THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Tuesday, November 26, 2019 |A
ADive
Into the Deep
The Imperiled Ocean
By Laura Trethewey
(Pegasus, 211 pages, $28.95)BOOKSHELF| By Richard Adams Carey
L
aura Trethewey’s “The Imperiled Ocean: Human
Stories From a Changing Sea” is a platypus of a book,
composed of odd and mismatched parts, more a
collection of essays than not, an enterprise that began,
writes the author, “with a simple question: what do people
want from the ocean?” You might think that each of the
book’s seven radically different chapters would provide its
own direct answer. But it’s not that simple in narratives
where sometimes the ocean, per se, isn’t even present.
Ms. Trethewey, a Canadian journalist, begins with a
profile of cinematographer Pete Romano, who films Holly-
wood movie scenes that purport to take place in the ocean;
really they happen inside a 233,000-gallon tank in a Los
Angeles warehouse. The last chapter concerns scientist Erin
Stoddard’s work on the white sturgeon, which he conducts
in the fresh water of Canada’s Fraser River. Another chapter
takes place aboard the Queen Mary 2. The ocean is to a
cruise ship as the upper atmosphere is to a Boeing 777—you
can see it, but you’re unlikely
to really experience it, and
God help you if you do.
Nonetheless, like a platypus,
the book somehow hangs
together and even flourishes.
“The ocean is a multitude,”
Ms. Trethewey writes, “linking
us to one another and to every
other living organism on the
planet in unimaginable ways.”
The stories themselves almost
resist linking up, but in their
very centrifugal force they
suggest the pervasive breadth
and influence of this one
ecosystem, which sprawls over 71% of
the planet and contains, claims the author,
99% of the space hospitable to life.
The Pete Romano chapter acknowledges the importance
of the sea’s first cinematographer, Jacques Cousteau, in
introducing humanity to the real color, beauty and abundance
of the life that exists in this other world. But underwater
sequences for thrillers and horror films also suggest—via
the “seafloor-strolling zombies,” for example, of “Pirates of
the Caribbean”—the ocean’s role in our minds as “the innate
instinctive id to land’s critical and self-contained superego.”
Ms. Trethewey rightly notes that bothHomo erectusand
Homo sapiensfirst flourished along African coastlines. With
the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago, however, the
superego ofHomo sapiensrooted itself in the land, and we
became suspicious of sailors and their nomadic lives.
In the 17th century, the doctrine of Mare Liberum—
freedom of the seas—defined the ocean as a commons
governed by a code of international maritime law. This has
enabled the sort of off-the-grid gypsies who live in boats to
do so cheaply, and Ms. Trethewey devotes one chapter to the
struggles of one community of indigent water-dwellers in a
Vancouver Island harbor to resist the town’s efforts to evict
them and gentrify its waterfront.
The doctrine has also enabled the exercise of lawlessness
on the high seas, where policing is difficult or impossible.
So where the sea stands as a barrier to human migration,
there stands also predatory profiteering.
The book’s most heartbreaking chapter describes the trials
and humiliations endured by two young male refugees, one
fleeing Ghana for Italy, the other fleeing Syria for Greece.
They are among those who pay exorbitant fees to board over-
crowded “death boats.” Mohammed Botwe, the Ghanaian,
survives, but not those loaded into a companion boat: “Help-
lessly, Mohammad listened to the sound of a hundred people
drowning at once....Eventually, the screaming stopped.”Yet even people on cruise ships can drown. Ms. Trethewey
describes the career and last hours of Favio Oñate Órdenes,
a young Chilean chef aboard Cunard’s Queen Mary 2. Like all
cruise ships, the QM2 sails under a flag of convenience, in
this case, Bermuda’s. Órdenes’s 2015 fall from the ship was
ruled a suicide, but his family was frustrated with the official
account. They had heard different stories, Ms. Trethewey
writes, including one in which a crew member “held Favio
down and injected him with some unknown drug.” Cunard’s
handling of the tragedy, Ms. Trethewey argues, illustrates
how the cruise-ship industry has made itself into the
unregulated “offshore banking of ocean travel.”
The most frightening of these chapters is also its least
dramatic: an account of the author’s volunteer work for
Ocean Legacy, an environmental nonprofit, in cleaning waste
plastic from a remote British Columbia shoreline. There, in a
lush wetland, “nature’s cathedral,” Ms. Trethewey finds that
“plastic carpeted the ground. Plastic bottles, plastic buoys,
Styrofoam everywhere, like someone had Photoshopped a
garbage dump onto the forest.”
Science magazine, she notes, estimates that eight million
metric tons of plastic is dumped into the ocean each year,
an amount that “will multiply by a factor of ten in 2025.”
Now tiny fragments are turning up in both our table salt and
our reservoirs. Ms. Trethewey cites a 2019 report calculating
that “the average person ate a credit-card-sized amount of
plastic each day” in drinking water.
Ms. Trethewey tries hard to be optimistic about the fate
of the ocean—and even ourselves—and cites the resilience
of the sturgeon, an age-old fish that has already weathered
several mass extinctions. But in its long tenure, the sturgeon
has never faced anything like the twining of overharvesting,
environmental degradation, and global warming inflicted in
this era, which is dubbed the Anthropocene but might also
be called the Plasticene.
Ms. Tretheway writes that, in organizing the subjects of
her book, “I split my focus into motivations: working,
migrating, cleaning, creating, adventuring, and researching.
The most common motivation for going to sea,
unsurprisingly, was money.”
Indeed, for reasons of money, migrants die, cruise ships
steer around the law, and plastic is made, sold and
discarded much faster than it can be collected and disposed
of. We’re enriching ourselves—some of us—into the sort of
madness where our id boils up and consumes us. Watch out
for the zombies.Mr. Carey’s books include “Against the Tide: The Fate of
the New England Fisherman” and “The Philosopher Fish:
Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire.”A series of ‘human stories’ from the high seas
that together convey the immensity and
influence of the ocean ecosystem.PG&E Refuses to Get Burned
Stanford, Calif.M
y physician’s office
called to have me come
in right away. I had
scheduled a flu shot for the fol-
lowing morning, but the office
had been informed that PG&E
would cut power within an
hour. The refrigerator would
warm and the serum would be
spoiled before day’s end. That
early October shutdown af-
fected almost a million house-
holds or establishments in Cali-
fornia and was repeated two
weekends later.
PG&E is in a difficult spot.
The last thing the company
wants is to ignite a fire that
causes loss of life and property.
Yet it is also aware that people
rely on it for power, which is
no mere convenience. With
temperatures near or below
freezing in some locations, fail-
ing to provide power for heat
puts Californians at risk—par-
ticularly the elderly, the infirm
and children. Businesses close,
food spoils and drugs become
unusable.
What incentive would induce
the company to choose cor-
rectly between bad alternatives
and to invest in risk-reducing
strategies like burying the
power lines? A simple principle,
described a century ago by theeconomist Arthur Pigou, states
that when a company or person
takes an action that has adverse
consequences, that actor should
bear the costs of that action.
The solution is simple:
Charge the company for any
damage it causes, including
those power outages. The cur-
rent settlement, in which PG&E
is liable for fire damage but not
the cost of lost electricity, moti-
vatesittocutpoweraggres-
sively. Being penalized for theconsequences of those outages
would encourage the company
to invest in technology, capital
and personnel that reduce fire
risk, rather than merely circum-
vent risk through blackouts.
Recent court rulings and reg-
ulations counteract these incen-
tives. The California Public Util-
ities Commission and the state
Supreme Court have held re-
peatedly that PG&E must cover
damages associated with any
fires it causes, but haven't ex-
tended that liability to the costs
of cutting power to households
and businesses.
Fires are all too common in
California, but are still rare oc-
currences. In making its deci-
sion about whether to shut
down power, the company
should account for how shut-
ting off power would affect the
probability of an outbreak and
for the damages from any fire
that occurs. Nonetheless,
PG&E’s current incentives drive
it to avoid fire risk entirely by
cutting power because its cost
of doing so is almost nil com-pared with damages imposed
on consumers
The Public Utilities Com-
mission has worsened the
safety problem by requiring
PG&E to invest in renewable
power to accommodate envi-
ronmental concerns, reducing
the funds available for preven-
tive measures. These costs
may be passed to consumers in
the form of higher rates with-
out any corresponding in-
crease in short-term safety or
convenience.
Regulators and courts should
take into accountalldamages
caused by PG&E’s behavior. If
the company is held responsible
for the destruction from fires
and outages alike, it will make
the right fire-prevention and in-
vestment decisions.Mr. Lazear, who was chair-
man of the President’s Council
of Economic Advisers from
2006-09, is a professor at Stan-
ford University’s Graduate
School of Business and a Hoo-
ver Institution fellow.By Edward P. Lazear
Under the utility’s
incentive structure,
blackouts make sense.OPINION
Marco Rubio
thumps for
“common
good capital-
ism.” Eliza-
beth Warren
speaks of
“making mar-
kets work for
people.” While
their prescrip-
tions differ,
they share the conviction that
capitalism is in crisis and must
be “fixed” if it is again to serve
the American people.
They share another assump-
tion as well. Those who dis-
agree are latter-day Panglos-
sians in thrall to laissez-faire
fundamentalism.
Now, Sen. Rubio gets full
marks for advancing his argu-
ment so forthrightly at Catho-
lic University’s Busch School of
Business, in a speech that sug-
gests the outlines of a post-
Trump form of Republican
populism. But there are seri-
ous objections that can’t be
answered merely by dismissing
critics as soulless libertarians.
Some of us, for example,
don’t agree with the senator’s
characterization of American
capitalism, or what economic
growth means for American
workers. It follows that we
doubt his prescriptions.
Sen. Rubio posits that
shareholder capitalism needs
overhauling because it no lon-
ger provides Americans with
“the dignity that comes from
hard work, ownership and rais-
ing a family.” The solution, he
says, is an economy where pol-
iticians such as himself make
more of the decisions about
where capital gets invested,
Making Capitalism Great Again?
and where businesses and
workers cooperate rather than
compete for resources.
Again, some of us believe
that cooperation is what you
get in a market where workers
are free to decide to whom
they’ll sell their labor—and to
whom they won’t. There is no
greater security for a worker
than the freedom to tell his
boss to take his job and shove
it, confident there is a good
job for him elsewhere. Such
confidence, of course, can be
had only in a growing economy
producing those jobs.
Experience, moreover, also
tells us that when competition
is tethered the result isn’t co-
operation. It’s collusion. In-
deed, Sens. Warren and Rubio
would both find no more
steadfast allies than libertari-
ans if their goal were simply to
eliminate rules and subsidies
that artificially rig the market
to favor big business and the
politically connected at the ex-
pense of the little guy.
Further, some of us do share
Sen. Rubio’s concerns about to-
day’s social dysfunctions—fail-
ing public schools, broken fam-
ilies, addiction—and how they
threaten to leave many of our
countrymen, especially those
without college degrees, on the
margins of the American
dream. But is this really a cri-
sis of the voluntary exchange
between buyers and sellers, or
of our culture? Here Sen. Rubio
is pushing for politics to do the
work of culture.
It’s an understandable
temptation, in the sense that
changing, say, tax credits is far
less daunting than repairing a
culture. But then, who are thereal materialists, if the answer
to a cultural meltdown isn’t to
address the human soul but to
say, “Don’t worry, we can engi-
neer it all through regulation
and the tax code”?
We can likewise haggle over
Sen. Rubio’s specifics, such as
whether American families
stand to benefit more from tai-
lored tax credits than from the
economic growth that a flatter
tax code and simplified filing
system might encourage. Orwhether wages tell the full
story about how the American
worker is faring. Or whether, as
the senator claimed, the key to
reinvigorating the “business in-
novation that delivered Ameri-
cans to the Moon 50 years ago”
is really... the Small Business
Administration.
This kind of thing speaks to
the larger objection: a want of
modesty.
The track record of govern-
ment tweaks to American capi-
talism isn’t encouraging: mini-
mum wage laws that price
workers out of jobs; subsidized
student loans that inflate col-
lege tuition; welfare payments
that help remove fathers from
families. Often these tweaks
end up hurting the very people
they are supposed to help. The
champions of the Great Society
also supposed they were simply
tweaking American capitalism.As President Lyndon Johnson
said of food stamps, it “weds
the best of the humanitarian
instincts of the American peo-
ple with the best of the free en-
terprise system.”
These interventions were
not carried out by stupid peo-
ple with bad intentions. To
the contrary, they were im-
plemented by some of our
finest minds with the best of
intentions.
So when Mr. Rubio and his
allies complain that the high
priests of capitalism dismiss
his ideas out of hand, it isn’t
because they believe him stu-
pid or the market status quo
incapable of improvements.
To the contrary, it’s because
they don’t believe politicians
recalibrating the tax code in
the name of the common good
will bring about the moral
economy. It’s because they
don’t believe technicians redi-
recting capital investment will
work, or that it can be had with
no costs or unintended conse-
quences. Above all, it’s because
they believe that trusting
Washington to give us a new
and improved capitalism by re-
purposing private companies
to serve the priorities of the
government rather than those
of their owners requires a faith
far greater than any ever de-
manded by the Lord.
The voluntary relationship
between buyer and seller at the
heart of the free market isn’t
the love of neighbor com-
manded by the Gospel. But in
making market success depend
on anticipating the needs of the
other, it’s perhaps not as far re-
moved as we might think.
Write to [email protected]Marco Rubio’s
ideas for fixing our
free-market system
have a familiar ring.MAIN
STREET
By William
McGurn
What will the
trans-Atlantic
alliance look
like in a world
focused on the
Indo-Pacific?
That, more
than President
Trump’s un-
predictable di-
plomacy, is
the question
that haunts Europe. During the
Cold War, protecting Europe
from Soviet aggression was
Washington’s highest foreign-
policy priority. That didn’t
only mean that the U.S. put
troops in Europe. Washington
took European opinions seri-
ously, engaged with Europeans,
cut deals with them and was
willing to make concessions to
preserve alliance unity.
Clearly, some of that has
changed. The next U.S. presi-
dent may not share Mr.
Trump’s undiplomatic instincts
or his affinity for Brexiteers
such as Nigel Farage and anti-
Brussels figures like Hungary’s
Viktor Orbán. But will he or
she engage in the ritualistic
ceremonies of diplomatic con-
sultation with the various
chancellors, presidents, com-
missioners and high represen-
tatives that Europeans so
love? When America’s most ur-
gent foreign policy worries in-
volve smoothing over Japa-
nese-Korean spats or facing
down China in the Taiwan
Strait, just how relevant will
Europe be? When Europe calls
Washington, will anybody an-
swer the phone?
The French like to say they
are a Pacific nation, thanks to
China Is Europe’s Problem Too
Tahiti and other outposts, but
it takes more than a sprinkling
of islands, however idyllic, to
make you a serious factor in
Pacific politics. From a military
standpoint, the European pow-
ers—and NATO itself—won’t
play a large role in the Indo-Pa-
cific zone. Nor will European
ideology or Europe as a model
have much appeal there. The
memories of colonialism are
too strong, and many Asian
countries see the slow-growth,
high-regulation European social
model as a trap to avoid, not a
goal to be reached.
Yet as China looms larger, a
new trans-Atlantic consensus is
forming. German Chancellor
Angela Merkel, in one of her
rare political missteps, decided
last month to allow China’s
Huawei to supply components
for Germany’s 5G internet.
Americans made the usual pro-
tests and threats, to be met by
the usual refusals. But the mat-
ter didn’t end there. Delegates
to her party’s conference last
week revolted, adopting a reso-
lution that could lead to a
Bundestag vote to block Hua-
wei from Germany’s 5G rollout.
Prominent Social Democrats,
the center-left party uneasily
allied with Mrs. Merkel’s Chris-
tian Democrats, agree. Chinese
companies cannot be trusted
with German data.
The convergence between
European and U.S. views on
China is far from complete.
France has refused to exclude
Huawei from its 5G program,
and other European govern-
ments as well as many Euro-
pean companies still see China
through rose-tinted lenses. Butopinions are changing. Like
Americans, Europeans sympa-
thize with Hong Kong’s democ-
racy movement, and are horri-
fied by Beijing’s treatment of
the Tibetans and Uighurs. The
Federation of German Indus-
tries has been voicing sharp
criticism of Chinese business
practices for the past year.
There is another force push-
ing Americans and Europeans
closer together: Vladimir Putin,
who appears to have resigned
himself to a full-fledged alli-
ance with China. Russia’s dis-
ruptive agenda in Europe,ranging from the annexation of
Crimea to efforts to influence
European elections through
disinformation, has always suf-
fered from a lack of money that
is the curse of Russian power
projection. A perception that
Russian activity in Europe is
more of a nuisance to the U.S.
than a strategic threat has
gained ground in some neo-iso-
lationist circles. But as China
makes major investments in
Greece and across Southern
and Eastern Europe, that per-
ception could change. The
closer Russia and China are
aligned, the more important
Europe’s Russia problems be-
come for a China-focused U.S.
foreign policy.
The Indo-Pacific isn’t LasVegas—what happens there
doesn’t stay there. As China’s
economic, political and mili-
tary reach expands in Africa,
Latin America and the Middle
East, European as well as U.S.
interests will be affected. Ef-
forts by China to export its
method of authoritarian gover-
nance backed by high-tech sur-
veillance will pose a serious
threat to a vision of the open
society that Europeans and
Americans mostly share.
One hates to say anything
so obvious, but world politics
is a global endeavor. During
the Cold War, America’s main
focus was on Europe, but
Japan and South Korea were
important allies without
whose support and counsel
the Cold War would have been
much harder to win.
The real question isn’t
whether the U.S. will take the
problems of the Indo-Pacific
too seriously and write off its
old allies in Europe. It is
whether Americans and Euro-
peans will recognize the
global nature of the challenge
before us.
About this, I am an opti-
mist. The Americans who best
understand the potential
threats emerging from China
also know that without Eu-
rope’s help it will be difficult
and perhaps impossible to
prevail. The harder Americans
think about China, the more
they will care about Europe. If
enough Europeans share U.S.
concerns about Beijing, the
Western alliance will remain a
vital force even as the world’s
political center of gravity
shifts to the Indo-Pacific.Only a strong trans-
Atlantic alliance can
counter Beijing’s
moves in the Pacific.GLOBAL
VIEW
By Walter
Russell Mead