I read a line from a book review by Krugman where he says “free trade is not as important as saving the planet.”
The context was the unlikely event of the WTO calling fouls if America and a few other regions levied carbon tariffs on imported goods.
Of course, The article was written in 2013, and it’s cyncisim would be considered wildly optimistic in today’s climate.
But perhaps his point is wrong.
Perhaps for humans, it is free trade that is more important than the planet.
Free trade is effectively our distributed human brain. Our ability to make choices and distributing those choices down information trees encompassed by entire industries.
Society is one big exercise in managing complexity - obfuscating or dispersing away decisions and information.
And maybe for human beings, that is just more important than saving the coral reefs or the elephants.
The insects may die, so we lose almonds and other flowering trees. That just means almonds and other precious species disappear.
But most human beings don’t even get almonds, Or meat, or fruit, as part of their diet anyways.
It would be nice to save other species, but if the whole planet was just covered in bio crop species 1-299, and a few aesthetics, humanity would be alive and ok.
Perhaps the awful truth is that for humanity as a species, free trade and economic growth is more important than saving the planet.
The context was the unlikely event of the WTO calling fouls if America and a few other regions levied carbon tariffs on imported goods.
Of course, The article was written in 2013, and it’s cyncisim would be considered wildly optimistic in today’s climate.
But perhaps his point is wrong.
Perhaps for humans, it is free trade that is more important than the planet.
Free trade is effectively our distributed human brain. Our ability to make choices and distributing those choices down information trees encompassed by entire industries.
Society is one big exercise in managing complexity - obfuscating or dispersing away decisions and information.
And maybe for human beings, that is just more important than saving the coral reefs or the elephants.
The insects may die, so we lose almonds and other flowering trees. That just means almonds and other precious species disappear.
But most human beings don’t even get almonds, Or meat, or fruit, as part of their diet anyways.
It would be nice to save other species, but if the whole planet was just covered in bio crop species 1-299, and a few aesthetics, humanity would be alive and ok.
Perhaps the awful truth is that for humanity as a species, free trade and economic growth is more important than saving the planet.