Pollution credits

From Wise Nano

The molecular Manufacturing Revolution, like the Industrial Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution, should allow humans to live with a much smaller ecological footprint than their less technologically enabled ancestors could, but like previous revolutions it will also greatly increase the possible ecological footprint of a single individual. Transportation is one of the better examples of this. Magnetic levitation trains traveling in vacuum excavated tunnels carry bring billions of people around the world every day with minimal ecological impact, while if one were to give every present day SUV owner a personal super-sonic aircraft the entire out-door world would be turned into a continuous thunder-storm of sonic booms. Given this situation, it is obviously desirable that people be encouraged to behave with respect towards the preferences of those around them.

There are a number of ways in which this could be encouraged, from stop-gap regulation banning whatever device or behavior appears obnoxious to requiring environmental impact studies prior to the sale of any new device. The latter would naturally fit into a regulatory regime that may be desired for safety reasons anyway, but given the difficulty of predicting environmental impact such a policy would be likely to be extremely restrictive, ineffective, or both. A policy that would be more in line with modern economic sensibilities is the distribution of tradable pollution credits, transferable licenses to emit a given quantity of some substance, or to produce a given quantity of heat, sound, or electromagnetic radiation of a particular frequency. Molecular manufacturing should enable the environmentally benign global deployment of sensors capable of detecting the release of substantial quantities of whatever pollutants are considered objectionable. A policy such as this one could be recognized as efficient and equitable by most people today, though political conflicts might occur regarding the distribution of credits. The intuitively just distribution schema is to grant equal credits to every human regardless of age, and to set the total number of credits with some sort of voting system.

Several consequences follow from such a system. One is that because the credits are valuable, and are distributed equally among humans or some ethically equivalent class of entities, they constitute a form of basic income. Because the marginal need to pollute faced by an individual falls rapidly with increasing freedom to pollute, the aggregate value of these credits will be greater when fewer total credits are distributed over the entire range of likely levels of pollution. This creates an incentive for people with few other sources of income to tightly restrict the number of credits granted. Because the cost of a given kind of pollution will rise steeply as the number of credits for that kind of pollution shrinks, smaller groups will have an incentive to maintain permissible pollution levels adequate to enable them to continue with their chosen lifestyle. The fewer the credits that are granted, the greater the effective basic income will be, and the less pollution will be permitted. Note however that an excessively low-pollution regime may impose a reduced standard of living even in a post MNT world, so some balance is called for. The question of how such a balance is to be achieved is difficult to answer. Since any society's mix of emissions is likely to vary with time, any answer must be dynamic. The status of non-humans under this system may also ultimately be a political question. By default, it seems that any organism or system that does not receive pollution credits will also not have its emissions restricted, but it is easy to imagine that eventually sentient whales might find themselves unable to afford to exhale carbon dioxide, or even to absorb sunlight. Less speculatively, should heat or CO2 credits be distributed too frugally, possibly in order to drive up their price, many humans might not be able to afford their preferred level of physical activity. The response that modern people will find obvious is that biological emissions are allowed for free, but as nanotechnology dissolves the boundaries between biology and machinery this solution becomes inadequate.

Because population growth under this system is deflationary, it is important that obligations relating to future allocation of pollution credits not be legally enforceable. If they are, this will produce a strong tendency to default. Since these credits include the right to generate body heat, e.g. the right to live, it is clearly a human rights violation for anyone to be denied a share. Someone should no more be able to enforceable sell a future income stream of this kind than they should be able to sell themselves into slavery or to put up a pound of flesh as collateral.

One weakness of this system, treated as a basic-income system, is that it makes people dependant on the existence of a continued demand to produce various kinds of waste. This implies that at least in the early post-MNT day’s novel environmental solutions which allow waste-producers to improve efficiency more cheaply than they could do so by purchasing pollution credits would imperil the standards of living of people dependant on the sale of these credits. Ultimately most pollution will probably be in the form of heat, and the demand to emit heat is likely to be essentially permanent. Also, if the indefinite extension of intellectual property licenses can be halted, it appears that a very high self-sufficient standard of living should become available within a few decades of the development of MNT.

One odd feature of this approach is that population growth will tend to increase the wealth of the poor. Because this system so strongly encourages population growth, it is probably only workable for about 3 centuries on Earth, and perhaps for a few millennia in the solar system, but that is plenty of time to develop a better system. Fortunately, any population pressures generated over the short term should be very small compared to the potential reduction in human environmental impact due to molecular nanotechnology.

With respect to concerns regarding the deleterious effects of expanding the population, the ultimate carrying capacity of the Earth is difficult to estimate, and is unlikely to be reached in any event. Even the amount of crowding that would be tolerable is difficult to estimate in advance. People adjust to tolerate what they are used to within broad limits. No European city has as many as 1,200 people per square mile, but Singapore has over 2,500, Bombay has over 17,000, and [Manhattan http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/AtiyaDixon.shtml] has about [67,000 http://www.epodunk.com/cgi-bin/genInfo.php?locIndex=1101] people per square mile, and the most crowded parts of Bombay have over [1,000,000 http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/10/index.html]. A far more appealing example of extremely high density population is Kowloon, a region of Hong Kong with about [500,000 http://www.cpavirtual.org/hongkong.htm] people per square mile.

Shockingly, if 10% of incident solar energy was captured and was converted into usable energy with 50% efficiency, which should be practical with mature molecular manufacturing, the a city with average solar energy resources and the population density of present day Manhattan could provide its average citizen with over 2.5kw, about 20% of the total energy consumed by a typical US citizen and far more than that consumed by their personal activities rather than indirectly through purchase of products. With the same 10% absorption efficiency and the same 50% conversion efficiency, but making the less reliable assumption that energy can be converted to food with this efficiency, the most crowded parts of Bombay could be self-sufficient, and still leave every human enough a few tens of spare watts to use on personal technologies. At Kowloon's population density they could live an athletic life-style, use more energy in their homes than many wealthy US citizens use today, and still have enough left over for public transportation!

Earth has a surface area of about 200,000,000 square miles and a land area of about 50,000,000 square miles. Currently, about half of the population lives on a land area of about 500,000 square miles it follows that the number of people who could be supported by using MNT to build up current urban centers to Manhattan's population density is approximately 33 billion. In practice, local manufacturing and stronger materials should solve many of the logistical and engineering difficulties faced by current cities, allowing much denser populations for any given level of crowding. With MNT urban areas could recycle all of their materials and use only a fraction of incipient solar energy to provide for all of their energy requirements. The current global population could live in current urban areas and reproduce at the current 2% global birthrate with no attendant deaths for 100 years before the average population density of current urban areas exceeded the current population density of Manhattan, and for another 100 years before the population density exceeded that of Kowloon. By contrast, the same population would cover nearly all of the earth's entire land area at a population density comparable to that of European cities. Typical US cities have population densities close to the harmonic mean of European cities and New York, approximately 8,000 people per square mile.

As you can see, ordinary population growth is not a problem in the foreseeable future, so long as people are comfortable living in high density cities. As populations climb, the ability to live in a low population density area will naturally become a greater luxury, but technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and phased array optics should provide many of the benefits of life in rural or undeveloped areas. A more serious population-related consideration is aggressive differential reproduction. A million people who decided to reproduce as rapidly as possible and who were able to convince their offspring to do the same could out-reproduce the rest of humanity in forty or fifty years. They could do this much faster if they were able to use pollution credits to purchase artificial wombs, with which new people entitled to pollution credits could be produced. In a highly monitored world with centralized nanotech administration such people would not endanger their neighbors, but they would seriously impoverish them.