Why we have green leaves and Kyoto

From a letter by Raymond Firestone to the New York Review of Books:

[N]atural selection proceeds via a narrow point-to-point pathway, not a wide all-encompassing one. in solving any given problem it can make use of only what happens to be available at that particular time.

Black leaves might be superior to green, but no new structure will appear...

unless it is immediately adaptive.... Thus green leaves dominate beacause they happen to have come along before black ones, and also because chance uncovered no route from green to black that was adaptive at every new step. NYRB, 11 October, page 49

Is there something analogous to our societies here? Perhaps so. I don't think we can assume, for instance, that left to their own devices our vast number of decision-making bodies, including not only corporations, individuals, interest groups and non-governmental organizations but government agencies as well, will somehow generate solutions to such universally recognised problems as climate change, famine or war.

What's missing, in my view, is the focus in both evolution and society, on the immediate. Bodies like the United Nations refect our own limitations: they do genuinely want to see an end to (say) climate change, but as an institution its focus is on the immediate: it looks at what it thinks is the next step forward. But the direction of such a step is limited by its imagination, which means that policy evolution will be overly based on what is current. Rather than stipulate a desirable end point (climate stability, for instance), our decision-makers are prepared to delegate only the next step of policy implementation to the wider population. So we get a huge political and financial effort directed at reducing anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. (And even this will be done at less than maximum efficiency.) There will, as a result be incremental change - better fuel efficiency here, more expensive power there - but larger adaptations, which might be dramatically more efficient, are not envisaged nor encouraged by our current political process.

The Social Policy Bond principle is different. It contracts out the achievement of broad social and environmental goals, like climate stability or world peace, to entire populations of would-be investors. So a broader, more highly motivated coalition would decide on the direction and magnitude of the most efficient ways of achieving society's goals. I think that would be an improvement.