Why America is Becoming a Second-World Nation and California is in the Crosshairs

 Fact: California is the world center of technology and engineering businesses and of the entertainment and music industries. None of these industries can survive on declining innovation. Related industries include aerospace, energy, mining, computer and information technology, and the tourism industries. Without a critical mass of innovators, these industries will falter and move to where they can access those innovators.

 Fact: Los Angeles International Airport and San Francisco International Airport are major hubs for trans-Pacific and transcontinental traffic. The giant seaport complex formed by the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach in Southern California is the largest in the country and responsible for handling about a fourth of all container cargo traffic in the United States. The Port of Oakland, fourth largest in the nation, handles trade from the Pacific Rim and delivers most of the ocean containers passing through Northern California to the entire United States. Rising sea levels will directly impact the infrastructures of these great ports.

 Fact: California’s crude oil and natural gas deposits are located in six geological basins in the Central Valley and along the coast. California has more than one dozen of the United State’s largest oil fields, including the second largest oil field in the contiguous United States. California’s crude oil output accounts for more than one-tenth of total U.S. production. Although there is also substantial offshore oil and gas production, there is a permanent moratorium on new offshore oil and gas leasing in California waters and a deferral of leasing in Federal waters. As the decline side of oil steepens in its decline, California will be pressed to lift the barriers to drilling in these waters.

 California’s hydroelectric power potential ranks second in the United States. With adequate rainfall, hydroelectric power typically accounts for close to one-fifth of California’s electricity generation. Substantial geothermal and wind power resources are found along the coastal mountain ranges and the eastern border with Nevada. High solar power potential is found in southeastern California’s deserts. California leads the United States in electricity generation from nonhydroelectric renewable energy sources, such as wind, geothermal, solar energy, fuel wood, and municipal solid waste/landfill gas resources.

 A facility known as “The Geysers,” located in the Mayacamas Mountains north of San Francisco, is the largest complex of geothermal power plants in the world, with more than 750 megawatts of installed capacity. Due to high electricity demand, California imports more electricity than any other state, primarily hydroelectric power from states in the Pacific Northwest. Due to strict emission laws, only a few small coal-fired power plants operate in California. Two nuclear power plants in California account for almost one-fifth of the state’s total electrical power generation. As the decline side of oil gains momentum, electrical systems will be expected to fill certain niches vacated by oil, particularly in relation to personal and mass transportation systems. Owing to this California can expect its electrical needs to intensify.

 Fact: There are nearly 38 million people in CA. One in eight Americans is a Californian. California has eight of the top 50 US cities in terms of population. If California were a separate country, it would rank 34th most populous behind Poland. As of 2005, the gross state product (GSP) is about $1.62 trillion, the largest in the United States. California is responsible for 13% of the United States gross domestic product (GDP). As of 2005, California's GDP is larger than all but seven countries in the world (and all but eight countries in terms of Purchasing Power Parity).

The bigger they are, the harder they fall. California’s industries and innovations currently lead the nation and the world. They have helped keep the United States front and center in the world system of societies. But, humanity has entered a new epoch where a lot more innovation is necessary -- not only for the United States to remain vital – but for humanity to survive.

Three Questions at the Dawn of a New Epoch

Those of us old enough to see the changes have witnessed our country take on the seedy trappings of a second-world nation. Or, a semi-peripheral society as opposed to a core society, if you prefer the terminology of Immanuel Wallerstein. Our standard of living is behind seven other countries. We have no national health care system, and the have and have-not system that we have leads six advanced industrial societies in infant mortality and iatrogenesis. The latter is a fancy word that gives a name to incidents like mis-blood-typing a patient so that her transplanted heart is rejected, picking up a killer strep infection in the hospital while being treated for breast cancer, or having the wrong leg amputated.

Transportation and other public works infrastructures in the United States are crumbling. The safety of the nation's nearly 600,000 bridges is in doubt and we can expect to see more disasters like the collapse of the Interstate 35 West Mississippi River Bridge. If the control of water is an essential mitigation in a globally warming world, the United States is starting from a weak position if its deteriorating locks, dams, and levees are any indication. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, of the 79,000 dams in the United States, more than 10,000 have a high-hazard risk of failure. When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers inspected some 2,000 levees in 2007, 122 were deemed “at risk of failure.”

Of interest to those of us living in California, nineteen of those levees are on the Sacramento River in California. Experts say that the thousand miles of Sacramento River Delta levees are built less robustly than the ones in New Orleans. A major levee break would put the city of Sacramento 20 feet under water in places. And, though its citizenry would have a better chance of evacuating than occurred for those in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, a major failure could disrupt California’s water delivery system for up to two years.

If the United States’ standard of living, health care provision, and public infrastructures trail behind many other advanced industrial societies, the infrastructures built on electronics and microchips that Americans take for granted like telephone, including cellular service, and information technological capacity lag behind many European and Asian societies. Much of the innovation in these areas that we make is trivial – like a new color of palm pilot.

How can it be that the society that led the spread of global capitalism is becoming a second world nation? Some would argue that it is because our leadership has gotten us mired in an expensive “Long War,” a war for oil, and to put it in the immortal words of Steppenwolf’s rock anthem about America during the Viet Nam Era: 'Cause the whole world’s got to be just like us. But, you must trust me on this note: The whole world more than ever does not want to be “just like us.” As a core nation, we are sinking on the charts of the Top 40 in the world system of societies.

Seriously, folks, the Iraq War is about oil because the world is on the decline side of oil and advanced industrial societies need oil to run. But, it is also about other things. More than anything, it is a war of mass distraction, as my colleague, Thomas Gangale, and I so succinctly put it several months before the war was begun. It is a distraction from the fact that national leaders do not have a clue how to stop America’s inexorable slide from the core. This ties to the fact that they don’t know how to answer three interconnected environmental questions that are the most important questions at this special moment in time for Americans, other people in the world, civilization, and the species. Those questions are:

 How do we mitigate, adjust to, or solve for rising sea levels and other direct and indirect effects of global warming?

 How do we mitigate natural disasters that occur in parts of the world becoming ever more populated and infrastructure'd (and that may worsen as an effect of global warming)?

 How do we power the world system of increasingly numerous advanced industrial societies without petroleum?

You can connect most any burning issue to these questions: terrorism, bird flu, food plenty and safety, etc. As my old American Government professor used to caution me: Stop looking at the trees and see the forest. In order to do that, one must get out of the woods and climb up on the nearest high ground for an overview. What have I seen from that vantage point?

A Whole New ‘Cene

The United States, indeed the world, finds itself in the unenviable position of being in a bottleneck between two geological-environmental epochs. Sure, human beings have been there and done that – at the transition point between the cold Pleistocene Epoch and the warm Holocene Epoch. The downside was: Not everyone made it through the Pleistocene-Holocene bottleneck. Whole human lineages did not survive. A great many plant and animal species did not survive. Our direct ancestors who did survive, did so because of two main inventions: tailored clothing and horticulture, quantum-leaping innovations.

Human survival depends upon innovation. And, though any innovation can be used for evil, as well as for good, the stuff that innovation comes from – science, knowledge, and scholarship – has brought us thus far. Though it didn’t start out as an instrument of deliberate evil, our use of fossil fuels that ushered in industrial society has vastly foreshortened our warm Holocene Epoch that would have lasted for millions of years otherwise. It has lasted only 10,000-12,000 years, a twinkle in geological time. We are about two centuries deep into a whole new ‘cene, an increasingly warmer Anthropocene Epoch. Global population stands at nearly seven billion at present; 10 billion by the end of the century. The seas are rising, natural disasters are sweeping away more human lives and infrastructure than ever before, and a larger number of societies on the world stage are leapfrogging to advanced industrial status. They need fuel to run.

Seeing the forest for the trees? Here is what our national leaders need to see. Our environmental realities and our geopolitical realities are intertwined. The composition of the forest is changing. The forest is even retreating and moving somewhere else. On an Earth becoming evermore extreme, a new ecology is emerging, a new ecology for a new epoch. And, what it means for a society to be “core” and “periphery” is changing.

To be at the core in the Anthropocene means that one’s society has to lead in the production of innovation -- innovation that can mitigate for and adapt humans and their infrastructures to rising sea levels, natural disasters, and the decline side of oil. Related realities will emerge that will propel nations to “core-hood.” What am I talking about? Here’s one instance: The position of one’s society in the functionality of an emerging world power grid, as electrical power needs increase as more advanced industrialized societies come online whose citizenry require personal and mass transportation that is increasingly reliant upon electrical power.

My original question that began this piece was: Why is America becoming a second-world nation? The answer lies in the paucity of investment that the United States makes in its people – people who could be trained to innovate and who could labor to make innovations. A type of Social Darwinism pervades American culture: If you can’t make it here, then you are not trying hard enough and you deserve to fail. Never mind the social structural barriers that keep you from making a go of it in the first place.

But, it’s a whole different ballgame now, a field of dreams that we helped build that could turn nightmarishly apocalyptical. Humans, including us Americans, have crafted a more extreme environment offering tougher circumstances that will tax social services and threaten infrastructures and those things that make societies run. It will even affect those people who are most able to help themselves. The poor who get the shaft even in the best of times won’t be the only ones to bear the brunt. The rich won’t go unscathed. In the Anthropocene, it is not enough to work hard, but to work smart. We need as much innovation as we can generate.

However, in the United States, the industry that produces “the smarts,” its network of postsecondary institutions, both public and private, is a former shadow of itself. At the dawn of our new epoch, when science and technology and innovative policymaking can provide the only means to mitigate and adapt to the new natural scheme of things, the United States is falling behind China, India, and the offshore research and development (R&D) facilities of multinational companies. The failure of the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) of the 1980s should have been a wake-up call. NASA and the industries that would have been involved in building the infrastructures to loft missions to Mars told then-Vice President Dan Quayle that there was not enough brainpower in the United States to make the effort. Americans surely had the brainpower during the earlier decades that saw it going to the Moon. What had happened by the 1980s to lend credence to the assertion that there wasn’t enough scientific and technological knowledge to ramp up for a large-scale science and technology and policy project like going to Mars? The answer to this has something to do with stepping away from the Moon in the first place.

This brings me to the end of Part I of “Why America is Becoming a Second-World Nation.” On 12 September 1962, President John F. Kennedy, speaking at Rice University in Houston, Texas announced, “We choose to go to the Moon…and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” In the subsequent parts of this series, I will discuss “the other things” that will have to be done. They, most decidedly, will not be easy.

Marilyn Dudley-Flores, Ph.D is a multidisciplinary scientist. She currently is the CEO of OPS-Alaska, (OPS: Oceanic, Polar, Space) a think tank based in Petaluma, where she manages projects over a range of disciplines. She frequently co-authors and speaks with OPS-Alaska’s Executive Director, Thomas Gangale, on a variety of topics including climate change and the need for social investment.