Cato Institute
1000 Massachusetts Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20001-5403
Phone (202) 842 0200
Fax (202) 842 3490
 Contact Us
Support Cato

Cato Policy Report, January/February 1998

Now What? Living with Perpetual Evolution

On November 13-15 the Cato Institute, with the Bionomics Institute and Forbes ASAP, sponsored the 5th Annual Bionomics Conference, "Now What? Living with Perpetual Evolution," in San Francisco. Among the speakers were Gregory Benford, professor of plasma physics and astrophysics at the University of California at Irvine, editor of Far Futures, and a contributing editor to Reason; David Post, professor at the Temple University School of Law and cofounder and codirector of the Cyberspace Law Institute; and Sameer Parekh, president of C2Net, a company specializing in providing commercial Internet security software. Excerpts from their remarks follow.

Gregory Benford: There is a controversy over global warming. But for this talk I shall simply concede that there is a problem of some kind, or that there will be one in the future. I am not entirely convinced that's true, but let's assume it is for this discussion.

The dominant ideology of the moment says that the answer to the problem of global warming is prohibition: don't burn fossil fuel. However, that does not make a lot of sense. Much research funded by the National Academy of Sciences over the last decade and a half has shown that it's much cheaper to mitigate global warming than it is to prohibit people--in the developing world and in the developed world--from burning fossil fuels, which, of course, is vital to so many industries and to economic progress.

There are basically three ways you can mitigate the problem. First, you can plant trees. Everyone understands that trees sop up carbon dioxide. What everyone does not understand is what a significant effect planting trees can have. If done correctly, it could reduce the total CO2 output of the United States by 30 percent.

The next thing is rather high tech. You can change the reflectivity of the planet. If you alter the reflectivity of the earth by one-half of 1 percent--and send some sunlight back into space--you can completely offset any plausible increase in warming due to the emission of CO2. We currently reflect about 30 percent of the sunlight that enters our atmosphere. If you increase that to 30.5 percent, you'll be able to settle the thermal books. The trick, of course, is how to do it. There are both local and global ways.

A study published last year by the Department of Energy showed that if you painted every roof in Los Angeles white and if you planted trees in the traffic islands, you could lower the cost of air conditioning by 18 percent and Los Angeles would instantly become cooler than Orange County, instead of being, on average, five degrees warmer on a summer day. That is something you could do locally. You could also do a number of things nationally or globally.

The most obvious large-scale solution is to adjust the percentage of the sky that is covered by clouds. If you change the cloud cover slightly, you can completely solve the greenhouse problem, and we know how to produce clouds. The cheapest way to do it is to create them at about 35,000 to 40,000 feet. And how do you do that? You simply go up there and dump a lot of fine-grained dust. Happily, it turns out that we do that already. In fact, most of you did that inadvertently on the way to this meeting. Fine-grained dust is left behind in the exhaust trail of jet planes.

A study done by the National Academy of Sciences showed that if you burn rich jet fuel, you deposit micron-sized droplets behind that are essentially unburned carbon. The unburned carbon that you leave behind at 35,000 feet stays, on average, about three months. It then disperses and provides added nuclei for the production of clouds. Moreover, the micron-sized droplets reflect sunlight. By using rich fuel--which is slightly more expensive--you will raise airline ticket prices by a few percent. But you will also mitigate the entire CO2 problem in the United States, and you will do it for just a few tens of millions of dollars, not tens of trillions of dollars, which is what prohibition of the use of fossil fuels could cost.

There are other ways to increase cloud cover, as well. You can burn sulphurous coal in the tropics and let the exhaust train--the smoke trail--blow out over the Pacific Ocean. That will increase cloud production and reflect light exactly where you need it: in the oceans. Oceans are darker then land, so they don't reflect sunlight very well; they absorb it. If you want to cool the world, the best thing to do is to go to the tropics, where sunlight is most intense, and cover the darkest surface--the ocean. That option is particularly reasonable because nobody lives in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Therefore, you can build all the clouds you want and there's not going to be any "not in my backyard" opposition to it. That is also true of leaving an exhaust trail behind jet planes. Nobody lives at 35,000 feet.

Connerly.gif (108166 bytes)The third method, which I'll mention only briefly, is to dump iron dust in the oceans. There is a block in the production of plankton in the oceans due to an inadequate amount of iron in the water. I like to call it the Geritol problem. By dumping iron, you will produce more plankton, the plankton will absorb more CO2, and when they die, they will sink to the bottom of the ocean and leave the CO2 in the mud two or three kilometers below the sea floor. We know that option works. It has been tried in two separate experiments near the Galápagos Islands and it has been successful. Plus, it has at least one positive side effect: by stimulating the production of plankton, you can get a bumper crop of fish. The increase in fish stocks will probably pay whatever expenses you incur in stimulating plankton development. In other words, this method is, in the aggregate, free.

Those are just three methods--the primary methods that the National Academy of Sciences proposed. When the academy published its findings in 1992, there was widespread revulsion among members of the academy, which absolutely puzzled me. So I went and talked to several people who had worked on the report as well as people who opposed it, including a colleague of mine at the University of California at Irvine, Sherwood Rowland, who won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for predicting the depletion of the ozone layer.

When I spoke to Rowland about global warming, he said "I'm really opposed to mitigation procedures." And I said, "But mitigation is probably cheaper than prohibition, right?" He said, "Yes, it appears cheaper." So, I asked him, "Why shouldn't we do it?" He said, "Because it will give people the impression that there is some better way to do it than by controlling their own urges to burn fuel." And so I told him, "I didn't know you were a Puritan." To which he replied, "What do you mean?" "What you advocate," I responded, "sounds like a response produced by the Puritan heritage in the American psyche--namely, the terrible fear that someone, somewhere is happy, or doing something that you don't approve of." That train of thought runs, unrecognized, deeply in the scientific policymaking establishment.

The thing that libertarians and people interested in sound science must do is oppose people who would like to block human progress by prohibiting the burning of fossil fuels. We need to demonstrate that there are ways that we can manage the system that will allow us to live in a healthy environment, while at the same time being economically prosperous and allowing the bulk of the world to attain much better living standards. We can be the voice of reason speaking against prohibition and for mitigation, for harnessing the increasing power we have over the world in a way that helps, not hurts, us. Mitigation can be achieved. But it can be achieved only through the use of markets, not through the decrees of managers.

David Post: I want to talk about how I think rules and law might evolve in cyberspace. Today, we live in a world that is divided into sovereign states, each of which tries to find a legal system that is best for its citizens. And, in fact, many sovereign states are broken up into smaller regions, which in turn are broken up into even smaller regions. We live in a world in which law is determined by geography. Sovereignty is defined as a geographical matter.

Defining sovereignty by geography has made a lot of sense for a long time because the spillover effects of human conduct, in large part, have been defined and distributed geographically. Throughout the sweep of human history, conduct in one place has primarily affected the well-being of people in that place--not exclusively, but nearly so. But we don't live in that world anymore. Thanks to communication technology generally and the Internet in particular, spillover effects are no longer geographically localized. You know that intuitively. If some financial analyst catches a cold in Hong Kong, my pension funds go down. Now, that's obviously a generalization, but there is more than a kernel of truth to it.

To take a more realistic example, when I publish copyrighted material on the Internet, that action affects the author, the publisher, the publisher's shareholders, the publisher's employees, students, those who read the information--an endless number of people. Yet none of those people is necessarily in Philadelphia, where I live and where I posted the information. They can be anywhere. What we are searching for in cyberspace, I think, are new governing groups that, at their core, are not geographical. If there is to be any hope of tracking nongeographical spillovers, geographical sovereignty has to be completely rethought. We need to make sure that spillover effects and membership are closely aligned. And to do that I think we should consider an answer that Stuart Kauffman has suggested: "patching."

In his book At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Kauffman demonstrates that there is a way to solve problems in complex systems. He calls that solution "patching." Patching means breaking up a system into overlapping groups of individual elements and allowing each of those elements in each of those groups to self-optimize, to find within the patch the best possible configuration for the members. The breaking up of a system in such a fashion can, in fact, help to produce a solution that optimizes the welfare of the patch.http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-20n1-5.html And individually self-optimizing patches can make it easier to produce greater overall welfare for an entire collection of patches.

Dividing complex systems into patches--patches where spillover and membership are closely, though not perfectly, aligned--can allow complex systems to adapt to change, and to evolve more efficiently. In a world of nongeographical spillover--the world of the Internet--geographic patches are not likely to be adaptive.

Crane.gif (49949 bytes)I am hardly the first person to suggest that new technology will lead to the death of conventional notions of sovereignty. Walter Wriston, George Gilder, and many others have talked about that for some time. But I think that patching gives us reason to believe that the demise of geographic sovereignty is a good thing. It gives us reason to think that we are not powerless, that we can adapt in a manner that will maximize our welfare. We should not be worried or surprised that the U.S. Congress will not be able to produce adequate policies regarding copyright and other issues on the Internet, precisely because its membership is defined in geographical terms.

I think the central question for law in cyberspace--and it may well be the central question for law in general in the 21st century--is, What processes can we rely on to produce appropriately shaped and defined decisionmaking patches? To me, the answer to that question is really exciting because, ultimately, it will be individuals, not states, defining their own decisionmaking patches. They will be able to organize their own sovereign communities and to attract members voluntarily. Individuals, after all, have the best information about what conduct and which spillovers affect their own well-being. The Internet can be a powerful, self-organizing system if the geographical sovereigns of the world allow it to become one.

Sameer Parekh: So often when people think about cryptography, they think about the camouflage angle, about confidentiality. Confidentiality, of course, is very important. It protects sensitive information from being stolen. And it makes sure, for example, that when you're writing to your mother about the vacation that you're taking next week, the robber down the street or the hacker next door doesn't find out and decide to break into your home.

In addition to confidentiality, however, there are two other extremely vital components to cryptography: integrity and authentication. Those components are vital to the growth of the Internet because, in addition to growing the networks, we need to make sure that people trust the networks.

Integrity is the function that verifies that documents and information have not been modified. It guarantees that when you send a document, the receiver knows that it is the actual thing, as opposed to something that a third party modified in transit. That's important because you don't want to have a third party go in and change, say, a "must" to a "mustn't" in a contract. In addition, you have situations in which, for example, you need to download software to a personal computer. In that case, you don't want a third party to alter that software and attach a virus that would invade the privacy of your PC.

The second additional aspect of cryptography is the authentication function. It allows someone you're talking to on your computer to know that you are actually who you say you are. For example, when you are trying to get vital company information, your company is able to verify that you are indeed an employee, instead of a competitor. Authentication also allows us to be sure that we're buying a product from the correct vendor. If you want to buy a car from Honda, you can go to the honda.com Web site and order one. What you get in return, thanks to verification, is a Honda, not a Chrysler. In addition, authentication protocols protect against other types of fraud. You don't want to go to a restaurant, buy a meal with your credit card, and then have the restaurant go to Honda and buy a car on your credit card.

In the real world, authentication schemes generally require sensory signals. For example, mammals often authenticate others by using their sense of smell. However, since we can't smell each other over the Internet, we must use cryptographic protocols. The U.S. government, of course, wants to make all that illegal.

We are all aware of the parasitic nature of government. A parasite must walk a very fine line between feeding off its host for a substantial period of time and killing it immediately. If a parasite kills its host immediately, it either dies or it has to find another host. The smartest parasite feeds off its host without the host even noticing. The HIV virus is a very good example of an effective parasite. It can reside in a host for years and, in fact, in additional hosts as well, without the hosts ever knowing. HIV often doesn't turn into full-blown AIDS until many years after the initial infection. Government cryptography policy has evolved from a very simplistic strategy to a much more successful HIV-like strategy.

In the beginning, when cryptography wasn't much of a public issue, the only regulations were export restrictions on strong cryptography developed in the United States. While those restrictions were constitutionally questionable and damaging to the U.S. encryption industry, they did not have a significant impact on the ability to deploy strong cryptography worldwide. Only when the Clinton administration announced its support for the clipper chip did the cryptography issue received widespread recognition.

At that point, more people than just the cryptography freaks found out about cryptography laws, the value of cryptography, and what the government was trying to do to stop cryptography. The public learned what cryptography is and what it is good for. The clipper chip announcement was a perfect example of the government's using a very primitive parasitic strategy. It aroused such a strong reaction in the host that the host retaliated early and had the opportunity to set up defenses. Having learned from its early mistakes, the government has developed a much more sophisticated approach. Much as HIV resides in the host for years without causing symptoms, the current government policy is to implement an infrastructure for unhampered cheap access to plain text so that it or any criminal organization eventually can snoop in Internet traffic without anyone ever knowing.

We must continue to expand our knowledge of the tactics the government is using to invade our privacy. And we must be very wary of any statements by members of Congress or by the administration in support of strong cryptography. The chances are that such statements are part of a manipulation scheme to enable the government to acquire unlimited access to plain text.

The cure to the problem is also clear. We must quickly deploy strong cryptography worldwide. To cure an infection, it is best to diagnose and treat it quickly. The rapid deployment of strong cryptography is the antidote to the disease of government. Such a cure will secure the future of the Internet and allow it to evolve into a free and fully functioning part of the marketplace.

This article originally appeared in the January/February 1998 edition of Cato Policy Report.