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TIME FOR A PLANETARY USER-FEE FOR HUMANITY?

By Howard V. Hendrix

I had planned to write that talking about “carbon footprints” or “preservation of biodiversity” or “cap and trade solutions to the climate change crisis” – without at the same time also talking about human hyper-population and human hyper-consumption – is just arguing over deck chairs on the Titanic.

Although a true statement, the metaphor is no longer quite apt. From the beginning the great luxury liner has stood for the entirety of our technological and cultural productions -- and its catastrophe for our arrogant faith in such productions. Almost a century ago, an iceberg took out the Titanic. Now, in a world of shifting climate, the Titanic is taking out the iceberg. Just ask the polar bears.

The metaphor only regains some of its old appropriateness once we go deeper than deck chairs. We might instead talk about how the passengers in Titanic’s global-north staterooms look at the passengers in global-south steerage and say, “You have too many mouths to feed – you need to curb the growth rate of your population.” The passengers in global-south steerage, meanwhile, point to the passengers in their global-north staterooms and say, “You eat too much – you need to curb the growth rate of your resource consumption.”

This worldwide deadlock has stood for more than forty years, not despite but because both sides are right. Barring the sudden mass migration of humanity from this world to another (whether through Rapture, Rockets, or Rendition into virtual reality via the so-called Singularity), humanity will be limited to the finite resources of this planet long into the foreseeable future. Given such constraints, the continuance of the status quo – or some mildly tweaked version of it – can only result in further massive degradation of the environment and a correspondingly massive increase in human pain and suffering.

What is needed to break the global impasse is a planetary user-fee system that addresses both hyper-consumption and hyper-population, both global north and global south. Such a unified system would apply universally to people at every level – individuals, families, corporations, governments, supra-governmental organizations, and the human species as a whole. This user-fee system would link consumption and population through the cost of each and both to the sustainability of the current iteration of the biosphere -- at all scales, from local to global. “Current iteration” would be defined from the median ranges of environmental parameters seen over the last 10,000 years.

The planetary user-fee system might work something like this. Let’s set a baseline and goal year – 1910, for instance, the year before Titanic was launched and two years before she sank. At that time, the human population of the planet was roughly one-quarter what it is today. In the United States of America, resource consumption per capita stood at less than one-tenth of where it stands today.

The goal of the planetary user-fee system would be to reduce – voluntarily, through financial incentives, education, and technological innovation – our “footprint,” or level of human resource consumption, to 1910 levels. The system would be calibrated to match median resource consumption levels in the wealthiest nation circa 1910, and technological innovation would be counted on to make up the discrepancy between wealthiest-nation median and overall human resource consumption for the same base year.

The metrics for determining resource consumption – a carbon standard, BTUs, waste-stream tonnage, or all these and more – would be complex but quantifiable and would serve as the basis for the consumption-charge component of the user fee across scales. Under such a system, some nations of the global south would experience net growth in resource utilization, while most nations of the global north would see reductions in resource use.

The planetary user-fee system would also be set up to reduce – voluntarily, through financial incentives and education – the level of human population to what it was, again, in 1910. The population and consumption indices of the user-fee system would be cross-referenced to take into account the fact that a child born in the United States will, during the course of his or her lifetime, use on average thirty times more of the world’s resources than a child born in Uganda, say.

Given such a lifetime resource-use index, individuals and couples who had no children would benefit most on the consumption-charge side of the equation – but, since the goal would be population reduction, on the population-charge side of the equation those couples who would be rewarded most (credited most against the fee) would be those who had one child. Until 1910 levels were achieved, individuals and couples who chose not to have any children in the household (population extinction trajectory) and those who had two children in the household (population replacement trajectory) would receive no net population-charge credit against the fee, but also would suffer no additional population charges.

Parents with more than two children in the household (population growth trajectory) would be assessed population charges for each child after the second – in addition to the already established consumption-charge assessment per child. Issues of adoption and the actual household toward which a child from a divorcing or remarrying couple would be counted, for instance, would be settled on a case-by-case basis.

Some readers might think this a crazily immodest proposal, and may doubt that I could seriously argue it here, even as a thought-experiment. Many will doubt that – given political, economic, and religious opposition -- such a planetary user fee could ever actually be instituted.

On the contrary. Despite all such opposition, Version 1.0 of the planetary user fee is already being implemented -- as an unintended consequence of our species’ million-year romance with fire, particularly the fossil-fuel intensification of that long love affair. This first-draft planetary user fee is generally referred to as “global warming” or “global climate change.”

If we don’t choose the planetary user-fee system we intended, we will get the one we didn’t. Like the old joke that hard-shell religionists are opposed to sex because they’re afraid it might lead to dancing, both hyper-population and hyper-consumption have continued to grow at an astounding rate, while we as a species have danced around those problems. We continue blithely dancing in Titanic’s ballroom at our peril -- no matter how long the band goes on playing.

Some on the political right may see in this proposal the worst sort of “luxury tax,” “creeping socialist internationalism,” and a backdoor way to establish the sort of world government you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. Some on the political left might see it as yet another globalist attempt to manage human biological, economic, and social behavior through market forces and the most politically incorrect of “sin taxes.”

Wouldn’t there be tremendous resistance from organized religion to the implementation of such a system? If such a system were instituted, might it not have unintended consequences? Might it not be open to potential abuse and fraud?

To answer the last concerns first: Of course. A planetary user-fee system would be subject to the law of unintended consequences and to misuse, abuse, and fraud – just like all other human projects.

The ferocity of organized religion’s opposition to even the idea of such a system only serves to indicate how deeply wedded those particular religious groups are to the current system of unlimited population growth and unbounded growth in resource consumption -- and how fiercely they would resist any and all proposals to limit and bind human desire in these areas.

As to those who would object on political and economic grounds, I remind them that such a planetary user-fee proposal is only necessary at all because the two great social-organization systems of the twentieth century – the corporate economic order of what used to be called the West and the state economic order of what used to be called the East – both were fundamentally based on unsustainable economic growth and so failed utterly in addressing the hyper-population and hyper-consumption issues. In fact, the planetary user-fee system could be implemented via many forms of social organization, from ecosocialist to monetarist libertarian.

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