Archive for April, 2020

Pandemic comparison 2

April 29, 2020

Previously I made a comparison between US and Australian figures for coronavirus. This is the second such comparison. The US is not improving.

This is perhaps a response to those who think that Australia should be more like the US economically and politically (ie Coalition politicians).

First case of coronavirus in the US announced 20th Jan.
First case in Australia 25th Jan. This is pretty comparable.

The US population is about 334,000,000 and the Australian population is about 26,000,000. So the population of the US is about 13 times greater than that of Australia.

Current confirmed cases in US: 1,008,571
Current confirmed cases in Aus: 6,725

The US has 150 times as many confirmed cases as Australia.

Current deaths in the US: 56,521
Current deaths in Australia: 84

The US has 673 times as many deaths as Australia.

Again, not all neoliberalisms or market fundamentalisms are equally destructive….

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Solving the Black Elephant Part II

April 21, 2020

In the first of this series of posts we explored the idea of the Black Elephant, the offspring of the ‘Elephant in the Room’ and the ‘Black Swan’. That is a looming and serious problem, which people ignore, until it takes them by surprise.

If you read almost any account of the lead up to the financial crisis of 2008 and later, it seems pretty obvious that people were selling shonky and over-complicated financial products to each other. US banks and loan agencies were giving loans to people, and many of these loans seemed designed to enable the lenders to throw borrowers out of their homes, so the lenders could profit from selling those homes in an inflationary market. These sales flooded the market with houses, causing a price crash which led to everyone losing. Computer modelers were being asked to do impossible things in the way of prediction on the markets.

Eventually the system would have to crash – and this was, in hindsight, blindingly obvious. It should have been obvious at the time, but it was a Black Elephant. Nearly everyone in the financial world refused to acknowledge these problems; probably because they seemed to be making so much out of it, and so the system crashed.

Likewise, pandemics are an expected consequence of global trade and travel, and viral mutation, yet governments ran down their preparation and resilience capacities, and more people died than was necessary trying for “herd immunity”. In some cases politicians seemed to be saying “no one could have expected this”, when it was perfectly expectable; the only doubts being as to when it would occur and how frequently. The same issues will almost certainly happen with climate change and ecological destruction. The world is finite, we cannot destroy the place we live faster than it can repair itself, and survive. And we cannot all be bailed out from such destruction by the Government.

Black Elephants, large and small, are common and possibly deadly, and, when they finally become undeniable, are hard to manage.

In the second post we explored in more detail the kinds of organisational structures and processes which hide, or generate, Black Elephants. We also looked at the paradoxes around finding the Black Elephant. The first of which is that the dominant people in the organisation must want to find the Elephant, but if they were serious about this, then they would probably already know it and not have to go looking. In other words, avoiding Black Elephants provides the perfect excuse for not looking for them, and being taken by ‘surprise’ instead of being prepared. I also mentioned the propensity of the way an organisation orders the world to be the way they disorder and undermine themselves – often by disregarding Black Elephants and the unintended consequences of their actions.

Finally we looked at a few basic techniques for trying to uncover Black Elephants, such as appointing a tenured Black Elephant hunter, and attempting to remove organisational blocks to information flow, by understanding, and working against, what makes those blocks.

Now let us look at the problem of complexity, and then move to the final set of suggestions for dealing with Black Elephants, before leaving it to the reader, should they wish to carry this set of ideas further.

Complexity

Many people will already know something of complexity theory, but let us first look at the disconcerting aspects of it, which are frequently ignored through writers embracing the idea of “emergent order”. These chaotic features can be considered to be Black Elephants. They can lead to major problems which should be expected.

All social, ecological, organic, psychological, climatic etc. systems are complex – so there is no avoiding this.

Flux

Instability and dynamic change is the way of the world. Everything changes. Stability is rare and ‘unnatural’ and takes huge amounts of work. Eventually the work may take more energy and time than the organisation has available and change will reappear. Flux means that techniques which worked one day, may not work a week from now, or they may make things appear worse when applied today. Nothing is ever exactly the same. Standard actions may disrupt the intended order. This implies managers need to be constantly paying attention to all the relevant systems, and learning from results in them. Argument over how to proceed in any particular circumstance is more or less normal. However, its also worth using tried control mechanisms while they are still working. Change for its own sake may be disruptive in a bad way.

Unboundedness

Complex systems are everywhere, and not completely bounded. The borders between systems are permeable. They ‘spill’ into each other. Actions in one system can affect actions in another, often unexpected, system. The apparent boundaries may appear because of culture or language, rather than reality. For example, ‘societies’ are not really separate from ‘ecologies.’ Humans are not independent from other life forms. Individuals are not completely independent from other humans. Another way of expressing this, is to say everything is Context Dependent. Human operators can tend to strip away context and interaction with other systems from their perceptions to make things easier to understand (this is often useful, but not always). This unboundedness means that causality is not straight forwardly linear; lots of different factors interact to produce the results we observe.

Divergence

Any perception of overall harmony in a system or between systems, is probably false. The ‘advance’ of one part of the system will be resisted by other parts of the system. One creature feeds off another. Competition is as natural as co-operation. Humans have tended to emphasise either competition or co-operation, but both occur naturally. Apparent Harmony usually arises because one part of the system is forcibly sacrificed to another, or because the system has become rigid and, therefore, unprepared for unexpected shocks.

Unpredictability

Unpredictability is a feature of complex systems. We never entirely know what will happen as a result of our actions. The further we look into the future the less we know. Any assumption of certainty is likely to be wrong. This does not mean that we cannot posit in advance what are the most likely actions to produce acceptable results, or which actions are the most likely to produce harmful results. We may be able to predict trends, but not specific events. Even so, we may be wrong – so it is essential to be conscious of feedback, ‘positive,’ ‘negative’ and ‘ambiguous’.

Complication

Because there are so many systems operating simultaneously, it can be hard to tell what exactly what are the direct results of your action, what results from your action in interaction with other actions, or from apparently unconnected actions. Every action has a history of previous actions, consequently there are never any ‘initial conditions’ to make a safe analysis from. It also means that contextual issues possibly cannot be finalised.

Tipping points

At certain moments in time avalanches can happen. Previously stable systems suffer lots of minor changes which appear to have little affect. Then one or a few more changes and the whole system careens out of control. The turmoil does not stop until a new relatively steady state arises – but as flux is normal, this steady state may not be that steady. Tipping points can look like Black Swans: events which seem impossible beforehand, but which were merely highly improbable. More likely they are Black Elephants which were probable, but which the organisation wished to postpone into the distant future.

Emergent chaos

People talk a lot about emergent order, but the orders emerging may appear chaotic, or destructive, from within established viewpoints. These emergent orders may disrupt system functioning, or lead to system destruction. An emergent order, may not be the order you, or the organisation, wants or needs.

Limits of organisation

Any organisation works up to a point. Success can lead to rigidity or lessening of capacity to respond to the flux, and thus to failure. To paraphrase an earlier statement: eventually the work of maintaining stability, or preferred organisation, may take more energy and time than the organisation has available and change will occur – and this will frequently be perceived and felt as collapse.

Movement

As it is a cliche, it should not have to be remarked that sometimes dealing with problems also presents opportunities. Sometimes these opportunities can be destructive or can present problems in themselves.

For example this can happen when one already dominant part of the organisation uses the problem as an opportunity to increase its dominance, and increase the number of other parts of the organisation that should be its underlings. This tends to render organisations less flexible and less responsive. `

While finding opportunities can be good, it should not distract from finding the problems. Organisations have endless ways of avoiding problems, already.

Metaphor and Analogy

Human thinking tends to proceed by using metaphors and analogies. An organisation takes a model from an area they think they understand and applies it to an area they realise they do not understand that well. Over time, with experience, failure and learning, the metaphor may change, although it may be hard to discard. Thus scientists approached atomic structures with a Newtonian orbital model mixed with a bit of field theory, and eventually came up with quantum mechanics, which is very easy for amateurs to misunderstand, as the model is nothing like what passes for common sense. And as it is not like common sense, the model can sometimes be used to justify almost anything.

As a society, we have tended to deal with problems through a semi-Newtonian model of regularity, singular cause and singular effect, using the analogy of a mechanical device. However, you cannot completely deal with a complex system through a mechanical metaphor or model. It will eventually escape, react in unexpected ways, and produce Black Elephants. Models may mislead as much as they enlighten (second Black Elephant Paradox). This is one reason why the model of complexity being presented is presented as semi-disconnected points, which are hopefully comprehensible and useful.

The point is to develop a model which is not just command and control.

Problem solving/adapting again

Dealing with flux

Flux is to be expected. It is the leaves on a tree which primarily face changes in the environment. They are the parts that often ‘know’ the immediate problems that have to be adapted to. The trunk provides structure and possibly co-ordination, but the leaves are the knowers, problem facers and doers.

An organisations workers, especially those that directly deal with those the organisation serves or uses, may know more than the management. If there is a first rule it should be “Do not suppress their information – however painful”. Open communication channels are worth the pain. The problem is whether ‘those who know,’ fear ‘those who co-ordinate’. If the leaders don’t want to know, then they will only come to know through pain, and if they get bailed out, or easily move to another similar job, they may never learn and may continue to spread destruction from one organisation to another.

In the lead up to the financial crisis, many organisations apparently threw out their risk analysts, because the risk analysts told them their behaviour could be self-destructive, or that the risks of these financial products were unknown, or too high. Computer modelers who told them that what they were required to deliver was impossible were branded as negative and obstructive, and sacked or silenced. There also appeared to be few ways of holding the drivers of these behaviours responsible or accountable, because they formed a relatively tightly organised and supportive group, that permeated the barriers between organisations. This produced a destructive stability.

The question here is how does the organisation, adapt and learn – whatever learning is. This goes back to removing informational blocks, investigating the ignored, and relaxing the hierarchy. The following investigation sessions might well need to be considered as something like a “feast of fools,” a disruption of the normal, so that what happens in the sessions in terms of friction and perceived insult is to be left there. This is not really possible, and the impossibility should be recognised, but it can be encouraged – along with courtesy. It also means that looking for change, or for accumulating change, in the environment is important, and that leads to the next point.

Dealing with unboundedness and context

The organisation exists amidst other forms of organisation and context. It is not separated from them, even if it pretends to be. Ask people to consider problems in different contexts. This method approximately uses the Nora Bateson Warm Data approach much simplified. In a workshop people can experience the effects of looking at different situations, or workings, through different contexts. I think it is probably a good idea for each context to have a fixed observer who takes notes, but this is not part of the formal process. Relevant contexts might include:

Economics, politics, familial, technological, religious, environmental, resource, educational (how does the organisation educate its members), hierarchy, and so on.

The meaning of information changes with context, but quite often in contemporary society, the context is stripped away from information and rendered abstract. Often numbers, and effectively impenetrable computer models, are used to help remove that context and meaning, even when it is doubtful that everything being analysed can be turned into a meaningful number. Thinking about contexts can help put back some of this important meaning, and can help make perceptible the real complex dynamics and multiple interconnections around what is being discussed. It opens us to Black Elephants, among other things.

As said earlier, there can be no definitive, or happily transferable, list of contexts. Contexts may well change; it may be useful to change them. Perhaps the participants can be asked for contexts, once they have the idea?

If people look for problems in different contexts, one after the other, then they seem more likely to get some knowledge of how contexts interact, or how problems or questions spill over into different fields and are influenced by them.

In Bateson’s work individuals move from a group of chairs defined as a context to another group of chairs defined as another context as they choose, joining and leaving as they want. There is no reason not to go back to a context, but staying in the one context is not helpful.

This is a form of idea stimulation. In this stage, there are no right answers, just exploration.

This process breaks up standardised patterns of interaction. People from different groups, silos, hierarchies and places in those hierarchies, may interact in new ways and, hopefully, convey new information and ideas. However, the organiser has to have some idea how much the higher-ups will tolerate this, and work accordingly.

Contexts can be thought of, by analogy, as a collection of grounds with the organisation as a figure in that multiple ground. Like a painting with figures in a series of overlapping landscapes.

It may be of some use to rotate the image, making the figure the ground for a context or vice versa.

Does this change the relationship?

Which should be dominant, and when?

Douglas Rushkoff remarks:

people who see the figure may be oblivious to major changes in the background, and people who see the background may not even remember what kind of figures it surrounded.

Rushkoff Team Human – How Every Great Invention Turns Into Its Opposite

So at the least, this kind of exercise should help people be able to remember, and conceive, more of the whole picture. If we consider the possibility that Black Elephants are unremembered parts of the picture then perhaps these exercises will shake up the process of deletion.

Ruskoff makes two further remarks useful in this context. One gives an example of unintended reversal of figure and ground:

Corporations destroy the markets on which they depend or sell off their most productive divisions in order to increase the bottom line on their quarterly reports.

Rushkoff Team Human – How Every Great Invention Turns Into Its Opposite

The corporation should be the figure in the context of the market, but in this ‘reversal’ the corporation has become context for the market, as if it could survive without the market, rather than needing a market (or an ecology, or a functional political system, or an accurate information system etc) to survive itself. This seems a pretty general occurrence, and comes to seem natural – but it is often destructive.

Once the figure and ground have been reversed, technology only disguises the problem.

Rushkoff Team Human – Technologies Don’t Solve Problems

Technology provides a context for information. One question that might be asked, as implied earlier, is how does it hide as well as reveal? For example stock trading technology, may only focus on price movements, and in feedback with other trading tech, may completely hide the relationship of share price to economic reality, or investment to its function of opening real possibility for new, or worthwhile, ventures.

Further exercises

The point of these exercises is to free up people’s other creative faculties in an organisational context dealing with problems.

After exploring contexts, people can also expand their ability to represent the problems and opportunities through collective ‘art diagrams’. Individual art works can also be useful, but the collective route tends to diminish the inhibition that people have around, ‘I can’t draw’, ‘I’m not an artist’. People can be provided with figurines, and picture magazines, for pre-made illustrations. They can cut up the pictures however they like.

The diagrams can have active stories, which also convey information, occurring within them, as people move figurines around or add new lines, places, and pictures to the diagram. The diagram is a flux itself, and the stories bring in different, permeable and shifting, contexts. It is a usual piece of courtesy to have the rule that a person cannot move another person’s figurine, or picture without permission – although they can describe what they would like to do, and that often becomes a dialogue going places that neither person might have expected alone.

People might even imagine problems, and discuss how those problems would be dealt with. There are no right answers.

If you have two days, then ask everyone that night to try and recall and write down their dreams. Discuss the dreams the next day. Dreams can give insights. However, in this case the dreams are not to be taken as being about dreamer, but about the problems, or the events of the previous day. No personal analysis, by other people, is to be allowed for the fairly obvious reason, that this can become a put down.

Similar procedures can be used with the following issues

Dealing with Divergence

Ask yourself, or your group, where the conflicts, are in your organisation or context, or between organisations and contexts. How do these conflicts help the organisation keep going? What problems do they mask? What harmonies are imposed, and does divergence get suppressed? Ask the questions within different contexts. Explore inverting the figure/ground relationship in different contexts.

Dealing with Unpredictability

One obvious exercise is for people, or groups, to look at historical predictions about what will happen, and compare them to what actually happened. Often the best worst predictions are those made near the events that came to pass. What did people miss? Why did they miss it? If you can remember predictions the organisation, or yourself, got wrong, think about looking at them. Consider some of the sociology of ignorance points, and the complexity points, and relevant, or apparently random, contexts that were not considered. How would you advise the people involved to avoid similar mistakes in future?

Final Remarks

If any of this makes sense or appeals, then people should be able to work out their own processes for gaining awareness of the other Black Elephants that arise from other points of complexity.

This is, as I stated previously, a blog post. It is a series of suggestions only. Organisations are complex and very good at hiding their social unconscious – they may also be very good at enforcing that unconsciousness and punishing those who draw it to their attention. What you, or the organisation, do with these suggestions is up to you, and it is your responsibility – because of that complexity – no writer can know exactly what your situation is, or predict what will happen in detail.

No advice always works. That might be the final lesson of this series 🙂

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Solving the Black Elephant? Part 1

April 19, 2020

In the previous article I explored “Black Elephants” which are what arises when the ‘Elephant in the Room’ is mated with a ‘Black Swan’, and a politics gets built around not acknowledging an oncoming problem as a problem.

When the Black Elephant, that people have been avoiding, arrives people will announce “no one could have expected this!” and it now may be too late to solve the problem anyway, so the consequences are worse than if it had been recognised earlier. This process of avoidance is tied into power dynamics and what is acceptable to the group. We could call this process ‘the social construction of ignorance’, as opposed to ‘the social construction of knowledge’.

Obvious examples of Black Elephants include most of the world’s ecological problems, which we hope are not going to be that big, and the possibility of pandemics, which we should have been prepared for. Similarly, that we going through one pandemic at the moment, does not mean we cannot have another at the same time, or that this one will not return.

Can we engage with Black Elephants?

The main problem is that a Black Elephant is not just an officially unrecognised problem, but a denied problem. Dominant people don’t want to talk about it. There is a tacit agreement not to talk about it. Its a bit of random chaos or not that important. There may even be penalties for trying to find out about it, or talking about it. You may get snubbed, or abused, by your groups if you mention it, and everyone will be relieved when the subject is dropped. No one has any acceptable model for dealing with it. Social organisation and its values could even be built around this denial, just as there are no servants in Jane Austen novels, although ‘everyone important’ depends upon them and their subservience. The Black Elephant maybe something most people know something about, but they probably do not know that much, as there is no incentive to find out about it. Some people may go out of their way to explain there is no Black Elephant, or it is not as bad as the evil idiots have made it out to be.

Given that it is a socially denied problem and there is social reinforcement of that denial, then openly recognising the problem is difficult, and so solving the problem is difficult. Any solution-process that does not recognise the fundamentally social nature of the problem, its denial and the difficulty of acknowledging the Black Elephant, is probably going to fail.

This means we have to study the rather undeveloped field of the sociology of ignorance (which is sometimes known as agnotology) .

Some pointers to the sociology of ignorance

Problems of hierarchy: such as:

  • Celine’s Law- (“good communication is only possible between equals”), in which people get punished for being bearers of bad news, or the high-ups cannot admit mistakes or vulnerability for fear of loss of face, status, power or wealth.
  • The Peter Principle in which people get promoted to their level of incompetence, and destroy competence around them and beneath them, partly because of
  • Dunning-Kruger effects, they don’t recognise competence when they see it, or do not want to be challenged.
  • Internal focus in which ‘managers’ get more status, power or wealth focusing on gathering internal rewards (office furniture, windows, golf games with important people, funding, more staff etc) than from focusing on external problems.
  • Deniability when the leaders are not be aware of the dirty, illegal or stupid tactics that underlings deploy, in order to carry out the leader’s instructions, or the underlings’ idea of the leader’s instructions.

Sometimes we can hear the argument that flatter hierarchies negate some of these problems, but that is not always the case.

The fewer the steps between the centre and the periphery, the more a hyper-dominant centre can overwhelm the periphery, and render it unable to adapt. The hyper-dominance may lessen ‘unofficial’ information flow still further – even if they can record every key stroke made the periphery. Flat organisations may only work in the long term, if the power differential, or inequality, between the levels is not that great.

Other Oganisational factors

  • Siloing in which different groups in the same organisation are walled off from each other, cannot talk to each other, replicate similar work, or are overridden as of minor importance when they are central.
  • Parkinson’s Law “work expands to fill the time available” or, as a corollary, managers make work for others to show that they are important and in control. This extra work then distracts the organisation’s members from dealing with problems of reality. They don’t have time.
  • Haga’s Law or organisation reduces anxiety and increases the ease of doing things, but there comes a point when the payoffs become less and the organising takes more and more energy for less and less results, which produces anxiety which leads to further organising, and less time for thinking or doing useful work, or recognising future problems.
  • Standardised Lack of Responsibility. Quite frequently organisations and high-ups have standardised ways of avoiding responsibility for their actions and policies. It may be a form of ‘distributed governance’, in which there is always someone else to blame, or channels of authority are not clear. Or it may be forms of attack – there are identifiable “bad people” who can be blamed for any events. Habitual ambiguity of instructions, or contradictory commands can be another form. This latter technique can also function to give those lower-down more freedom to act appropriately, and for the higher-up to take credit for whatever works, and condemn whatever doesn’t.
  • Information structures which hide information from various people.
  • Data is collected because it can be. The more data can be collected, the more time is wasted collecting it and analysing it in the hope it will be useful. If there is too much data, important events can get lost.
  • Disinformation society. In information society there is so much information that almost any argument can be justified in the short term. So without a real desire to explore the Black Elephant, the Elephant can be recognised and downplayed. For example, Bjorn Lomborg can always find some reputable organisation which says, or which produces figures which show, that climate change, while a problem, is not a serious or urgent problem. As a result, all the figures which show it is likely to be truly serious can be ignored. If people don’t want to find out that there is a problem. then they don’t ever have to look for those figures and see what Mr Lomborg is doing. Now he may be acting like this, because if he didn’t then there are groups of people who would not see climate change at all. And it is possibly better that they see it, and think about doing something useful, in other ways, than not to see it at all.
  • Knowledge and Status in ‘knowledge societies’, people are supposedly graded by knowledge and ability. Those higher up can be expected to know everything, and thus refuse to listen to those below, when those below may know things not known by those above. For higher-ups admitting they were wrong can be impossible as it appears to admit their position is not legitimate, yet everyone is wrong occasionally, and failure is one of the ways we learn.
  • Organisational roles, which make the Black Elephants someone else’s problem or indeed create particular Black Elephants by not having a recognised position to deal with those kinds of problems.

Problems of Language and Culture

Language

This is a complicated factor, and much has been written about it, but we can reasonably uncontroversially say that language draws attention to particular features of the world. Different languages may classify the world in different ways – they have different colour terms for example. Languages do not translate exactly because they have different world models. By directing attention to particular features of the world language directs attention away from other features. Thus the language you use may help create Black Elephants, through this direction or through its categories.

Organisations sometimes develop specialist languages and models for work, which again show parts of the world and hide or ignore others. An organisation, for example, might see things entirely in terms of good and evil, where good, means agrees with them, and evil means disagrees with them, and so they become unable to see the ‘evil’ (as classified by them) they do themselves. A language arises as a culture makes a world and deals with a world.

One of the problems with any example of language is that meaning depends on interpretation, and the context of the ‘sentences’, writing or utterance, helps influence their meaning for the interpreter, and this happens in many different ways. We can never guarantee that what we have written will be interpreted in the way we intended. This is why great poems or novels can never be exhausted, they are seen in different contexts by different interpreters. This is also why scientists tend to use mathematics, and frames of objectivity to limit context variability. Culture is one way of trying to give similar contexts, shared contexts with other people. But it is not the only way, and when used to interpret sentences from another culture, or subculture, can frequently be misleading. Violence can be deployed to reduce apparent misunderstanding. This just suppresses obvious variation.

If you write, or announce, a programme, expect that people will read what it differently, or sometimes with difficulty. Communication involves misunderstanding as much as understanding.

Culture

I’m only going to mention one factor here, common in the English speaking world, and that is the positive thinking ‘bundle’ (a collection of destructive reinforcing patterns).

Positive Thinking

Many contemporary people and organisations praise positive thinking. This can become a unofficial but compulsory positivity bundle. These positivity people may say that someone who finds problems is negative or unmotivated, or bad in some other way, and deserves to be silenced or let go. That events are sure to get better. We are marvelous and will deal with the Black Elephants easily when they become prominent enough to cause passing trouble. Problems are unreal and so on. Such an organisation is probably avoiding many Black Elephants. It is also probably good at spreading disinformation, because it only allows the information which suggests it is doing very well, and dismisses all criticism. People may again, be frightened of saying anything negative, or pointing out anything negative, as they think that will make the negative event happen, or that others will judge them as weak.

This positivity bundle is harmful. It is not the same as being able to recognise problems and not let them get you down; recognise that you can either solve them easily or with effort, take advantage of them, need to call in an expert to fix them, or need to evacuate now.

The Elephant Paradoxes

There are many other factors in the dynamics of ignorance, but we do seem to have a specific set of paradoxes about Black Elephants.

First Black Elephant Paradox. People who are doing the problem solving, particularly those people who are dominant or high status, have to want to explore and recognise the Black Elephants – and if we had that, we probably would not have the Black Elephants to begin with.

Second Black Elephant Paradox. The organisations tools of knowledge, like language, culture and technology, may direct attention away from the things the organisation needs to know about.

Third Black Elephant Paradox. Facing Black Elephants takes effort and risks disturbance. It may mean organisational change, which then occupies people’s attention so much, that they go back to ignoring the Black Elephants.

Fourth Black Elephant Paradox The problem space must be open, yet the more open the problem space is to recognising Black Elephants, the more unending the process, and the easier it is to avoid Black Elephants because of finding other more acceptable, easier to deal with, problems – especially such problems the organisation, or certain factions of the organisation, already acknowledge.

Fifth Black Elephant Paradox. To survive in one system, we may need to act in a certain way which threatens survival in another system. To see the threat to our survival in one system may create a threat to our survival in the other system. This paradox creates Black Elephants, as well as providing an incentive to ignore them.

Sixth Black Elephant Paradox.This is not really a paradox, but its close. The organisation may be so busy avoiding the big Black Elephant that they get eaten by termites. Avoiding a Black Elephant may lead to more immediate and recognisable threats being ignored as well. A Black Elephant can be sheltered by other Black Elephants.

With this in mind let us look at some potential ways of solving for Black Elephants. No guarantee is provided that these will work. This is a blog post.

Methods

One fundamental feature of dealing with Black Elephants is that there must be as much equity and open communication as possible, with no penalties for pointing to an unpopular problem. It must be possible to challenge the hierarchy. If this is not allowed then Black Elephants will not be faced.

Open communication is polite and non-threatening. People can say that communication which allows threatening-communication is real open communication, but the point of threats is shut people down. So this demonstrates another paradox: open communication involves restraints, but restraints can curtail communication.

Perhaps the inquiry can be conducted at a particular level in the organisation, in order to free the upper levels from potential inclusion. However the upper levels have to consider and take seriously the results of the inquiries, which is unusual. Every year some organisations find out that workers are unhappy with upper level management, and every year these results can be ignored, downplayed, or seen as purely political. Management has to be able to take criticism as important and meaningful feedback. This is difficult, even if open communication is promised. Criticism can also be political.

Seeking blocks

The first step is to find the blocks to Black Elephant recognition. We firstly have to assume there are Black Elephants. Without that assumption we probably will not find them.

This process involves a negative set of questions, such as: What the processes of ignorance and unconsciousness in our organisation? How can these processes be lessened, or undermined? What will be effective? We can look at some of the factors listed above to start with.

If a Black Elephant is suggested, what would it mean? If it means the organisation should not exist, this is a major block to its recognition. Very few people will destroy an organisation which gives them power, status, and income, to save the world from a Black Elephant. Some will, but that might not be enough.

If such an elephant appears then what can be done to keep recognition of the Elephant and transform the organisation without it expanding the elephant, or attempting to deny the elephant?

Is it possible to change the organisation but keep some of its focus and purpose? Say a fossil fuel company decides to become an energy company. How is this to be done? What relevant expertise and material capital do they already have? For instance an oil company might know how to build floating platforms which can be used for wind power. They may know how to transmit power, or oil, via undersea cables etc….

Blocks need to be made conscious, in order to progress.

Seeking destruction

Another fundamental question for exploration is – what kind of processes does our organisation engage in, which are destructive of its aims?

As a general heuristic, we could propose that: “Most forms of order, create disorder as unintended consequences of their modes of ordering.” If the blocks to perception and information are removed then we might be more able to see what these unintended consequences are and avoid them or deal with them.

If the organisation has a strong authoritarian hierarchy or a culture of fear (which leaders will probably not be able to recognise, or the culture of fear would not exist), it may be possible to ask people to put in anonymous submissions. It may also be useful to explain that destructive ordering is normal, and then appoint a group to explore what kinds of destructive ordering exist in the organisations relations to its ‘ecology’ (business, social, political, technological, religious, environmental, resources, educational etc). As we shall suggest in part two, exploring different contexts in which Black Elephants and self-undermining behaviour, can appear is vital to finding these problems.

An Official Elephant Hunter

Create a high-level semi-tenured position that looks for Black Elephants and informs the organisation as a whole. The only way of removing the person is if they don’t find any Elephants. They have a place in all high level deliberations. They have the ability to produce a ‘committee,’ ‘workshop’ or whatever, that considers the issue of the Elephant and how the organisation deals with it.

Problem. If the other high-ups still don’t want to see it, or do anything about it, they won’t. They can also try to undermine the Elephant hunter. But that is always the case. By being able to communicate with all levels of the organisation, it is possible independent ways of dealing with the problem will emerge anyway, or that the Black Elephant will slip into organisational conversation.

Consultants are supposed to be Black Elephant Hunters, but they are often aware that they have been brought in to recommend particular procedures for which those hiring them do not want to take full responsibility, or who want evidence to justify what they want to do. They are sensitive to the wishes of those who pay the bills. If they get a reputation as unsatisfactory with the dominant management of this organisation, then they may lose work elsewhere, as these managers have ties across organisations. This is why the Black Elephant hunter is semi-tenured.

Expand consciousness

This step is relatively innocuous and does not involve drugs. It simply means, once the blocks are uncovered, how do we expand organisational awareness? The Elephant Hunter is an overt method, but to some extent identification of, and removal of as many blocks as possible will help the identification of what the organisation does not recognise in general, what the organisation does not want to know, and what we personally benefit from (in the short term) by not knowing? (how do we help build the fictive world of the organisation?).

Let us describe a simple management technique which can be employed by any new manager, but is almost never applied. Walk the floor. Talk to the staff you are responsible for, but without being critical or surveilling them (Really!). Catch people doing what seem to be good things and complement them. When there is some level of trust, ask people what could be improved? What procedures do not work? What are the blocks to them doing their job? Take them seriously, check with others, do something about it. Talk with people. Remove the blocks to performance before you do massive change or restructuring. Things may almost be working now. Indeed they probably do work to some extent, or the organisation would have already collapsed completely. Then ask people what the major problems are, especially the problems the organisation does not deal with well. These may be harder to fix. They may be Black Elephants. Try not to get captured by a particular faction, because your underlings will recognise this and information will be tailored to this, or politicised.

The workers, the people on the ‘coal face’ or in the ‘interface’ between organisations or between organisations and those they serve, are much more likely to see some sets of problems than people in management, who are insulated from daily practice, but who attempt to structure that practise. This is both a form of consciousness expansion and Black Elephant detection.

This is long enough…. Part II later…

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The Black Elephant

April 17, 2020

This is largely just a collection of quotes:

The Black Elephant is an unholy union of two boardroom clichés: the Elephant in the Room, the thing which everyone knows is important, but no one will talk about; and the Black Swan, the hard-to-predict event which is outside the realm of normal expectations, but has enormous impact. The Black Elephant is an event which was quite foreseeable, which was in fact an Elephant in the Room, but which after it happens, everyone will try to pass off as a Black Swan.

A: Dougald Hine | Black Elephants and Skull Jackets | A Conversation with Vinay Gupta

“There are a herd of environmental black elephants gathering out there” — global warming, deforestation, ocean acidification, mass extinction and massive fresh water pollution. “When they hit, we’ll claim they were black swans no one could have predicted, but, in fact, they are black elephants, very visible right now…. We’re just not dealing with them at the scale necessary. If they all stampede at once, watch out.”

B: NYT Herd of Stampeding Black Elephants

So to be clear: a black elephant is a known, or suspected, highly dangerous but not yet overtly current problem, which many people, especially powerful ones, do not want to see, or which they downplay hoping it is trivial, exaggerated, improbable or going to occur after it’s not their responsibility.

“In terms of sustainability, there are two questions. Sustain what? And then, can we sustain those things? Right now, more or less the whole of the debate focuses on whether we can sustain hyper-consumption – and the answer is no, of course not. Something is going to give: oil, climate,topsoil, some other factor we’re not even paying attention to. You can’t just burn the earth’s natural resources like a gasflare on an oil rig forever…. climate is just the first of a long list of things that can and eventually will go wrong.”

A:

These ecological, production and consumption problems make up a horde of black elephants, but powerful people appear to lose out if we do anything about them, and we are helped to be comfortable ourselves by ignoring them, or by pretending they are not looming. The powerful do not have to push us that hard to get us to pretend there is no problem or to act half-heartedly about all these problems.

“the power that financiers and corrupt politicians still hold in setting the limits on what we can and cannot destroy in nature — as opposed to the scientists and biologists — remains the bad news.”

B:

And again this is a black elephant. It is pretty obviously not sensible to have the world run by financiers or business, when what they finance destroys the land we are standing on.

Sometimes black elephants were possibly quite normal things or processes which have just grown up with us, and many people have not caught up to realise that the normal has become abnormal. Nearly everyone says, “oh Elephants are only 2 ft tall… and there is only one of them, and its really cute.”

Perhaps black elephants are created by human cognitive and social processes. One writer remarks that science is full of black elephants:

The scientific world is a sprawling and untidy place whose inhabitants practise their craft in myriad ways. Attempts are periodically made to bring order to this world by building model homes in it, so to speak, and declaring that what’s inside is what science is really like – all the activities outside being imperfect versions. That way, we can easily teach it and tell outsiders what it’s about.

Two such homes are particularly attention-grabbing. The first is orderly, its atmosphere logical, and its disputes calmly resolved by proposing theories and taking data. Experiments are good when they get the true result, wrong when they don’t. This house does not have normal people inside – the inhabitants are so exacting and rule-abiding that they live and act quite differently from the rest of us. Discoveries made inside this house are universal, reflecting truths about nature outside. This house was built by traditional philosophy of science.

Another house was erected in reaction to the first. Its inhabitants behave exactly as non-scientists do, motivated by the same social and psychological forces. Experiments are good when they get a result everyone accepts. What’s found in the room is not universal but local – arising from what’s happening in that room. Obtaining consensus about a result is a matter of swapping interests, like the work of diplomats. This home, built by “social constructivists”, has real people inside but no real nature.

The [models] differ in what they include and omit. The first, to oversimplify, gets rid of human beings, who disrupt the rationality inside the house. The second gets rid of nature, which would resist, define and frustrate the negotiations.

Physics World: Black Elephants

Either model diminishes ‘science’ by creating dangerous black elephants. The first by making science objective, inhuman, valueless or ‘unspiritual’ when we know it is human and made by humans and hence limited and slightly weird, and the second by disconnecting it from reality and making a matter of enforced consensus and desire, when we know the reactions of reality are vital to that consensus (or it cannot be called science) – and you will hear both positions taken by those attempting to discredit some science they don’t like….

Historically it has been quite difficult to speak of science as human and riddled with personal politics, and bias without appearing to discredit the ideals of science, its power, and relatively accurate truth. This inability now reinforces the arguments of those who would listen to nothing but their own short-term interests.

We also know that science is nearly always better when it is not played according to government or commercial policy. That is when people say “We would like this. Make it it so, for us.” Then you get a whole load of finance for projects like turning lead into gold, and pressure to push scientists to pronounce certainty when not enough research has been done, especially to get the product into consumption and make a profit.

This dynamic is another black elephant we hope our world can survive, when it comes to things like genetic modification, biotech and so on (which literally have a life and evolution of their own).

Science also sometimes generates black elephants in that there are non-solvable problems, weird occurrences, or theoretical incoherencies, which scientists ignore, in the hope that they are not significant problems, or that they will somehow turn out to be explicable by the current theory. And sometimes they realise things like an atom bomb could cause the world to ignite or that a hadron collider could produce black holes, but “hey let’s do it anyway!”

One writer points to the consequences of an obvious political Black Elephant that was pretty clearly present, but which it is probable hope got in the way of analysis…

Last year, many of us would have been astonished to learn that the Treasury in the United Kingdom had made no contingency plans for Brexit, despite the fact that the polls showed that the outcome of the referendum would be a close call. The British military – which I presume is like most armed forces and makes contingency plans at the drop of the hat – also reportedly did nothing. 

The black elephant challenge for governments
Peter Ho

That author points to another “obvious problem”

governments often ignore the complexity of their operating environment. They typically deal with complexity as if it is amenable to simple and deterministic, even linear, policy prescriptions. In a sense, the crux of public policy has been to apply – if not impose – orderly solutions to the myriad of complex problems that afflict our societies, our politics and our lived everyday experiences, in largely vain attempts to make what is complex merely complicated.

We see this in legal systems that are based on uniform punishments for complex and varied crimes, in public health enterprises that treat patients as largely homogenous, and education systems and pedagogies that assume that all children develop uniformly, or ought to.

We also see the same problem in business, for a similar reason: standardisation makes things appear simple, and allows the illusion of command and control. For some reason people rarely seem to want to admit this problem in business. Perhaps business is now where we put the search for perfection? Anyhow, the idea that business (big business in particular) does not face similar problems to government, is another Black Elephant, and possibly an extremely dangerous one, given how much of government we hand over to business.

The author goes on to ask:

What can governments do to improve the way they manage complexity, and at the same time mitigate the effects of the various cognitive biases that afflict them?

We can start by accepting that complexity creates uncertainty. Prediction is not possible.The right approach is an orientation towards thinking about the future in a systematic way.

We have to be careful here, because we can use unpredictability to hide black elephants from ourselves and others. “The climate change elephant may not come, we cannot be certain about it, it might go away, we might find a technology that can chain it up, if it was a problem people would be doing something about it before us – if we act first then we will be taken advantage of… We can’t be sure, let’s just ignore it.”

Ultimately this author recommends scenario planning, but does not say why this should overcome the social bias of avoiding the elephant.

Just in case you think the idea of the Black Elephant is simple:

Black Elephants capture the postnormal dynamic of the Extended Present, and they are decidedly contextual and ought to be situated and/or articulated from more than one perspective, if only to capture the contradictions inherent to their emergence. Finally, Black Elephants indicate that PNL is present, and perhaps dominant, within a particular system.

https://postnormaltim.es/black-elephant

I have no idea what PNL is either.

You may remember the famous and quite common-sensical lines from Donald Rusmfeld

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

Black elephants are those knowns and probables we don’t want to know, don’t want to acknowledge, don’t want to acknowledge as important, or don’t know we know, and which will effect us. Zizek has a nice essay on this going back to the Bush Jr. Admin and the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in which the army knew what was going on, and decided to ignore the reports. [I wonder if this elephant has almost been forgotten, nowadays?]

In the past several months, the International Committee of the Red Cross regularly bombarded the Pentagon with reports about the abuses [of Iraqis by US troops] in Iraqi military prisons, and the reports were systematically ignored….

To anyone acquainted with the reality of the American way of life, the photos brought to mind the obscene underside of U.S. popular culture – say, the initiatory rituals of torture and humiliation one has to undergo to be accepted into a closed community. Similar photos appear at regular intervals in the U.S. press after some scandal explodes at an Army base or high school campus, when such rituals went overboard….

In being submitted to the humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture: They got a taste of the culture’s obscene underside that forms the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity, democracy and freedom. No wonder, then, the ritualistic humiliation of Iraqi prisoners was not an isolated case but part of a widespread practice….

What [Rumsfeld] forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” the things we don’t know that we know – which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say.

If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the “unknown unknowns,” that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the “unknown knowns” – the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.

What we get when we see the photos of humiliated Iraqi prisoners is precisely a direct insight into “American values,” into the core of an obscene enjoyment that sustains the American way of life.

What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib

In this context, we might also think of this comment:

Republican Rep. Trey Hollingsworth asserted that, while he appreciated the science behind the [corona]virus’ spread, “it is always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life, of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.”

“It is policymakers’ decision to put on our big boy and big girl pants and say it is the lesser of these two evils. It is not zero evil, but it is the lesser of these two evils and we intend to move forward that direction. That is our responsibility and to abdicate that is to insult the Americans that voted us into office.”

CNN 15 April: GOP congressman says letting more Americans die of coronavirus is lesser of two evils

In other words, he is making a rare acknowledgement that the American way of life, both requires and demands the early death of Americans.

Sartre had a point about this kind of unconsciousness, that we have to know what it is we don’t want to know, in order to ignore it – so we are writing of actively unknown knowns. Or things that are made ignorable matters of chaos when they are actually part of the order of everyday life and acknowledging them would somehow undermine that life, or its (moral) validity.

This is not ignorance but effort. The more upsetting the black elephant the more effort is put into ignoring it, and the less we will be prepared.

Perhaps all cognitive and social life requires us to create a social unconscious, which includes Black Elephants. Things that everyone knows are likely to become a problem, or generate problems, but which they believe would cause them problems were they to mention it. And besides the future is uncertain, perhaps the elephant will wander off, or prove to be a mouse in disguise. “Why should I upset my life for this? Nobody will thank me, and they might even hurt me.”

The other problem is that people tend to think that if it really was a problem then other people (especially people they respect) would be dealing with it. The fact that no one worthwhile is dealing with it, shows it is not a problem. And if everyone worthwhile thinks it is not a problem, then it probably isn’t – it’s certainly not my business. Again this formulation adds to the “Why should I upset my life by screaming about Black Elephants? Couldn’t I be deluded? And it looks tame now. Its not yet trampled anything important underfoot. Other people are not going to thank me, for going on about it”.

This is how a social unconscious is constructed, and it can become personal. Because if something is not acknowledged by people a person respects and desires to emulate, then they to have to suppress awareness of it, to emulate the admired ones. If you are lucky, you may never have your attention drawn to the black elephant, before it kills you. So you can relax – up until that moment.

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Bjorn Lomborg again

April 14, 2020

Revised 8 May 2020

I’ve been reading quite a bit of Bjorn Lomborg recently, for my research on climate technologies and their social consequences – and I’ve been reasonably critical of some of his writing and mode of argument (see [1], [2]). However, somewhat to my surprise I found it possible to extract an interesting, and relatively consistent position on climate and ecological problems from his work.

The main problem with Lomborg is that he almost always seizes on the most optimistic figures for the economic and other consequences of climate change, and never questions the consequences of current economic structures and drives. He is similarly cheery about the consequences of the current pandemic and the ways to deal with it. He always appears to try and diminish the problems. This ‘optimism complex’ (found in those supporters of renewables as well, who think transition is inevitable and easy) is a problem when the situation seems a lot worse than most people realise.

Another problem is that he appears to not ‘think ecologically’ ie in terms of complex systems. Thus he appears to argue that a few degrees cannot make that much difference – we can all survive 2 degrees no real problem. However, a minor change in one part of the systems can make massive amounts of difference as it courses through the systems, triggering other effects and compounding crises. For example, global warming will probably not just mean our highest temperatures are one or two degrees (the average) higher but much higher, and the high temperatures will not be separated out into single days which might not be too harmful, but over continuous days or even weeks. This significantly magnifies human and animal deaths, water and crop problems, so that they can become catastrophic. These failures then add to other stresses (say pandemic, flood, fire etc) on what should be manageable days. The more stressed the society, the more vulnerable it becomes, and the more catastrophic minor incidents become.

Finally he does not seem interested in any action which restricts air pollution, or emissions. It is probably right to be cynical about the bone fides of any position which claims to be about benefiting human life and which does not recognise air pollution as important harm.

However, this post is an attempt to summarise what I believe to be the strongest points of his underlying argument. The result may not be exactly what he would put forward himself, but seems worth considering. While I don’t agree with all aspects of this argument, and would be far more intense about the problems we face, it does seem to be a useful position, and I have put it as strongly as I can.

  1. At the moment, the whole world faces a set of interlinked problems that cannot be solved by a narrow focus on just one or two of these problems. We have to approach these problems from many directions, and be generalists.
  2. There is a climate crisis which needs to be fixed. It may not be immediate, and it may not be the primary problem we face today, but we do need to fix it. Now, I do think it is an immediate problem, but Lomborg tends to postpone it, as part of his optimism complex. However, let’s begin with it.
  3. The current systems of climate talks, agreements and targets are not working. The Paris targets are costly and nowhere near strong enough, and we are failing to achieve them anyway. There is little point continuing on in the same way and keep failing.
  4. We do not have anything like the amount of green energy we need. We may be increasing green energy enormously, but we have been increasing fossil fuels even faster, so the percentage of truly green energy remains tiny. According to the IEA, the OECD has 2.3% hydro and 2.6% of “geothermal, solar, wind, tide/wave/ocean, heat and other.” To this we can add 9.6% Nuclear and 6.1% of Biofuels and waste, if you really wish to classify these other sources as clean (IEA 2019 Key World Energy Statistics, p7.)
  5. Governments should immediately stop subsidising fossil fuels, at all stages of production. This is a complete waste of money and time. It helps make the situation worse. If companies go bust, then they go bust; that is the market in action. Established companies which depend on bailouts and subsidy should not be supported, as their weakness indicates either bad management, poor financial choices, unwanted products, or some combination of the three.
  6. Pollution and ecological destruction should not be free. At the very least, we need a mechanism to establish a carbon price to help fund research. Lomborg’s position is inconsistent and it’s easy to find counter examples, but I think his position moves towards this over time. I’d add that other ecological destructions should not go uncharged, and uncurtailed, either..
  7. Green energy should not be subsidised. This might result from good intentions, but it is distorting and, according to the IEA, governments are spending way too much for the observable results. Strangely, while Lomborg questions calculations for fossil fuel subsidies he does not seem to question the figures he objects to for renewable subsidies. For example, does the IEA count feed-in-tariffs as subsidies when these could be considered the price paid for electricity generation? We need to be sure what is a subsidy.
  8. Some of the processes receiving subsidy are not that green to begin with. For example, carbon capture and storage is a waste of money. It has no hope of solving the problem, and merely prolongs fossil fuels use.
  9. In the US and Europe, wood burning is classified as green or renewable. This is also deceptive. Burning wood emits more CO2 than coal, and destroys forests and wildlife. The forests may not be replanted, either and it is dubious planted forests have the bio-complexity and resilience of natural growth in any case. Biofuels take away land from agriculture, especially from poorer farmers, and they are largely energy inefficient with low EREI.
  10. Green energy’ should mean every energy source without GHG emissions after set up, including small scale nuclear.
  11. Currently, research into green energy does not receive anything like the money needed.
  12. Instead of subsidising renewables, governments should put at least half that money (or “an annual global commitment of some $100 billion”), into research into green energy [1], [2], [3]. This could be funded from abolished fossil fuel subsidies, so it is not an extra cost. Government led research is effective, and stripped of commercial bias. It can also lead to ‘public domain’ patents, available to all, thus increasing economic productivity.
  13. As we are on track for climate or ecological devastation in the long term, we also need to increase societal resilience.
  14. Poverty and disease are major causes of suffering and decrease societal resilience Removal of poverty also increases life-span and productivity.
  15. Most people who suffer badly from disasters [and climate change] are the poor. The better off people are the better able they can handle, or negotiate, disaster.
  16. Poor people tend to be less worried about climate than about day to day survival. Action on climate often may not seem to benefit, or engage, them but action on their immediate problems can be embraced enthusiastically. However, it can be added, that given that some problems are already coming from climate change, we should not ignore this either.
  17. One reason for massive fossil fuel use is that this easily available, well understood, and centralised form of energy is promoted as helping to lower poverty in the developing world. Without solving the poverty problem, we will not solve the pollution and ecological destruction problems.
  18. There is little point having green energy if it seems to be as harmful to people in poverty, as fossil fuel energy generation and mining can be. We should probably stop coal mining were it hurts, or displaces, poor locals.
  19. We need to keep the economy strong enough and organised enough to lift people out of poverty.
  20. It is notable that Lomborg does not ask whether the current structure of the global economy enables a general lifting out of poverty without harmful consequences. For example does the increase in living standards in the ‘third world’ or ‘the South’ come at the cost of increasing inequality of wealth and power in ‘the North’, along with the decline of the ‘first world’ working and middle classes? Do current methods of raising living standards destroy ‘community’ and mutual aid? Yet the general idea of raising living standards and prosperity, as a help towards problem solving, increasing political participation and resilience, is important and requires more investigation.
  21. These problems also stretch to his support for ‘Free Trade’. The problem is we don’t get really free trade. Neoliberal free trade, has tended to suppress government programmes aimed at providing the social amenities and common good which was not provided by ‘the market’ in the vague hope that they would be provided by the market. This amounts to a suppression of democracy in the corporate interest. Free trade negotiations also seem to have allowed the market to be regulated by the major players in the market to benefit, and protect, themselves. So care is needed here.
  22. Another cause of instability and suffering is disease. TB, for example, is debilitating, and could apparently be eliminated with enough spending. The same is true of Malaria.
  23. Governments also need to protect water and its flows. Improved sanitation and latrine technology help reduce disease, and no one can live without drinkable water. Convenient water also frees up time from collecting it. At the moment we seem to be damaging water at an increasing rate. In dry countries, like Australia, it seems obvious to me that projects which could harm, or restrict, the water supply, even in 200 years or more, should not be considered. It is easier to damage than to protect water supply, in particular underground water.
  24. Research is needed into improving agriculture and food supply in the long-term. It is obvious that short term improvements should not be at the expense of long term sustainability. Although Lomborg does not seem to mention it, this may require research into regenerative agriculture. At the least we need to lower the emissions from agriculture and stop leeching soils of nutrients, salt rising, topsoil loss, and deforestation to provide new fields because old fields are exhausted.
  25. Indoor air pollution from cooking, needs reducing. I would suggest solar cookers, where possible, as this allows wood to remain uncut and dung to fertilise the soil, but Lomborg goes for ventilation – this is also useful and cheap addition. Outside air pollution is also a problem. The World Health Organisation estimates 3.8 million people die per year from household pollution and 4.2 million people die from outdoor pollution. This requires reduction of burning, of coal, gas, oil and so on, but Lomborg seems largely uninterested in lowering this cause of death.
  26. Another source of instability and poverty is the lack of effective birth control, [1], together with the lack of educational and economic opportunities for women. Again it is relatively easy and cheap to fix this – although it will encounter a lot of religious opposition and the amounts being spent seem to be declining.
  27. By reducing the number of children, birth control helps provide better nutrition for existing children and this renders them more physically and mentally capable of education and resilience.
  28. Education needs improvement and more accessibility, especially pre-school – but this is difficult as some dominant groups don’t want people to be well informed, or able to think critically or creatively; they just want them accepting and obedient. A critical and creative population is dangerous for incompetent, or unjust rulers.
  29. It also needs to be added to this summary of Lomborg’s remarks, that any reform program that is actually going to deal with this whole series of problems which interact with each other and magnify each other, may involve a disruptive politics. Particularly when one of those serious problems, is the structure of power relations themselves, and those power relations will affect all attempts at reform.

These ideas seem to be worth considering, wherever they come from, as increasing disasters point to global systemic causes and effects, and they demand systemic strategies in response.

One final addenda. It seems common for people supporting Lomborg to say that:

Spending on green tech research,
Fighting poverty,
Doing our best to end TB, Malaria and other health issues,
Improving food and agriculture,
Improving access to drinkable water and protecting water supplies,
Lowering indoor pollution and
Boosting education, particularly for women,

is somehow incompatible with lowering emissions and pollution and reducing ecological destruction. They repeatedly imply it’s one or the other. However it is probably more accurate to say we cannot carry out Lomborg’s plans, unless we reduce pollution and ecological destruction. The poor end up with the harmful consequences of pollution and eco-destruction and usually live in the places which are most badly affected. We cannot, for example, reduce poverty when corporate or government interests are destroying local agriculture, and poisoning the water and air.

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US, Australia and pandemics again

April 11, 2020

The last post showed the figures for coronavirus in Australia and the US. It is clear that Australia is doing better than the US. They are both neoliberal governments, but the neoliberal government in the US is Donald Trump who appears incompetent. This demonstrates that there are different types of neoliberalisms and it is not accurate to say all neoliberalisms are the same. Some are actively harmful.

President Trump did close flights from China (announced 31st Jan, in place 2nd Feb), as he boasts, but originally this closure only referred to foreign nationals, and had so many exceptions that another 40,000 people entered the country from China after it was in place. Yes, that does not make sense at all. Two weeks after the flight ban he was saying the pandemic will be over by April. On the 27th Feb he was saying:

we have done an incredible job.  We’re going to continue.  It’s going to disappear.  One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.  And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before it gets better.  It could maybe go away.  We’ll see what happens.  Nobody really knows

Remarks by President Trump in Meeting with African American Leaders

and there appears to have been more or less no federal preparation before March. There are reports that hospital workers are still (April 11) massively under-equipped in the US, and still at risk, which will compound problems as medical support is removed by the virus.

For example, a week ago, the New York Governor was expressing gratitude for ventilators donated by the Chinese Government as New York was running out and there was no sign of availability from the US.

Louisiana, which has also been hit hard by the virus, has requested or ordered 14,000 ventilators from the federal government and the private sector. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards told NPR on Friday that the state had only received 553 so far.

Time Magazine 6 April Gov. Cuomo Says Chinese Government Delivering 1,000 Ventilators to New York

We now know that Trump’s medical advisers were asking him to issue physical distancing guidelines in the 3rd week of February, but apart from acting as a bad example, he delayed action until the 16th March.

By comparison, in Australia, on 21 Jan, Australia’s chief medical officer, Brendan Murphy, stated that “additional proportionate border measures” are in place. The same day health Minister Greg Hunt declared coronavirus a “disease of pandemic potential.”  Biosecurity and border security staff were meeting passengers from Wuhan to Sydney. The next day flights from Wuhan stopped. On the 29th Jan, the Queensland government requested quarantine of everyone coming from China, and the federal government released its stockpile of facemasks so hospitals would be equipped in advance. 31st Jan the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency. On the 1st of Feb Australia’s air ‘borders’ with China were effectively closed. Peter Dutton suggested Australians about to leave for any overseas holiday should reconsider their travel. Australians evacuated from Wuhan were quarantined on Christmas Island. There were immediate efforts at quarantining all people travelling in from overseas, even if it was largely voluntary. On the 18th Feb the government released its Emergency Response Plan. On the 27th February, the Prime Minister announced that:

based on the expert medical advice we’ve received, there is every indication that the world will soon enter a pandemic phase of the coronavirus and as a result, we have agreed today and initiated the implementation of the Coronavirus Emergency Response Plan…

So while the WHO is yet to declare the nature of the coronavirus and it’s moved towards a pandemic phase, we believe that the risk of a global pandemic is very much upon us and as a result, as a government, we need to take the steps necessary to prepare for such a pandemic….

we need an even greater abundance of caution to ensure that should the coronavirus move to a very extreme level or there is any particular risk that is associated with children, particularly those attending school, that we have the preparedness and the arrangements in place with states and territories. And I want to thank all of the state and territories for their engagement, whether it’s on this issue on schools or the many other issues, the health issues, that are associated… 

we’re effectively operating now on the basis that there is… a pandemic. 

27th Feb: Press Conference – Australian Parliament House

The Australian government’s approach was nowhere near perfect, by any means, there are many criticisms which could be made. For example, after advising a ban on large crowd events on the 13th March, the Prime Minister announced he would be attending a football match on the day before the ban came in. However, they had a somewhat different and more constructive approach to Trump, which has continued. For example while Trump has been trying to suggest a back to normal date is soon, Morrison has been saying:

We have seen what’s happened in Singapore most recently, we’ve seen what happened in Sweden and other countries. If you take your eyes off of this thing, and it gets away from you, it writes its own rules, so we do need to understand what the prerequisites are, the things that we have to achieve before we can start to ease some of those restrictions…

I do want to caution Australians that we’re not in that phase yet we’re many weeks away I think from being in a phase like that.

Interview on Sunrise 14th April 2020

Right wingers often say, no doubt inspired by Trump, that there were howls of ‘racism’ from the left, about his blocking of flights from China. I did not hear those howls personally, and some reports seem exaggerated by those being criticised. I did hear people saying that banning flights was not enough, which is true, and perhaps Trump should have done more than think he could wall off trouble? People, such as the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine and others did make requests for politicians to stop encouraging people to avoid or scream at Chinese Australians, or not go to Chinese Restaurants. That kind of internal disunity and pointless conflict is not helpful in containing a pandemic, although it does allow deflection of blame, which is why Trump loves it. People have also criticised his use of the term ‘Chinese virus’ when the virus has a proper name, and is not the only virus originating in China, but again I guess using the term serves to imply that Trump’s bad performance can be blamed on the Chinese, and that the threat is insidious and cunning – and it also feeds into the laregely right wing narrative that the virus is a Chinese bioweapon, that they decided to test in their own country rather than just release in the US (imagine how much worse the US response would have been if they had no warning there was a problem).

Closing borders as much as possible is a standard response to pandemics, and, apart from when bringing people home from foreign shores, is exactly what you would expect. Queensland has tried to close its borders to the rest of Australia as has Western Australia. That is difficult but not unreasonable. It is normal. It is routine, but it needs other backing as well.

There have also been attempts to say that virus is so bad in the US, because ‘the left’ has sabotaged Trump’s attempts to make firm borders. However, Trump had two years with a friendly congress to do whatever he wanted like make stronger borders or fix Obamacare etc. If he didn’t do it then, he either was not capable, uninterested, or there were good reasons for not doing it, which he is ignoring to now try and build political capital by blaming other people (as usual) for his inabilities. I could suggest that the demand for cheap labor by US business was one reason the borders were not closed. Anyway, the virus seems to have come into Mexico from the US, rather than the other way around. So the issue is irrelevant, and nobody has attempted to prevent him from preparing for a pandemic.

Trump continually says no one could have expected this situation. This is clearly not true. The world has been preparing for a pandemic for years. The possibility is glaringly obvious, and many of us were fearing a much worse event than the current one. Mass globalised air traffic, is an invitation for pandemics and, if you don’t know that, then you should not be in politics.

I quote a comedian – because we are in that realm in which comedians have better political knowledge than presidents. I guess the fools have always known more than would be kings:

“First, Obama officials walk Trump aides through a global pandemic exercise in 2017. Then, in 2017 and 2018, threat assessment intelligence analysts even mentioned a close cousin of coronavirus by name, saying it had pandemic potential. Then in 2018, the director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the national security council told a symposium that the threat of pandemic flu is our number one health security concern. Then, top administration officials said last year that the threat of a pandemic kept them up at night. Then, White House economists warned in 2019 a pandemic could devastate America. Then, intelligence reports warned of a coronavirus crisis as early as November. And then, US intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic.”

The Guardian 10 April Colbert interviews Sanders

Then:

The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted Event 201, a high-level pandemic exercise on October 18, 2019, in New York….

Experts agree that it is only a matter of time before one of these epidemics becomes global—a pandemic with potentially catastrophic consequences. A severe pandemic, which becomes “Event 201,” would require reliable cooperation among several industries, national governments, and key international institutions.

http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/

Furthermore, on the 29th January Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro, circulated a memo warning the administration that a coronavirus pandemic that could wipe out hundreds of thousands of jobs, erase trillions of dollars in economic activity. “The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil,.. This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.” He also argued that “the clear dominant strategy is an immediate travel ban on China.”

Truly no one could possibly be prepared if they didn’t want to listen.

I have heard right wingers say that Event 201 is suspicious, and shows some deep state planning to run a pandemic to undermine Trump. But that just shows you that they can escape any reality. This was a public event, warning of the possibility of pandemics. If Trump had listened he might have been better prepared, no matter how Machiavellian the organisers were. But he did not listen, and it does help the US to be unprepared if you cut CDC funding by 80%, disband the National Security Council’s global pandemic team, opt to discontinue the “Predict” program which monitored the threat of animal-born diseases crossing over to humans, which is the probable origin point of the current coronavirus, or allow stockpiles of respirators to break down because you cut maintenance contracts. That’s life.

Donald Trump has not had good relations with many States in the US, so coordinating responses has not been wonderful. He has gone so far as to argue the Federal government should not take responsibility for action, and largely left it to the States to do it by themselves.

we had to go into the federal stockpile, but we’re not an ordering clerk. They have to have for themselves. 

Rev: Donald Trump Coronavirus Briefing Transcript April 3

He also decided to end federal support for coronavirus testing sites, leaving the States with the responsibility for testing – although that move may be being reconsidered. He has also blamed the States for failures. So presumably his primary strategy is to end his responsibility and shift it, and the blame, elsewhere. He has helped create a toxic political environment, by this refusal to take responsibility, ‘forgetting’ what he said the day before, saying that he would not have contact with governors who were critical of him, and blaming everyone else for his own mistakes.

The context for Trump’s relationships with the US states is provided by the resentment of aid to Puerto Rico, and his blaming of California for its fires and his twitter threat to order Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to cease helping victims of those fires, despite the fires starting on Federal land. During the pandemic, on 27 March Trump declared when asked about his responses to the Governors,

I think we’ve done a great job for the State of Washington and I think the governor, who is a failed presidential candidate as you know, he leveled out at zero in the polls, he’s constantly chirping, and I guess complaining would be a nice way of saying it. We’re building hospitals. We’ve done a great job for the State of Washington. Michigan, she has no idea what’s going on. And all she does is say, “Oh, it’s the federal government’s fault.” And we’ve taken such great care of Michigan…..

All I want them to do, very simple, I want them to be appreciative. I don’t want them to say things that aren’t true. I want them to be appreciative. We’ve done a great job…

You know what I say? If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call. 

Rev: Donald Trump Coronavirus Task Force Briefing Transcript March 27

According to some reports the friendly governor of Florida received 100% of its requested medical supplies  including 430,000 surgical masks and 180,000 N95 respirators while Massachusetts, which is not so flattering, received a mere 17% of what it requested.

It appears that the only way, that Trump could see the toxic environment ending is if everyone keeps telling him that he is the best president ever.

Other accusations seem more serious:

the White House seizes goods from public officials and hospitals across the country while doling them out as favors to political allies and favorites, often to great fanfare to boost the popularity of those allies. The Denver Post today editorialized about one of the most egregious examples. Last week, as we reported, a shipment of 500 ventilators to the state of Colorado was intercepted and rerouted by the federal government. Gov. Jared Polis (D) sent a letter pleading for the return of the equipment. Then yesterday President Trump went on Twitter to announce that he was awarding 100 ventilators to Colorado at the behest of Republican Senator Cory Gardner, one of the most endangered Republicans on the ballot this year. As the Post put it, “President Donald Trump is treating life-saving medical equipment as emoluments he can dole out as favors to loyalists. It’s the worst imaginable form of corruption — playing political games with lives.”

Talking points: PPE and Ventilators Becomes Patronage in Trump’s Hands

See also: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-04-07/hospitals-washington-seize-coronavirus-supplies

Australia’s Prime Minister has been much better, despite similar political views, and despite the support of the Murdoch Empire. The Australian PM may have tried to model himself on Trump but he appears never to have been in that league and, he seems to have improved since the bushfire debacle, which is a good sign he can learn to be better.

Our main source of infection in Australia seems to have been people from the Ruby Princess cruise ship. There are questions as to why they were allowed to dock, including allegations that it could dock because it had Hillsong Church friends of the Prime Minister’s on board, and because home affairs intervened to let them dock. Whatever the results of the current police investigation, it should never have been allowed to dock once, never mind twice. But anyone can make a mistake. So it could be a mistake. A severe one, but a mistake.

We now know that unfortunately, many Qantas flights into the country had infected crews, because apparently crew have not had to quarantine if it turns out there were infected passengers on board. Another mistake, but its not sure whether that is the regulator or the business’ fault. Again another mistake.

Border force, or whoever is responsible, should also have been doing the kind of temperature checks in Australia that you get at overseas airports by distance, or forehead, thermometers. I’ve no idea what has been happening in the US. These thermometers have been available for years. The government has now finally started to take temperatures (I know people who came into the country two weeks ago, and they were checked everywhere other than at Sydney). Apparently the new temperature checks are being done manually – which does risk transmission without extraordinary care, and anecdotally this care is not happening. IF this is the case, and has been for more than a day or so, then it is monumentally stupid as well.

It also would have been good for the Government not to encourage queues of people at Centrelink offices, as that was not helpful, but again that was a mistake anyone could have made – initially. It helps you to make that mistake if you think Centrelink’s prime purpose is to punish people on welfare, but this could be changed. How long the mistake lasted or whether it is still happening, seems to be a subject of dispute and its not like the Republicans in Wisconsin forcing people to queue to vote, despite any rational person knowing at this stage this would be a problem and increase the seriousness of the epidemic. But then Republicans apparently ‘know‘ that mailing the votes in, which allows better checking for voter fraud, would mean no Republicans would be elected. I personally think that some Republicans would be elected, but the fear and the preference to sacrifice voters to power is extraordinary. Let us hope this event was just massive incompetence, instead.

It is probably a good idea to argue for random temp checks of the populace, as well as as much coronavirus testing as possible, although to excuse the PM we have not yet built up supplies of reliable checks (it’s not easy, and you need a decent sample size, and duration of testing to find if a test is working properly). Certainly this action is better than the current chorus of righteous demands for old people to die so the economy can get going. People over 60 have lived their lives don’t you know – but even Trump seems to realise that is probably not a vote winner – especially if older people are his main voters, and they all die off.

The Australian prime minister has been incredibly fortunate. If it had been a Labor person acting as he has done, we would be hearing nothing but screaming about how the party was sacrificing Australia’s economy and prosperity and how it was all financially irresponsible, a suppression of liberty, and an encouragement of dole bludging. But he isn’t, so thankfully he can be largely be left to get on with what is necessary. He has also been lucky that Peter Dutton has been sick with coronavirus and Tony Abbott is outside parliament and that Abbott has only been trying to take credit for it all, which is pretty mild for him.

I’d personally would have preferred it if Morrison had not tried to shut parliament so that there was no supervision or questioning of the government. There are many ways around the contagion problem, as nearly every office based workspace has discovered, and we could still function as some kind of participatory democracy.

So the US and Australia are different, and we are left with the proposition that all neoliberalisms are not equally deadly in every situation.

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US, Australia and Coronavirus

April 10, 2020

Now these are the figures at this moment 10 April 2020. They could change, but they seem to speak for themselves.

The US population is about 334,000,000 and the Australian population is about 26,000,000 (as you can imagine population figures are a bit slippery). So the population of the US is about 13 times greater than that of Australia.

The figures come from wikipedia today. That sources seems to be being updated regularly, and currently is compatible with other sources… but will be changed, so don’t expect the same figures if you look.

First case of coronavirus in the US announced 20th Jan.
First case in Australia 25th Jan. So pretty comparable.

Current confirmed cases in US: 469,021
Current confirmed cases in Aus: 6,109
The US has 77 times as many confirmed cases as Aus.

Current deaths in the US 16,675
Current deaths in Aus 54

The US has 309 times as many deaths as Australia….

It is highly probably that the US figures are under reported because people can’t afford to get into hospital or see doctors. The ‘at home’ death rate in New York has supposedly risen quite sharply [1], [2].

So to recapitulate, the US has:

  • 13 times the population of Australia
  • 77 times as many cases of coronavirus as Australia, and
  • 309 times as many deaths

Who says all forms of neoliberalism are the same?

Its a complex situation, but does seem like the US is heading for a much worse situation than Australia. Although some reports suggest that Australians love of Easter Holidays will radically stuff up the situation here.

Addenda

Today, 12th April:

he US has suffered more confirmed coronavirus deaths than any other country, and on Saturday was poised to soon reach 20,000 Covid-19 fatalities, new data indicated…

By Saturday evening, Johns Hopkins University’s tally of US Covid-19 fatalities was at 19,877. Italy followed with 19,468. The US was also the first country to report 2,000 deaths in a single day, with 2,108 people dying in the previous 24 hours.

The Guardian 12th April Coronavirus: US overtakes Italy as country with most deaths

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Biased Political Announcement

April 6, 2020

Right wing plan:

1: Make money for, or give money to, your mates.

2: Read Murdoch Empire.

3: Believe Murdoch’s ranters rather than science.

4: Call the ranters “quiet Australians” or “silent majority.”

5: Kick a few powerless people if any are available.

6: Claim to be a victim.

7: Claim anyone who disagrees with you, is:

  • a) politicising the subject,
  • b) drinks white coffee or Chardonnay,
  • c) a traitor,
  • d) a communist seeking tyranny,
  • e) just upset, and of no consequence.

8: Find some one else to blame, who had no power to change anything.

9: Give special treatment to some righteous fundamentalist Christians.

10: Destroy the ecology some more.

11: Ignore feedback from reality.

12: Repeat.

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Pandemic and Climate Action

April 1, 2020

The pandemic has shown the world is quickly able to organise against crisis. Charles Eisenstein claims the pandemic “breaks the addictive hold of normality.” Others propose that the coronavirus has “killed neoliberalism,” changed the practical ideology of neoliberal governments, or changed the world. Neoliberal governments have decided to support workers laid off during the pandemic, even casual workers. Retired politicians in Australia, such as ex-state premier Bob Carr, and ex-leader of the opposition, John Hewson, have been agitating for climate action following the response to the virus. George Monbiot points to the growth of bottom up, and often localised, support actions by ordinary people, as showing that communal processes are not dead. Electricity consumption is going down in some places, air flights have been cancelled, oil remains unburnt despite its low price, CO2 emissions are falling, showing what a low carbon future might look like and so on – although it is not certain that it will be long term.

Many are asking whether these systemic changes can be carried into action on climate. To explore this question we must look at the differences between pandemic, and climate, action.  Some of this may sound cynical, but it is also plausible, and given we do not (and cannot) have full knowledge of what is happening, plausibility may act as a tool to help us uncover the problems we face.

Differences

Monetary

Firstly, few organisations stand to make billions out of ignoring the virus. Cruise ships and airlines are losing money, and therefore could downplay the crisis, but they are fighting against fears that the virus comes from outside (encouraged by right wing politicians and media – the “Chinese virus” etc.), and from travellers being easily identified by authorities as infection vectors, so this is difficult. In Australia, Virgin air, despite not being profitable for seven years, is requesting a $1.4 billion government loan to get it through the pandemic. Qantas has argued that if Virgin receives this money it should “get A$4.2 billion in funds because its revenue is three times larger”. In the US, the government has offered airlines $US29 billion in payroll grants, $US3 billion to contractors and 29 billion in loans. Tony Webber, the former chief economist of Qantas, said “Every airline around the world needs help, it’s not just Qantas and it’s not just Virgin, they will run out of cash eventually.” So airlines have an interest in supporting recognition of the pandemic as it will help keep them in business 

On the other hand, many powerful, wealthy and socially central organisations (fossil fuel, mining and energy companies, car manufacturers, etc.) profit out of downplaying the climate crisis, and may lose financially from recognising it (for instance subsidising fossil fuels would look odd, if governments recognised these fuels are destroying us).

Disruption and pollution

The pandemic disrupts ordinary life styles, while pollution, ecological destruction and fossil fuels help to continue these modes of living, until it’s too late. Pollution and ecological destruction are also frequently less visible, or easier to hide away, than sickness. It is common for pollution and destruction to primarily affect the poor or be located away from large influential populations who might notice it. Coal mines are rarely in central public parks.

Escape

Wealthy and powerful people are less likely to think that they can completely escape the pandemic through their wealth and power; they may even say coronavirus does not care about wealth from within a bathtub with floating rose petals. Well-known people like Prince Charles, Boris Johnson and Australian politician Peter Dutton have caught the disease (as have presumably some of those close to them), although, as none of them have apparently died, they might come to think it has been exaggerated. Doctors have died. Even if you can escape to the high-seas in a well-armed private yacht, you still have to come to land to take in food, water and possibly disease, and you may need treatment.

While the wealthy cannot escape completely the disease will affect poorer people more severely. In the US because they cannot afford health care, or time off, and elsewhere because the essential services workers have to interact with other people and live in more crowded conditions. The rich can isolate much easier.

Precedent

We have dealt with pandemics before, the historical guidelines for action are quite clear, and we know how bad they can get. We have precedents for action on disease, but we only have recent, largely unfamiliar, models for climate change and no heritage of action. Action on disease is habitual and uncontroversial, action on climate is not, as there is no routine.

The timeline and future of a pandemic is pressing and short. Intense immediate action is required, but will probably, although not certainly, be over in a year or less. The timeline within which climate change will become an ongoing crisis is absolutely uncertain, and is not marked by a brief agreed upon period of transition from good to bad, and back again. Most people are able to behave as if climate crisis will be at least 50 years away (rather than that we may have already passed, or be passing, the tipping points), so there is apparently no reason to discomfort ourselves or engage in major political struggles against power and wealth elites now. It is easy, and less painful, to postpone action.

Command and Control

As Charles Eisenstein points out, pandemics can be handled within a ‘command and control’ power structure. Violence and penalties are implemented mainly against the general populace rather than the power elites themselves. Again this is a familiar route and, for some politicians, suspending parliament or democratic process presents them with an opportunity to extend their power, as in Hungary, decrease opposition and bring in business as in Australia, or delay elections and hinder public protests [1], [2], [3],[4] – it is hard to protest if people cannot gather in groups larger than two as in NSW. The chances of absolutely unexpected or unknown consequences from these authoritarian actions seem relatively low. With climate change, the elites resist, the chance of unintended consequences is high, and we are not sure how to proceed, or even if we can proceed, without long term disruption. Command and control is not always the best way of dealing with complex or ‘wicked’ problems, so we would have to develop new modes of acting, which adds to the difficulty of agreement.

The technology for pandemics is generally clear. Quarantine, medical treatment and working on vaccines. We do not have to hope for major breakthroughs to deal with the problem. Climate technologies are new and expensive substitutes for already functional technologies which are strongly tied into modernist power, wealth and energy structures. Climate technologies are resisted by those tied to established technologies, and are not always easy to implement without disrupting more people, as when agricultural land is taken for solar panels. The unintended consequences of these technologies are largely unknown, even if the dire unintended consequences of established technologies are known.

Mess of Information

While lots of disinformation and misinformation circulates about the pandemic, with a possible tendency to wander off into political polarisation, or even US vs China slugfests (apparently to diffuse blame for one’s own group’s, or President’s failings), there are currently no major media organisations, or corporately sponsored think-tanks, promoting an anti-medical agenda. They may want to distract from any role they played in helping the initial situation get out of hand, agitate for special compensation or make political capital out of the aspects of the response, but they are not banking on building a political alliance out of pretending the pandemic is unreal (at least not yet). Even Fox News changed its initial tune, possibly after people in the organisation became ill – although it now seems to be trying to exonerate Trump by implying China is the real source of the US’s problems [1], [2], [3], even if other countries are doing much better in the same situation.

One of the main ways of making money from the pandemic, or attempting to lower fear, is through promoting fake or untested medicines [1], [2], [3], but most large businesses are aware that this could lead them into financial, or legal, trouble. So it is mainly small concerns that benefit from this, but they gain no benefit in denying the pandemic.

An interesting perspective on disinformation is visible through the way that President Trump has changed his stance. His initial reaction was to deny there was a problem, state that it would be over quickly, that criticism of him (or alarm at the virus) was a hoax by the Democratic Party, that it was no worse than the flu, and that everything would be over by Easter. Now he is claiming that “I’ve always known this is a real — this is a pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic”, and if there are less than 200,000 deaths he will have done a good job. “The president repeatedly asserted that millions would have died if he hadn’t stepped in.” He may have made this change by seeing the effects of the virus on hospitals in Queens NY, and infecting people he knows, or because people from Fox told him that there was a problem. This does indicate importance of personal reference, and the vague possibility that he might be able to change track on climate change with equal speed.

Ecological Disruption and Economics

A major problem revealed by the pandemic is how important ecological destruction is to the workings of our system, despite talk of nature sending us a message. In the US the Environmental Protection Authority has announced it will not be policing pollution because of the outbreak (but see this), and rules for fuel efficient vehicles are to be scrapped. The crisis has not stopped, or slowed, the taking away of Native American land, or stopped Amazon’s anti-union, anti-worker’s rights activity [and 1]. “America’s wind and solar industries have been left out of a $US2 trillion economic stimulus package released by the federal government” leading to job losses. Various companies see the pandemic as an excuse to bring back ‘one-use’ plastic bags. Kentucky, South Dakota and West Virginia have taken the opportunity to outlaw disruptions of ‘critical’ infrastructure‘, which includes oil and gas fields, through protest or ‘riot’. Building the Keystone pipeline will begin, despite the dangers of pandemic, with massive investments and loans from the Alberta government, and was welcomed in Montana as bringing jobs shut down by the pandemic, as if contagion did not apply to construction work. One paper claimed that “

The construction of the pipeline is deemed critical infrastructure by the US Department of Homeland Security and therefore is allowed to continue as planned provided measures are implemented and followed for safety under current orders.

Other promotions of US fossil fuel continued.

[T]he Interior Department wrapped up an auction to sell oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico, offering up some 78 million offshore acres ― an area roughly the size of New Mexico. It proved to be a bust, bringing in approximately $93 million for just shy of 400,000 acres, the smallest total for an offshore auction since 2016…..

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a panel voted 2-1 to rubber-stamp construction of both the Jordan Cove liquefied natural gas export terminal in Oregon’s already-polluted Coos Bay, and the 230-mile Pacific Connector Pipeline. The decision, The Oregonian reported, stunned Oregon Gov. Kate Brown (D), who warned that the state had not yet approved permitting in the midst of a national emergency.

Huffington Post 21st March 2020

Former US Energy Secretary Rick Perry warned that warned that US fossil fuel companies were under threat of collapse due to lack of demand and flooding of cheap oil imports.

I’m telling you, we are on the verge of a massive collapse of an industry that we worked awfully hard over the course of the last three or four years to build up to the number one oil and gas producing country in the world, giving Americans some affordable energy resources

Fox News 1 April 2020

Perry also warned of the collapse of the shale gas industry, and suggested government intervention. Other commentators say that the shale gas and fracking industry in the US has never made a profit: “companies spent $189 billion more on drilling and other capital expenses over the past decade than they generated from selling oil and gas.” Fox news reports that the fossil fuel industry and “our energy workers” are supporting the fight against the pandemic by providing energy, and they are threatened by ingratitude and any Green New Deal. So it is conceivable crisis money may be used to defend established corporations against the consequences of destructive and foolish investments, or their refusal to branch out into new forms of energy or more environmentally friendly business. Below-cost oil could also undermine energy transitions.

A $2tn US coronavirus relief package will dole out billions…. and offer low-interest loans that fossil fuel companies could compete for – without requiring any action to stem the climate crisis.

The Guardian 27 March 2020

Despite the ideology that the free market comes first, neoliberals have always been prepared to bail out and support or build up, established, and well connected, wealthy companies, and it seems like the justification for a intensification of that process is beginning. Therefore, we should probably check all the spending of taxpayers’ money to make sure it is not just the normal transfer from ordinary taxpayers upwards.

The trend of defending the past is not just manifested in the US under Trump. China issued permits for more new coal-fired energy stations in the first three weeks of March 2020 than for all of 2019 and has halved subsidies for renewables to balance the budget. The virus has slowed solar installation in Australia’s Victoria. In NSW, an Independent Planning Commission inquiry into the Narrabri gas fields will be launched despite difficulties for audiences or public participation. Coal mining has been approved under Sydney’s reservoirs. So far in NSW, building of toll-roads does not seem to have been affected by quarantine restrictions. The Federal Government is “agreeing to stimulate demand for a fossil fuel” to keep the price stable. The International Energy Agency has warned that political action to deal with the virus could derail the energy transition.

Perhaps the pandemic has been used to cover these economic actions, perhaps they are seen as necessary to recover ‘ordinary destructive order’ after the pandemic. Whatever the case, it does seem that without a lot of political pressure and action from ordinary people, the historical devotion to environmental destruction will continue, even though the pandemic has demonstrated the possibility of enacting radical and rapid social and economic change, largely for the public good.

Conclusion

So we know the modern neoliberal state can act swiftly and intervene in the Economy and life, but what have we learnt of the difficulties of acting on climate?

We have to be prepared for resistance from wealthy and powerful elites, who can pretend that their mode of destruction is necessary for the continuance of contemporary life and its improvement. For them, postponing the appearance of crisis is important for contemporary life to continue, as is postponing the realisation that climate change and ecological destruction affect everyone. If the economy is destroyed through environmental destruction, there is little in the way of further wealth production.

Bringing realisation of the crisis into the lives of the power and wealth elites is important, as they generally see prosperity as arising from their actions rather than destruction, and the media tends to reinforce this, only partially accurate, attitude. The crisis affects them, and their businesses, and they should not expect to be bailed out, when they fail.

Everyone, even the wealthy, is vulnerable to this ecological destruction. This is an important message. It is also important to make people aware of the harsh normality of this irreparable destruction rather than to participate in its cover-up. People should be encouraged to keep protesting against things like the Sydney coal mines and the destruction of water tables, online and through letters, even if they cannot gather safely together. They need to keep trying to hold governments and businesses, accountable for their actions and their spending, whatever is happening elsewhere, and to keep organising themselves to provide support for each other, both physical and emotional. We cannot assume that money will be spent primarily to defend people rather than big business.

Personal experience seems able to change misinformation. When the problem hits misinformers and the problem affects them, their associates or their local areas, then change can come. From Trump and Fox, we know people can do a u-turn while pretending otherwise. There is no point berating them for their previous misinformation, but there is a point to encouraging the spread of reality and accurate information. This does not stop overseas interests from trying to interfere and disrupt connective action, but it will lessen their impact.

There is a romantic glory in fighting against established power. This is the case with fighting for climate action and needs to be made more of. At the moment, the romantic vision is commandeered by the power and wealth elites, in an unlikely pretense of fighting against all powerful science and socialism.

We need to explore how previous civilisations fought against ecological destructions and learn from them, whether they failed or not. This gives us experience we don’t have.

Managerial theory is finally trying to get beyond command and control, to encourage bottom up organisation of the kind that is occurring spontaneously in the pandemic. People naturally function in co-operation as well as competition, but our neoliberal societies discourage co-operation unless it is organised from above, probably because of the fear of revolution or loss of elite property – after all property is a fiction usually imposed by violence and the right to exclude others, and if people refuse to co-operate with the violence and exclusion, then property could get shared and the profit appropriated be diminished.

Community democracy and self-organisation is important to fighting environmental destruction. Few people want their own living spaces to be poisoned. Neoliberalism dismisses this resistance out of hand as NIMBYism (unless it is a new industry like windfarms), in effect saying that corporate profit justifies the destruction. But if you can’t object to your own way of life and your environment being destroyed, when can you object? and if you can collectively organise your environment to be more pleasant and liveable and sustainable, and safe from corporate exploitation and destruction, is that not good?

Finally, most people do not realise the ways that contemporary forms of economic activity destroy their home. This, to me, seems a major point of understanding. Once people get this reality, and it is a reality, then they can truly start to wonder if there is another way of conduct manufacture and trade, which retains freedom to trade with lack of permission to destroy and imperil everyone. Human logic, and civilisational experience, implies there is. So we need to discover the rules by which this new game can be played – and it probably comes down to fluid democracy again, rather than to command and control businesses devoted to authoritarian ways of proceeding.

So climate action is connected to freedom to live, and to freedom to act with others, and by oneself, without being imperiled by corporate power, or by the governments that support that power over the people.

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