WEALTH OF NATIONS

I use the internet most to get free access to articles, columns and publications that, otherwise, would be out of my reach. And I use social media to help me find them. I find that the International Spectator, Aeon Magazine, Quartz and the Atlantic Magazine are great sources for thought provoking information and by following them on Twitter I am always up to speed on what gets written there.One topic that intrigues me is the wealth of nations and what nations do to make their wealth work for them.

The International Spectator recently posted two informative statistics on that subject. In the first one it listed, based on 2014 data from Allianz, the ‘Total Wealth’ of 9 leading nations and this listing provides a good frame of reference for the relative strength of the USA as measured by wealth. The data put the total wealth of the USA at $48.2 Trillion or $151,114 per capita. The next wealthiest nation is Japan at $11.7 Trillion or $92,126 per capita. Here is the full list

COUNTRY	TOTAL WEALTH IN TRILLION DOLLARS	POPULATION IN MILLIONS	WEALTH PER CAPITA IN DOLLARS
USA	48.2	318.9	151,114
JAPAN	11.7	127	92,126
CHINA	10.5	1,357	7,737
UNITED KINGDOM	5.8	63.8	90,909
GERMANY	5.1	82.6	61,743
FRANCE	4.4	64.9	67,796
BRAZIL	1.1	200.4	5,489
INDIA	1.0	1,267.4	789
RUSSIA	0.5	142.1	3,518

The second statistic originates with Credit Suisse reporting on the number of millionaires in six leading countries. That list looks like this

COUNTRY	NUMBER OF MILLIONAIRES IN MM DOLLARS	POPULATION IN MILLIONS	MILLIONAIRES AS % OF POPULATION
USA	15.7	318.9	4.9
UNITED KINGDOM	2.4	63.8	3.7
JAPAN	2.1	127	1.65
FRANCE	1.8	64.9	2.77
GERMANY	1.5	82.6	1.81
CHINA	1.3	1,357	0.09

What do these numbers tell you? No two readers will draw the same conclusions from these two data sets, but a few observations jump out at us.

1.       Both in absolute terms and on a per capita basis, the USA is (still) far ahead of its nearest competitors when the yardstick is the financial wealth of nations.

2.       On a per capita basis, the USA, Japan and the United Kingdom are the wealthiest nations in the world, also confirmed by the largest number of millionaires.

3.       China’s wealth per capita is on par with Brazil, but far ahead of India and Russia.

4.       In Europe, the UK and France are the wealthiest nations, ahead of Germany.

The question is what we do with this wealth and how we protect it from eroding. National wealth is not unlike a person’s net worth. It consists of assets minus liabilities. Our assets do not grow unless we do something productive with what we have and we have been increasing our liabilities now for a while as evidenced by the growth in our national debt and by a large number of unfunded future obligations we have undertaken in the realm of pensions, entitlement programs and deferred maintenance of our civil and military infrastructure.

Sometimes I’m afraid that America will go the way of so many big lottery winners. The New York Daily News reported on the 12^th of January, 2016 that almost seventy percent of big lottery winners were broke within seven years of hitting it big. Just like these ill-fated lottery winners, America is more concerned with consuming than it is with saving and investing. And the wealth is incredibly unevenly divided. Thirty-five percent of private wealth in the USA is in the hands of the top one percent of households and seventy-six percent is in the hands of the top ten percent of American households. This is much worse than income inequality, where the top one percent of American households takes home about twenty percent of overall income.

This level of wealth inequality is bad from a socio-political perspective. It is one explanation for the high level of populist dissent evidenced in the current campaign for the 2016 presidential election. And it has led to a situation where a handful of very rich individuals has taken control of the funding of election campaigns that serve their, rather than the national, interest. It is equally bad from an economic perspective, because it sidelines all but a few Americans from risk taking by means of participation in the funding of research and innovation required for the generation of future wealth. It perpetuates the control that very few individuals have over the major economic decisions about allocation of resources and the types of investments America makes in its future.

America is still, by any measure, the wealthiest nation on earth. This wealth, if properly applied, should serve as a platform for continued global leadership. But just like the ill-fated lottery winners, America could lose it all if the wealth is not properly preserved, allocated and put to use for the benefit of all.

SECOND AMENDMENT

I tuned in, on January 7, to the CNN ‘Town hall Meeting’ on gun violence in which the President of the United States participated and I found it painful to watch. Here was the holder of the highest office in the land and it was clear from the start that he had to advocate for common sense gun control measures with his hands tied behind his back. I am not a big admirer of the current holder of the highest office in the land and am very concerned about the tendency of his and recent other administrations to stretch the boundaries of executive power, but I still don’t like to see America’s President powerless to steer the conversation to where it really needs to go. And I don’t think that he had to limit his arsenal of arguments for gun control the way he did. The first words out of his mouth were: ‘I do respect the Second Amendment’. Of course he does, he has sworn to defend the constitution when he took office. But he failed to say: ‘But I believe that the Second Amendment does not forbid the Federal Government, and much less the States, to put in place reasonable, sensible restrictions on the trade and handling of firearms’. By not putting up that argument, he reduced the debate to a fight on the periphery of the issue.

How quick do we forget! Former Justice of the US Supreme Court John Paul Stevens wrote a book that President Obama should have read and referenced in this town hall meeting. The book, published in 2014, is titled ‘Six Amendments, How and Why we should change the Constitution’. In the book, Justice Stevens reminds us that—and I quote—“for over two hundred years following the adoption of the second amendment federal judges uniformly understood that the right to bear arms was limited in two ways: first, it applied only to keeping and bearing arms for military purposes, and second, while it limited the power of the federal government, it did not impose any limit whatsoever on the power of the states or local governments to regulate the ownership or use of firearms.” This interpretation underpinned the 1939 Supreme Court decision in the ‘Miller’ case in which a unanimous Court held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun, because that sort of weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a ‘well-regulated Militia’.

Justice Stevens writes in his book that during his tenure on the Supreme Court under Warren Burger he never heard any judge or justice express doubt about the limited reach of the second amendment and that he cannot recall ‘any judge suggesting that the amendment might place any limit on state authority to do anything.’ He quotes Justice Burger himself, who, in a 1991 appearance on the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour remarked that “the Second Amendment has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud’, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

So, what has changed? 

In the first place, the National Rifle Association (NRA) has deployed a vigorous campaign against the Supreme Court’s limited interpretation of the reach of the Second Amendment, it has significantly grown its membership and found a way to place a litmus test on people running for public office. Candidates for public office who do not underwrite the NRA’s interpretation of the Second Amendment not only will have to do without an endorsement and financial support of the NRA, but expect active campaigning on the part of the NRA against their candidacy. NRA keeps the pressure on politicians by issuing a ‘rating’ from A-F for each elected office holder in the nation. Hence Warren Burger’s accusation of defrauding the public.

In the second place, the Supreme Court, in more recent rulings has changed the law of the land in at least two respects. In the ‘Heller’ case in 2008 a divided Court (five to four) held that the Second Amendment protects a civilian’s right to keep a handgun in his home for purposes of self-defense. And an equally divided Court decided in ‘McDonald v. Chicago’ that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment limits the power of the city of Chicago to outlaw the possession of handguns by private citizens. (Note that in both cases the Court rules on ‘handguns’).

This case history shows a few things:

1.       That it is not so much the law of the land, including the Second Amendment of the Constitution, as well the heavy hand of the NRA that prevents Congress from taking reasonable, common sense steps to reduce, if not prevent, gun violence.

2.       That the Second Amendment does nothing to prevent regulation of military style weapons outside of the use by well-regulated militia (in modern terms, police, National Guard and military).

3.       That the Second Amendment does nothing to keep the federal government from putting a registration requirement (like vehicle registration) in place.

4.       That only the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment limits the states’ freedom to regulate the possession of handguns.

Opponents of further gun control point to the fact that in spite of unabated growth of the number of firearms in circulation, gun related homicides in the U.S. have decreased since 1993 from 7.0 to 3.2 per 100,000 people, cutting it by more than half, but they have no answer for the fact that, at that rate, gun related homicides in the U.S. are still at least five times higher than in the rest of the Western world. The CIA World Factbook puts gun related homicides in Italy at 0.7, in Canada at 0.5, in Germany at 0.2, in Australia at 0.1 and in Japan at 0.01 per 100,000 people. Total annual deaths by firearms in the U.S. have, since the start of the 21^st century remained remarkably stable at around 10-10.5 per 100,000 people. Every year around 30,000 people get killed in the USA by the use of a firearm. That is roughly equivalent to the number of traffic deaths, which, in 2014 was reported by the NHTSA at 32,675.

Don’t such numbers provide a compelling interest on the part of the government to take whatever steps it can to protect its people from harm caused by firearms?

A problem with firearms is that they die a very slow death. Other than cars, which generally get junked after 10-20 years, guns stay in circulation and therefore keep accumulating. A responsible government needs to acknowledge that guns, while they have a legitimate use, are (not unlike cars, pesticides, pharmaceuticals) inherently dangerous, and therefore need to be subject to regulation. The question is how much and what kind of regulation is needed to adequately protect the people. Only an open political debate and process can answer that question. My contention is that there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution, including the Second Amendment, to hold back the federal, state and local governments from putting effective safeguards in place against unnecessary gun related deaths in the U.S. The lawmakers just need to unshackle themselves from the iron grip of the NRA and muster the courage to do what is in the best interest of the public at large.

Contrary to what the NRA may want you to believe, nobody has any intent to take away the right to bear arms for the legitimate use of protecting life and property, hunting or recreational use like skeet trap and target shooting. Nobody will prevent any law abiding and qualifying citizen to acquire a gun for any of these purposes. The Second Amendment certainly protects against that. But it should stop just about there.

Congress should have the courage and moral fiber to defy the NRA and ban the sale and possession of any firearms that are not commonly used for the legitimate uses referred to above. It should also impose a registration requirement, so that illegitimate and criminal use of a firearm can be traced back to its owner. It should mandate the use of technology that prevents accidental discharge of a gun or the firing of a gun by anyone other than the registrant. Finally, it should get serious about enforcing the gun laws already on the books by appropriating the necessary funds to adequately staff the agencies charged with public safety and gun regulation. In all other respects it should defer to the states and local jurisdictions to meet the needs of their citizens in line with local traditions and circumstances.

It is a pity that the President of the United States on January 7 did not seem to realize how much leeway the law gives him and the Congress to dispel the fraud perpetrated upon the public by the NRA and work together on putting reasonable and common sense limits in place on the sale, carry and use of firearms in the U.S.

RESOLUTIONS

If America were a person intent on bettering its life by cutting through the clutter, ridding itself of distractions, focusing on what really matters and making the most out of its God given potential, then it probably would have made the following New Year’s resolutions:

1.       Get out of debt and live within my means.

2.       Don’t hide behind the Constitution as an excuse for not dealing with my problems.

3.       Put my own house in order before I become judgmental and interfere with how other persons conduct their lives.

4.       Make sure that the rising tide lifts all boats.

Sounds reasonable and doable doesn’t it? Alas, we know only too well, also from own experience, what happens to our lofty New Year’s resolutions as we get further away from the January 1 date. Other priorities take over and we quickly fall back into the familiar routine that we know but will not get the job done. There is always next year!

America can (and needs to) do better than that. How much of a challenge do these four resolutions represent? Let’s examine that.

The first resolution is blindingly obvious and straightforward. America simply can’t continue to, each and every year, spend more than it takes in. Nobody really knows where the tipping point is. At what point will our indebtedness impede and reverse economic growth? America should not continue to test the boundaries and find out where the tipping point lies. Instead it should muster the courage to sort out what kind and level of spending is required to execute a national strategy that propels the nation forward, economically, socially, culturally, protected by adequate security. And then eliminate all other spending. To cover the cost of these expenditures America should set up a revenue collection system and process that 1) supports attainment of  the national strategy; 2) is fair and supported by its citizenry; and 3) preempts further deficits. Holding on to this resolution is going to be painful, given the depth of the hole that America has dug for itself.

The second resolution requires more explanation. In making this resolution America is asking itself if the writers of the Constitution could have ever intended to protect some of the rights that, by judicial interpretation, have become unassailable in our current lives. For instance, where comes the right from to buy, with virtually unlimited funds, the subservience of our elected officials to their campaign donors? Did the writers of the second amendment to the Constitution truly mean to put military style weapons in the hands of Americans outside of their participation in a well-regulated militia? If the writers of the first amendment to the Constitution had had access to television, would they have condoned and protected the right of political candidates and their cronies to pollute the airwaves with lies, distortions and innuendo about their opponents? What would they have thought of the end run that pharmaceutical companies make around physicians by advertising their ware directly to an unsuspecting public trying to watch the news, a game or some entertainment? America is hiding behind its reverence for a document written two hundred years ago in a world that has no resemblance with the world we are living in today. It provides an excuse for not acting where a responsible government would have to feel compelled to act in protection of the interest of its people.

The third resolution addresses America’s responsibilities beyond its borders. Resolutions are made with the intent to achieve better outcomes. While many in the USA and abroad believe that America is the indispensable power in keeping a semblance of order in the world, an activist American diplomatic and military intervention in foreign affairs is less and less in the cards for three reasons: 1) after Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan the American public cannot stomach more body-bags coming back; 2) it is costly and would have to lead to either increased taxes or increased deficits; 3) the ‘Yankee go home’ sentiment is widespread around the world. The fact is that America has lost the moral authority required of an effective arbiter in world affairs. It is exacerbated by the irresponsible rhetoric used in the presidential election campaign and abandonment of a long standing American tradition that in matters of foreign policy democrats and republicans rally behind the president. That moral authority is best regained by showing the world that America has the will, the means and the capacity to solve its domestic problems manifested by its growing national debt, its crumbling infrastructure, its political polarization, its governance system corrupted by money-influences and its increased inequality. Leading by example is still the best recipe for attracting followers and allies.

The fourth resolution is about counteracting the forces that drive sharpening inequality. America’s capacity to create wealth is still unmatched in the world, but it increasingly benefits a tiny segment of the population. If it merely was a matter of math, the solution would be simple: Dividing the nation’s income generation capacity, or the aggregate wealth, by the number of residents would lift everyone out of poverty and restore the middle class. That is just to say that America has the financial capacity to make sure that the rising tide lifts indeed all boats. But does it have the political will to get there? America would have to make sure that institutional advantages and disadvantages do not get perpetuated and exacerbated. Here the focus should be on the younger generations. They represent the future and are the ones who will project the revived American moral authority abroad. For that they, all of them, need to have a chance to grow up, protected from poverty, disease, abuse and addictions and supported by great education, a healthy environment and effective social services.

America is not a person and there is no indication that its political leadership has made any commonly agreed upon New Year’s resolutions. But four simple resolutions sure could make a difference.

CHRISTMAS 2015

They say nowadays that the year-end holidays are among the most stressful times we experience. If that is so, how far have we strayed from where Christmas is supposed to guide us!

We are doing it to ourselves. We spend all of our time on decorating the home, the office, the yard with ‘made in China’ lights and ornaments, which we then, in a few weeks with a hangover induced remorse, will have to dismantle again and put away in the attic. We spend precious hours on stuffing the mail with gaudy greeting cards conveying the best sentiments from Hallmark or American Greetings and on taking advantage of incredible shopping deals for stuff that nobody really needs, with the result that we are exhausted before the party begins. In the process we run out of time to observe the birth of Christ the way it used to be celebrated, by candle light, in church or outside, caroling, volunteering or just enjoying the company of those who are most dear to us.

If we are so proud of our values and culture why have we, in only a few generations, so massively succumbed to consumerism?

Our stress is also elevated by the need to be politically correct all the time. In our Christmas get-togethers we are not supposed to talk politics, but how can we avoid it when our cable TV channels and the most outspoken candidates are working day and night to polarize us? In the midst of a messy and discouraging election campaign, we yearn for Jesus-like leadership, and wonder where it may be coming from.

But here is the good news: Christmas still comes around every December 25, inviting us to have our dreams and aspirations reborn. There is still that Silent night, Holy night whether we open our eyes to it or not. Everything else is not really part of Christmas.

Merry Christmas to all and may the shining star guide you to where you want to go in 2016.

CLIMATE THOUGHTS PART III

In my previous two segments on climate change I put the spotlight on Bill Gates and the Breakthrough Energy Coalition that he put together and on Ben Sasse (R), the junior Senator from Nebraska, because I think that what these two prominent Americans have been saying is key to getting the American political establishment engaged in the battle of climate change.

Bill Gates, because by his words and actions (committing $2 billion of his own money) he is challenging the political establishment to take the threat of climate change serious and come up with a strategy (and the funding of that strategy) to fend off disaster for the living earth that could result from continuing human contributions to global warming.

Ben Sasse, because he had the courage to call his colleagues in the Senate to task for not seriously tackling the great national problems that worry most Americans.

For America to play a lead role in reducing, if not eliminating, the human contributions to the current phase of global warming two things will be required:

1.       Money to surface and develop transformative technologies that have the potential to supply clean renewable energy at a cost below the cost of fossil fuels (Gates’ point).

2.       A national strategy for climate change (Sasse’s point).

It is no longer disputable that greenhouse gases released by human intervention are contributing to the warming of the atmosphere that our generation is experiencing. The question is still largely open if the human activity is the main driver, a major contributor or a minor contributor to the release of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, but either way I believe that we owe it to future generations to do everything we can to reduce our emissions and mitigate the negative effects of global warming. It is called good stewardship.

Money is required for basic R&D in the field of clean renewable energy, because the existing technologies like wind, solar and nuclear are in their present form not cheap enough to bring about a wholesale, worldwide, replacement of fossil fuels. Moreover, there are significant negatives associated with large scale deployment of each of these technologies and these will have to be worked out before a change-over becomes feasible. Also, R&D needs to be extended into exploration of other forms of clean renewable energy that currently may only exist in our imagination or in the test labs of scientists. Only governments, and particularly the governments of the developed countries, have the money that it will take to surface the needed technologies and have the capacity to absorb the financial risks that inevitably come with a trial and error based discovery process. America can play a lead role in this with its world class university based research institutes and its superior national wealth. Business will be reluctant to step in to finance new products and technologies if it does not see the government doing its share by funding basic R&D and adopting a national strategy for climate change.

Political will is required to: 1) Acknowledge the challenge presented by climate change. 2) Accept the responsibility to curb it and protect the people from the negative effects. 3) Budget appropriately for the funding of whatever will be required of the government. Of course there will be formidable hurdles to overcome before Congress will muster the will to get serious about doing these things. For one thing there are powerful special interests lined up against any government mandated change in energy generation and consumption in the USA. Not surprisingly this has resulted in ideology on the right side of the aisle that wants to deny that any government action is required. But there is a slim chance—Bill Gates seems to think a good chance—that forward thinking politicians would see the light and the promise that American discovery and development of transformative technologies in the energy field would generate huge new employment opportunities, export opportunities and renewed prestige for American ingenuity. So, we should not give up on developing a national strategy for climate change.

What should such strategy look like? I see three major approaches:

1.       Eliminate carbon emissions that are controlled by human activity.

2.       Capture, recover or absorb carbon emissions.

3.       Protect people and property from the negative effects of climate change.

Investment in R&D and development/commercialization of the output of the R&D effort would be required in each of these three approaches. It stands to reason to expect that a successful strategy would have to incorporate elements of each of these three approaches.

In opposition it will surely be argued that we would be wasting readily available natural resources by a large scale move to renewable energy and that in the process we would be jeopardizing millions of jobs and the health of our economy. These are bogus arguments. In the first place because it will take decades before the proposed strategy could take full effect. Second because the strategy will only be successful if new sources of clean renewable energy can become available at a cost that is lower than the cost of fossil fuels. Third because we are not wasting anything by leaving fossil fuels in the ground as a kind of strategic reserve. Fourth because implementation of the proposed strategy will require highly qualified employment from a very large number of Americans. And fifth because other nations will beat us to the game if we don’t take the lead.

America misses a unique opportunity to reassert its global leadership in creating a better, cleaner and safer world for coming generations if it now does not follow through on the potential for combating the warming of our atmosphere.

CLIMATE THOUGHTS PART II

Freshman Senator Ben Sasse (R) of Nebraska made a notable inaugural speech in the Senate on November 3, almost a year after he took office. It was the first time he took the floor in the Senate Chamber and it deserved a much larger audience than he got. He held out a mirror in front of the members of the Senate and told them that “the public is right that we as a Congress are not shepherding the country through the serious debates we must have about the future of this great nation.” And he added: “The Senate isn’t tackling the great national problems that worry those we work for.”

One of those great national problems (although not mentioned by name by Senator Sasso) is the issue of climate change that is now the subject of discussion at the United Nations conference in Paris, France.

Senator Sasse is right in putting his finger on the degeneration of the American political system that is at the root of the delinquency on the part of Congress. It is not just the Senate that is falling down on its job. The whole system has been corrupted by the money influence of the special interests and by the polarization in two irreconcilable camps. The resulting dysfunction risks making what once was the model of good governance into the laughing stock for the whole world to see.

What the country needs—in addition to a redress of how our political institutions work at the federal level—is a national strategy that defines the challenges the nation faces and sets priorities in dealing with each of them. For sure the climate challenge should appear somewhere in such prioritization. The debate should be not on whether it requires intervention by the governments of the major economic world powers but on how such intervention can best produce results.

In Part I of my Climate Thoughts, I referenced Bill Gates who addressed this question in an interview with The Atlantic and called for a tripling of government spending on energy R&D.  Gates stated that ‘We Need an Energy Miracle” and he is committing to invest $2 billion of his own money in clean energy start-ups that should come out of vastly increased government R&D spending. Gates points out that at $6 billion US government R&D in the energy sector pales in comparison with the $30 billion spent in medical research. The richest country on earth should be able to adequately fund basic research in several areas of need at the same time. To the predictable congressional push-back against such spending increase Gates retorts that the case for American innovation, American jobs and American leadership resulting from such R&D investment is just too compelling to fail in the end. Gates underscores his optimism by his willingness to put his own money at risk.

He may be too optimistic though on Washington DC’s readiness and willingness to expand the government’s reach into the energy field and pay for it. All the momentum is the other way, particularly on the Republican side that is currently in charge of Congress. Just listen to the GOP’s candidates for the 2016 presidential election.

I am largely sympathetic to the conservative point of view that we should not be spending money that we don’t have. We are already more than $18 trillion in debt and we have a slew of unmet needs, like the funding of our entitlement programs for the future, the upgrade of our infrastructure and the readying of the population for the rapidly changing job environment. I too am an advocate for a smaller, more nimble government, but one that has the courage to face the major challenges of our era and provide solutions, real results for the people who are footing the bill.

There are at least two things wrong with the current structure of the public sector. First it is large, bureaucratic and misdirected. It should be small, efficient, competent and focused on enabling the private sector to propel the country forward through innovation. Second it is permanently under- funded. This may solely be because it is spending on activities that should not be done at all or should not be done by the public sector. In principle, a smaller, more nimble government focused on enabling citizens (people, companies and organizations) to grow the economy and propel the nation forward should be able to function on less tax revenue than it currently collects. But chances are that under-funding will not be resolved without a complete reorganization of our public financing system. Our current tax code and the de facto blocking of revision and simplification of the IRS code in Congress are formidable impediments to progress. As it is we are not taxing the right entities, activities and sources of revenue. We should have a legitimate discussion about the merits of taxing consumption more than income. A shift from tax on income to a tax on consumption in itself should help the environment, particularly if consumption taxes take into consideration the burdens that specific consumptive activities place on the environment and the wellness of the population. But, as Senator Sasse points out in his maiden speech to his colleagues: “No one in this body thinks the Senate is laser-focused on the most pressing issues facing the nation.”

Unfortunately, Congressional debate and action is caught up in the two year election cycle, which makes planning over a long term time horizon nearly impossible and translates talk of new taxes by politicians into virtual suicide. Politicians may be devious or dumb in our eyes, but they are not that dumb that they shoot themselves in the foot when it comes to advancing their careers.

In a final segment of this three part column I will present some thoughts on what the US government should and should not do to address the climate change challenge.

CLIMATE THOUGHTS PART I

The last Chapter of my book ‘NEITHER HERE NOR THERE, A First Generation Immigrant in Search of American Exceptionalism’ is titled “Technology is the Answer”. In it I provide a blue print for how America can benefit from establishing a national strategy that takes on the challenges presented by climate change. I wrote:

“We are burdening the earth with many more people—and all they bring to bear—than ever before. Nature’s way of dealing with that burden is to produce cataclysmic events, wars, plagues, meteorite impacts, floods, earthquakes, and you name it, to rebalance the situation. That’s not how we like to solve our problems in this day and age. Our challenge is to create conditions under which the earth can accept the burden and people can go on with their lives. Technology will have to be the answer.

Any technology that the United States can develop, that will serve to address the following challenges, will have great global commercial value and enhance both the prestige and the world ranking of the United States:

·         World shortage of accessible fresh and clean water and its global distribution

·         Nuclear waste processing

·         Risks associated with the recovery of fossil fuels and gas

·         Alternative energy development

·         Environmental impact of any other kind of human activity

Herein lays the key. We should embrace the challenge presented by the current wave of global warming rather than arguing if it is even happening. We should embrace the challenge to find ways to sequester CO2 from our emissions, even if we are only half-certain that these emissions are causing the apparent climate change. And we should embrace the challenge to find economically feasible alternatives for fossil fuels. Which nation is better equipped than the USA to find solutions for these problems? If we don’t find them some other nation will, and we lose the opportunity to maintain our leadership of nations. Conversely, if we do find technological solutions for the challenges presented by climate change and the need for greater human productivity, these solutions will be very marketable all over the world and enhance not only our economic prospects but also our prestige in the world.

Why would the United States government not consider to issue worldwide challenges to find answers to some of the unresolved questions that stand in the way of further and more rapid progress? In 1714, England’s Parliament offered a king’s ransom of 20,000 pounds sterling to anyone whose method of measuring longitude at sea could be proven successful. In an age of exploration, precious time, cargo, and life was lost at sea because ships, on their voyages, were able to determine latitude by the length of the day or by the height of the sun or known stars above the horizon, but not longitude. It took an English clockmaker, John Harrison, fifty-nine years and five prototypes before he collected the prize with a chronometer that worked. Given all the money the government spends futilely, what would be wrong by paying another king’s ransom (which would have to be a little more than 20,000 pound sterling) for finding answers to the most pressing issues of our time, like clean affordable energy, suppression of drug addiction, or boosting individuals’ propensity towards positive attitudes?”

Today, I find myself in good company. Bill Gates and Bill Nye both, individually and separately, make the case for doubling or tripling government spending on R&D in the field of clean renewable energy (including nuclear) and Bill Gates puts his money where his mouth is by pledging $2 billion to invest in clean energy projects and business. Bill Gates channels his financial contributions through an international coalition, the ‘Breakthrough Energy Coalition’, in which he cooperates with 27 other tycoons. And governments are not far behind. A loose coalition of 20 nations announced in Paris the ‘Mission Innovation’ initiative aimed at accelerating the clean energy revolution. See ‘mission-innovation.net.’ In it the 20 countries, including the USA, China and India (but not Russia), commit to seeking a doubling of governmental investment in clean energy R&D over five years. Bill Gates says, in an interview with The Atlantic on November 15, that we need an ‘energy miracle’, but he is optimistic and adds: “in science, miracles happen all the time.”

Where governments and business cooperate with a clearly articulated goal in mind, miracles are indeed achievable. Let’s get to work. If it produces results, it will be a classic case of creative destruction leading to a breakthrough solution of a global problem. The worst that can happen is that, in the process, we will leave the remaining oil and gas in the ground as a kind of strategic reserve for when environmental conditions change again. Either way, applying technology is the best response to the climate challenge we are facing.