Global Ecological Problems and Issues

Many technologies that can be produced in the village level make it possible for the communities to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions while they would also increase the people's economic and qualitative standards of living.

However, in some cases also Big can be Beautiful. What comes to energy production in the village level we should perhaps think in terms of hybrid technologies. By this we mean technologies some parts of which are best produced in very large series in big factories, but which can still strengthen local economies and lead to more decentralized production structures.

For instance it would be very expensive and very, very difficult to produce good-quality Stirling engines or modern windmills at the village level. It makes sense to produce such technologies in large factories where it is easy to produce millions or even billions of such devices with relatively low prices. Such centralized production of renewable energy technologies cannot employ many people. However, if the nature of the actual energy production based on these technologies is very decentralized, the overall result will be more employment.

Various renewable energies typically provide 5-10 times more employment per unit of energy produced than centralized energy production systems like large dams or big coal and nuclear power plants. Replacing such technologies with decentralized production of renewable energy could create hundreds of millions of full- and part-time jobs to millions of separate village economies.

The trade union chapters of Finland's state-owned companies proposed, in November 2000, that the programme of privatizing state-owned companies should be stopped and that the publicly owned companies should be developed as models for ecologically and sustainable development. Based on this initiative some of the Finnish environmental organizations and trade union activists that have been part of the Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam network in Finland produced a set of more detailed proposals.

The most important new idea was the establishment of international state-owned companies.

One of the arguments for privatizing publicly-owned enterprises has been that state-owned companies cannot compete successfully in a global economy. Because private transnational corporations operate globally national state-owned companies are doomed to lose and disappear if they are not sold to private capital.

However, if the state-owned companies would start working together and establish global networks and joint companies together with the publicly-owned enterprises in other countries, they would get all the benefits globalization has brought for the privately owned transnationals. This would take away the extra, unfair competitive edge globalization has given for the private transnational corporations in relation to state-owned enterprises.

In other words, the establishment of international, publicly owned companies might be a way to protect different kinds of mixed economies consisting of both private and publicly-owned companies and strong public service sectors from the onslaught of raw and barbaric North American capitalism. Most of the countries in the world are different kinds of mixed economies, and the mixed economies have generally done better than the extremist models aiming either to abolish all private entrepreneurship (Soviet Union and Pol Pot's Cambodia) or to privatize both public services and all state-owned companies (the model towards which the USA is now moving).

One of the most important areas for such cooperation might be modern biogas technology. From the viewpoint of halting global warming and preventing the global renewal of nuclear power, the development of biogas technologies could be the most important single thing to do. India and China have been clear world leaders in developing and distributing decentralized biogas technologies, but even they have utilized only a small part of all the interesting possibilities.

Methane (natural gas or biogas) will in any case be an important part of the energy system of the future.

The big vision of the car manufacturers and the big oil companies is hydrogen economy. At least Ford, General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, BMW, Toyota, Nissan and Honda are developing their own fuel cell cars that would use hydrogen as their fuel. DaimlerChrysler predicts that there will be 250 million hydrogen-using cars already in 2020. Also BMW estimates that at least one third of the cars it will sell in 2020 will be using hydrogen.

Oil companies like Shell, Texaco and BP Amoco share these opinions. They say that the global warming is a real problem, and that the easily utilizable oil reserves will soon be finished if the world economy continues to grow with the present speed. According to one estimate, the oil companies are now finding only one barrel of oil for every four that is being consumed. This means that the prizes of oil and gasoline could soon rise to prohibitive heights.

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