People often indignantly say they do not deny climate change, but it sometimes seems they might as well.
There are a variety of ways of defending oneself and politics from the prospects of climate change.
Climate change is unreal or is not happening.
Climate change is unreal and it’s all just the result of a vast conspiracy of scientists from all over the world. This is somehow much more likely than that there is a conspiracy of fossil fuel companies, who would like us to continue fossil fuel burning. These two points are a little rarer than they used to be, and the people who used to take these positions now often take one of the following.
Climate change is real, but its no big deal. People who think it might be a big deal, are to be dismissed as ‘alarmists’, ‘chicken littles’ etc.
Climate change is real, but it’s not humanly generated and, as it’s not humanly generated, humans can do little about it. Clearly this denies the human cause of climate change, so it promotes continuing as normal, usually without even thinking about adaptation. Fossil Fuels Corporations and more fossil fuels are fine. This merges with…
Climate change is real, but it happens all the time. While recognising the existence of climate change, the person defuses it, and implies that there is nothing special about this particular lot of Climate Change. This change is normal – even though it seems to be rapid and non-localised. Again the result is to protect the person and the social establishment from having to change, or even think about the problems. Climate change is something humans have faced locally before, but we haven’t experience as a planet for a long, long, while before recorded history.
Climate change is real, but it is so economically costly to do anything about it, that we should not do anything about it. People need the forms of development we have developed over the last 120 years, and recognising the consequences of human action will keep people poor. Climate change is less threatening to our well being than the economy, which will destroy us if we change.
Climate change is real, but the consequences of dealing with it are politically costly. Dealing with it might involve governments making requests of corporations, or imposing taxes on corporations, so we should do nothing, so as to avoid complete tyranny.
Climate change could be real, or is real, but the models climatologists use are inherently implausible, so we will just use our common sense and abandon all these models and assert that everything will be ok. We will assert the world cannot change hugely, and ignorance is our great defense.
Climate change is just one of many problems. So let’s do nothing about all of them.
If climate change is real it will be fixed by the Free Market and magic. If people want to buy products that cause their death and the death of others, that is their fault, and they will evolve out.
I’m sure there are more, and I’ll add them when I remember them…
But real understandings of climate change make several points:
Climate change is happening. It is happening quickly, and the speed of change seems to be increasing, as we go along. It gets more dangerous the longer we delay attempting to fix it.
Climate change is caused by human industry producing greenhouse gases. Human production of greenhouse gasses usually comes from modes of energy consumption and production, agriculture, transport, building, mining for fossil fuels, leaks, deforestation and so on. We need to change the ways we do these things.
Climate change already seems to be costly in terms of natural disasters, and the cost will likely increase.
Climate change, along with other human activities, will increasingly disrupt the known patterns of the weather system, and disrupt necessary ecological processes for some while. This will almost certainly have detrimental effects on everyone’s lives and the international political process will likely become unstable.
Surviving climate change involves curtailing greenhouse gas production, and adaptation to the changes in weather and ecology.
How we decide to make, or not make, these changes will result in political struggles.
There is a relationship between poverty and climate change. No question. However it might not be the one that Jordan Peterson is claiming.
The usual position is that poorer people are generally forced to live in areas nobody who can afford to get out of would live. Not always true, because poor areas can also be quite communal, supportive and looking out for each other – co-operation helps survival. The land they occupy tends to be less fertile or vulnerable to seizure if it suddenly proves useful as the laws are not written to protect or benefit them. They tend to be in areas subject to flood, subject to heat, subject to drought, subject to disease, subject to heavier pollution, poisoning and rubbish dumping. In the cliché, the rich live at the top of the hill and the poor get the sewerage run down – they literally get pissed on. Corporations come in, use up, or destroy, the land and move on, out of reach of recompense; their promises of local prosperity for the poor never being fulfilled.
So what is Jordan Peterson’s attitude towards this?
He argues that:
The fastest way to make the planet sustainably green and ecologically viable is to make poor people as rich as possible as fast as we possibly can… poor people [are] not resource-efficient. They use a lot of resources to produce very little outcome, so that’s a problem… when you’re insecure on a day-to-day basis, you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, you’re not paying attention to the broader environment around you
This more or less contradicts the data which suggests that rich people use huge amounts of resources. Naturally if they use huge amounts of resources they may well (by some measures) produce a big outcome, but it may not be all that efficient, but wasteful – and its easily possible to assume that when resources are easy to obtain, and produce no immediate suffering to the person obtaining them, that this person will not care how much they expend and waste, and pay little attention to the environmental consequences of that use. It is wealthy societies which are destructive. The logic works both ways, but let use assume that Peterson is right and people should be wealthier and this will produce green behaviour.
Peterson apparently says something to the effect that “Everything pollutes something – net-zero is nonsense“. This may be true (indeed I’ve argued that the mode of pollution is as socially important as the mode of production), but only a very wealthy person could assume that any amount of pollution somewhere else is ok.
My source is not clear on how Peterson wants to make people rich – indeed one source suggests Peterson criticises Corporate capitalism implying that companies “thrive at the disadvantage of the worker“. So he gives little hint of what we should do, as I presume he will not discuss the benefits of socialism or the mixed economy. My guess is that he is inconsistent and follows neoliberalism and handing everything over to the corporate market – this suspicion is boosted as he apparently argues that deregulation doesn’t create ecological disaster and that fracking is great. The problem here is that while we want to help people become as prosperous as possible, we don’t want everyone to have a huge ecological footprint. If the average Chinese or Congolese person gets to have the same ecological footprint as the average Australian does now, we are stuffed. We need prosperity with a smaller footprint. That means we need to learn to reduce Australia’s ecological footprint (or whatever your country’s footprint is, etc.). And we need to stop profiting from encouraging other countries to increase their footprints by buying our fossil fuels. We need to be able to generate wealth without pollution and destruction – partly because the costs of pollution and climate change are already high [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]. This again points to the difference between ‘wealth’ and ‘illth‘.
As poor people usually survive with a very low ecological footprint, they are often amazingly resource efficient, whatever Peterson says. This is one reason we send our garbage overseas. People reuse it. They extract minerals and valuable materials from it. They are generally not that wasteful. I’ve talked to people from some developing countries and they have been amazed at what Australians habitually throw out. You can’t afford to be wasteful if you are poor. Everything counts. That is certainly how my parents were brought up. They were not endlessly disposing of stuff – they reused, they repaired and so on. I would guess this could be true of Jordan Peterson’s parents as well. Thrift is usually considered a virtue, but modern machinery is often quite difficult and expensive to repair by design – hence the idea of a right to repair [9], [10], [11], and the request for biodegradable plastics and other materials.
Peterson continues:
You can’t even really worry about your children’s future in some real sense because ‘No, no, you don’t understand. Lunch is the future. We don’t have lunch, we’re hungry and that goes on for like a month we’re dead.’ That’s the future.
Yes extreme poverty may not be good for future thinking, but then you need to ask what causes this kind of poverty, and it is often brought about by other people getting extremely rich; taking the land or forest the poor people have occupied and looked after for centuries, displacing them into cities (or other places where they have no land they know) where they cannot grow anything or look after themselves easily. Or perhaps poorer people suffered from taking perfectly legal loans which turned out to have unpayable interest rates, and they fled or a parental member of the family suicided for shame. Or they were forced into buying GM seeds which were infertile, or the water dried up because it was used for local industry or industrial farming, or climate change…. Riches and illth creation can involve destruction for some.
The problem here, apart from the likelihood that all this will get worse with continuing climate change, is differential of power. And again there is going to be little difference if getting people prosperous does not weaken the power differential and the force of unequal law.
What Peterson says is true:
The attempt to make the environment habitable and sustainable — that comes up of its own accord at a grassroots level and spreads everywhere.
but this is usually prevented by the hierarchies that exist and seek for profit rather than sustainability. Corporations may have no tie to the land, and no care for it, at all. They are only a temporary resident exploiting resources, not planning to maintain things ecologically for all.
Now Peterson tries to get political saying:
“left-wing types” seem “willing to sacrifice the poor to their Utopian [visions]” by pushing green energy resources to make the world more sustainable.
Well that may be true, if you have seen the damage that massive coal mines, or fracking can do to the land to provide old unsustainable energy. The IEA has said since 2020 that
Solar PV and onshore wind are already the cheapest ways of adding new electricity-generating plants in most countries today….
Solar projects now offer some of the lowest-cost electricity in history.
Renewables are consistently cheaper than new coal or gas based electricity. Renewables not only have the potential to be cheaper, but they are modular – they can easily be expanded when locals have more money. Villagers can become self-reliant on renewables and control it. It may be awkward but is often better than what they have now. They don’t have to wait for power cables to be built to their village from some distant source, or serviced, and they don’t have to pay for the capital expense of that wiring. Once renewables are paid for, they are paid for, ongoing costs are minor.
Peterson develops his incorrect argument that renewable energy is more expensive, by saying:
What happens is that in any system that’s hierarchical—and left wingers know this because it drives their whole philosophy — when you stress the system, the disproportionate amount of that stress falls on the people who are in the lower rungs because they’re barely hanging on anyways.
This is true of hierarchies in general. The weird thing is that previously we have seen Peterson defending right wing established hierarchies and refusing to admit there was any problem at all. So he here may be changing his whole political opinion. Perhaps he objects to hierarchies he does not like and which may not exist, or perhaps he is opportunistic. This is why you need a whole transcript. Anyway, in this case, we might all be able to agree we should scrap the hierarchies, including the capitalist hierarchies, and hand choice back to the poor.
He continues:
There is the old saying, ‘When the aristocracy gets a cold, the working class dies of pneumonia.’ So fine, increase energy costs. Well, what happens? A bunch of poor people fall off the map and the more you increase the energy cost, the more that happens.
True again, so you want cheap locally controlled and owned energy, which will have to be renewable. You don’t get cheap locally supplied fossil fuel energy, which does not harm the land. To support the poor, you want to scrap fossil fuel mines that displace people, you want people not to be forced away from the land that supports them, and that they know how to look after. Let’s get rid of extreme poverty without increasing ecological footprints – and lets try and reduce our own footprint as much as possible. That way we will be providing an example, and investing in ways of doing things that are less destructive, so the innovation will occur and spread.
Neoliberalism is not the only way forward, indeed it is a method to make things worse.
This blog is written at a disadvantage, because I don’t have a full, or even a partially full transcript of the extremely long discussion between Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. I’m relying on media articles which may be inaccurate or deficient. As soon as I can listen to enough or get a full transcript then I will update.
The main point of this blog is that Peterson is correct in some ways, but he is trivially correct and does not apply his criticisms to everyone, including himself. He also understands some aspects of complex systems, but does not understand enough… neither do I, but that is a different issue.
Complexity 1: Models are complex and probably inadequate for exact prediction
Peterson claims that climate is so complex, it can’t be accurately modelled.
This is partially true. The distinction I have emphasised repeatedly is that we can often model trends, but we cannot predict particular events accurately in the future. This seems to be correct. Saying we cannot model everything with 100% accuracy is not the same as saying we cannot model anything, including trends, for climate at all.
As Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler and senior adviser at Nasa, says:
Peterson has managed to absorb the first part of George Box’s famous dictum that ‘all models are wrong’ but appears to have not worked out the second part ‘but some are useful’
Another problem that bedevils climate modelling, too, which is that as you stretch out the models across time, the errors increase radically. And so maybe you can predict out a week or three weeks or a month or a year, but the farther out you predict, the more your model is in error.
And that’s a huge problem when you’re trying to model over 100 years because the errors compound just like interest.
Another account says he said that errors “compound over time,” which means, apparently, the models are “all errors.” He argues that trying to predict what’s going to happen with the climate, is like trying to “predict how your life goes.”
Let’s be clear, that if you delete our ability to predict trends, then climate is unpredictable, just like your life. However, the fact that your life is unpredictable in specific, does not mean that you cannot predict useful things about your life, and plan to build a better life. Indeed Peterson writes books about this, so we can presume he believes this is possible.
If you spend your life shopping online rather than doing your work, you will not get better at work. If you keep moving from one article to another you probably won’t retain that much. If you eat too many foods full of sugar, all the time, you will probably put on weight. If you take cocaine frequently it will not help your health or your thinking. If you repeatedly step in front of speeding cars you will probably be injured. If you keep your room tidy you might eventually gain a tidier mind. These things may not happen with everyone, but we can see the trends and make predictions based on those trends. That is the basis of his psychological advice, and it is true with climate as well.
However, Peterson does not transfer his insights about human life into climate, or his insights into climate modelling into his own modelling.
Thus he does not say climate change is real, and we know what bad habits it is based upon and we can correct those habits. He does not say we don’t know exactly what speed climate change will come, or how bad it will be in 20 years, but it will probably be bad, and its worth trying to avoid.
He appears to assume that because climate modelling is not 100% accurate, the climate will stay stable, or not change too much. What is his modelling for that? Why should we assume that his modelling, which seems to be based on hope and the assumption that the future will match the past, is more accurate than the climate scientists models? I don’t know, and I suspect neither does he.
He is banking a lot on his ‘common sense,’ and his untested models, being accurate – which they won’t be as they face all the problems the scientists models face, and they are not being improved, or compared to the fullest data sets we have. His models are not even being compared to the results that say the hottest years and days ever recorded tend to accumulate in the last 20 or so years.
Errors can compound over time Peterson is correct. This is why scientists repeatedly reconfigure and improve their models, so that past data is better ‘predicted’ in retrospect and future data is more expected, and models checked when data isn’t as expected. If we were still using the climate models from the 1970s then they might be wrong, although some were pretty accurate. I quote the abstract of one article:
Models are compared to observations based on both the change in [global mean surface temperature] GMST over time and the change in GMST over the change in external forcing. The latter approach accounts for mismatches in model forcings, a potential source of error in model projections independent of the accuracy of model physics. We find that climate models published over the past five decades were skillful in predicting subsequent GMST changes, with most models examined showing warming consistent with observations, particularly when mismatches between model-projected and observationally estimated forcings were taken into account.
Scientific models are being tested and improved, and made more complex, all the time.
Likewise, he should know that bad habits, such as continually polluting and destroying ecologies in search of bigger profits will probably not build better ecologies in the long term, that this destruction will almost certainly weaken human society, and that these habits will likely weaken human virtue and morality, and possibly personal functionality.
So Peterson is not consistent. He varies his implicit arguments when it suits his desire to support the status quo.
Complexity 2: Categories overlap
Peterson apparently claims that climate and environment do not exist, because they mean ‘everything’.
Peterson gets confused because he likes sharp distinct categories, and the world is not always like that. Human categories are not always 100% accurate and, in reality, systems often overlap with each other.
PETERSON: Well, that’s because there’s no such thing as climate. Right? “Climate” and “everything” are the same word, and that’s what bothers me about the climate change types. It’s like, this is something that bothers me about it, technically. It’s like, climate is about everything. Okay. But your models aren’t based on everything. Your models are based on a set number of variables. So that means you’ve reduced the variables, which are everything, to that set. Well how did you decide which set of variables to include in the equation, if it’s about everything? That’s not just a criticism, that’s like, if it’s about everything, your models aren’t right. Because your models do not and cannot model everything.
ROGAN: What do you mean by everything?
PETERSON: That’s what people who talk about the climate apocalypse claim, in some sense. We have to change everything! It’s like, everything, eh? The same with the word environment. That word means so much that it doesn’t mean anything. … What’s the difference between the environment and everything? There’s no difference….
Let us be clear, a statement that implies the ideas of ‘climate’ connect to everything and the ideas of ‘environment’ connect to everything, is correct. However, none of his conclusions from this recognition are accurate, because he does not like that recognition, or shies away from it.
In reality, almost everything connects to everything. Jordon Peterson would not be online without the internet which involves the research of heaps of engineers and scientists, and continues because of maintenance people, and businesses, and people who build computers and cables, and the farmers who provide food for them, and the builders who provide buildings for them and their equipment, and the people who build roads the trucks can drive down, and drill the oil or build the electric engines. That all depends on the geological history of the planet, climate conditions and the weather that results, and that depends on the earth’s spin, densities of greenhouse gases, and cloud formations which depend on the sun and other things. The oxygen he breathes and the food he eats, depends on complex bio-systems and ecologies. His fame depends on a particular political patterning, which interacts with modes of celebrity and sales promotion and so on and so on. He presumably has learnt from books, and from other people. He shares an existing language with others. No one, and nothing, is an island of themselves. Everything depends on everything. It should be no surprise that from one point of view climate and environment involves everything. They are large scale contexts, and their background also forms a context – they are in two way interaction. For example, climate affects economic life, and economic life affects climate. Jordon may affect political life, and political life may affect his thought and popularity.
Models for anything are, as he states, based on a finite number of variables. They have to be. This is true of any understanding.
Absolutely accurate and all encompassing statements which are not definitional or trivial, are difficult and rare.
The intellectual models and understandings he promotes, by the same reasoning, are also incomplete. Does this mean they are worthless? Apparently not. They are apparently worth more than climate science. His skepticism is directed at statements he does not like, and is not directed to the statements he does like.
This also leads him to exaggeration. Most people don’t think we have to change everything to avoid ‘climate apocalypse’. Most people would insist that we need to stop changing the environment and the global ecology for one. Let us be clear these people may be wrong, but there is no evidence that people wanting to change everything are in the majority on the green side of politics. He is just panicking, because he appears to want nothing to change – and many things will change because of climate and ecological damage.
Conclusion to the first part
So. Peterson makes some valid statements, and uses them to come to invalid conclusions, probably brought about by his biases in favour of the current systems and its power domains.
Just in passing, Rogan appears to make a big fuss about how he wants to hear both sides. Climate denialism is pretty much the mainstream, as shown by lack of accurate reporting, lack of Government action and continuing support for fossil fuel companies. Has he ever had a climate scientist on his Show? Or is he part of the mainstream censorship apparatus?
The next blog will treat of Peterson’s reported comments on poverty, hierarchy and climate.
In these days of ecological destruction, climate change and Pandemic, the concept returns….
From Engels Condition of the Working Class in England
When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of workers in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live — forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence — knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.
I have now to prove that society in England daily and hourly commits what the working-men’s organs, with perfect correctness, characterise as social murder, that it has placed the workers under conditions in which they can neither retain health nor live long; that it undermines the vital force of these workers gradually, little by little, and so hurries them to the grave before their time. I have further to prove that society knows how injurious such conditions are to the health and the life of the workers, and yet does nothing to improve these conditions. That it knows the consequences of its deeds; that its act is, therefore, not mere manslaughter, but murder
It is worth joining this up to the ideas of Stochastic Terrorism, and Information mess as tools used by the Dominant classes to wage war on everyone else.
Perhaps it happens because in neoliberalism (or in old fashioned capitalist liberalism) the only important thing is the corporate economy, which must be protected at all costs. Without that economy the dominant groups think there is nothing. Natural systems, and people, don’t exist apart from the economy, and as tools for the economy, under the economy. If those systems, or people, get in the way of the economy, or the way of corporate profit, then they have to be sacrificed to the economy to placate that economy. Then everything will work out fine.
Another aim of neoliberalism is to turn business people into heroes and everyone else into disposable and anonymous numbers. 29 unnamed people died today of Covid in NSW, to support the corporate economy and to maintain the fiction that all is well; and it is pretty good for the billionaires.
The ideal model of the worker, is the soldier who will do as they are told until they die for the greater good. They like the soldier are forced to go into danger, the threat not being firing squad, but hunger and homelessness for them and their children. The greater good is the corporate economy and those who run it, which is surely greater than any atomistic, unnamed worker…. The people who die under neoliberalism have only themselves to blame: they are old, they have pre-existing conditions, they are sick, they are not keeping quarantined, they don’t understand medical information, they don’t trust the government, they are idiots, they are not wealthy, they have no savings, and so on. All ways of distancing the rest of us from the murdered, and helping to stop us recognising that we could be next.
However, we should now know, that if the CEOs and high level executives don’t turn up for work, everything is ok. But if the garbage collectors, the street sweepers, the truck drivers, the people who put stock on shelves, the people who harvest and pick the food, the nurses, the ambulance drivers, the teachers don’t turn up, then there is panic. These are the essential workers, and these are the ones the system kills.
I’m sorry this sounds a bit glib, but the real answer is probably something like:
“Innovation affects social systems unpredictably.”
In general, we can define a real ‘innovation’ as a series of organised new events and organisations which were not predictable to begin with (as opposed to an ‘improvement’) – otherwise it would not be an innovation. Given this, it is hard to say what will happen with innovations in general, in any area.
To add to the problem, as I point out ad nauseum, social, technical and ecological systems are what are called ‘complex systems’ – these are systems in which individual nodes modify themselves, or are modified by other nodes, in response to interactions and events elsewhere in the system.
Complex systems seem to be inherently unpredictable in detail. We can often predict trends, but it’s impossible to predict detail. We know winter will generally be colder than summer, but not by how much. The further out we look from the present time, the harder these systems are to predict with accuracy.
If we alter complex systems through the innovation (or through the cumulative effects of normal practice), then we may disrupt the way they work, or their equilibrium points and attraction points may change, and prediction gets even more difficult. Although we can probably predict the systems are not likely to function quite as we expect, they may change, or if the disruption is bad enough, they may function erratically or even break down.
Human based innovation, more or less by definition, will occur in a social, technical, ecological or other form of complex system. The innovation will change, at least part of, the ways the innovation’s system behaves, and that may well effect the ways other systems behave, which in turn affects the originating system. Even small changes can, theoretically, have large unpredictable consequences.
We can expect (as a repeated trend) that dominant social groups (in the English speaking world, likely corporations) will try and commandeer, alter, or suppress, the innovation, if they see it is powerful or changing the system. Not all innovation is allowed to be acceptable, or is even found to be acceptable. However, by the time the people attempting to stop it, notice it, the changes may have already begun.
Perhaps new businesses, new corporations, or new modes of life, have already evolved around the innovation, and they become too strong and established to challenge by the time they get noticed. Perhaps social life has changed, and attempts to put it back by force are resisted, perhaps we get social separation or even civil war, perhaps we get increased social functionality…. again we cannot tell exactly what will happen as a result.
While the ‘free internet’ became the ‘corporate internet’, as a series of innovations it still changed the ways corporations work, and the ways they exert power and exchange products. We did not predict this 30-40 years ago, and the process has probably not finished. Up to you whether you think the changes were ‘good’ or not.
Some innovations become so ingrained into life, say like fossil fuels, that they appear to be normal or essential. We can say that the innovation of modern social and economic life has been generated or helped by the innovation of fossil fuels and easy to find hyper-cheap energy. As a result, many people would rather not deal with some of the consequences of fossil fuels, than attempt to change, or diminish those consequences. Change is scary, and again unpredictable in detail. In this kind of case it is likely there will be efforts to suppress innovation that removes the need for fossil fuels, because so much established power and habitual behaviour is tied up with the original innovation. One surprising thing we have not observed, given the mythology about corporations, is fossil fuel companies being innovative in replacing fossil fuels. So change and innovation in energy sources may still proceed slowly.
Sometimes we may hope for innovations to arise out of nowhere to preserve our current order (the Bill Gates solution to Climate Change), but there is nothing to guarantee those innovations will have to arise, or that they will have simple and stable consequences.
The best way to find out how innovations work, is probably by studying them as they happen , and the ways that the unexpected materialises…. That way we get to understand what people expected and what happened, before it all gets normalised, but my bet is that, on the whole, the we will still be in the position that the results of accepted innovation will not be entirely as expected.
This is a flow on from the Djokovic saga: You can make your own mind up.
First quote
Fordham: The Novak Djokovic case has raised another issue. He was kept in a Melbourne hotel that also holds asylum seekers that have been denied visas. There are refugees in that same hotel who have been detained for more than nine years, and taxpayers fork out millions of dollars to keep them in limbo. How is that acceptable?
Prime Minister: Well, the specific cases, Ben, I mean, it’s not clear that to my information that someone in that case is actually a refugee. They may have sought asylum and been found not to be a refugee and have chosen not to return. And that’s that’s a very, that happens in this country, people aren’t found to be refugees and they won’t return. And they don’t have a visa to enter Australia, then obviously they can’t enter Australia.
JOURNALIST: …On Monday, you said that those held in the Park Hotel in Melbourne were not refugees. Most of them are. 25 of them are. Do you apologise for that mistake? Or if you, if you’re now aware that that is not the case, is it appropriate that some of those people have been held in detention for more than eight years?
PRIME MINISTER:…. I didn’t make the statement that every single person was who was in that place was not a refugee. I said that was, to my understanding, the case with some people who were there. There are a number of people who were at that facility who have not been found to be owed protection.
JOURNALIST: [Inaudible] I’m asking about the 25 people …
PRIME MINISTER: They are all in various stages, various stages of the pathway to where they will ultimately be located. Now, as I can tell you, as it was confirmed to me this morning that those who are there, with some obvious exceptions, who have who arrived more recently, are people who came to Australia, illegally entered Australia by boat…. The suggestion that I said they were all not found to be refugees is not true. That’s not what I said. It was a question in a radio interview. I answered to the best of my knowledge at that time. And in quite a number of cases, that was indeed the case. There are people who who are in detention, who are not owed protection under the, under the Refugee Convention and our rules. Others, but I can tell you the ones that are, they arrived in Australia illegally by boat.
For quite a while, it has been the convention of the coalition to declare that you cannot be a refugee if you come to Australia by boat. No matter if you cannot afford air travel, no matter that you cannot wait for diplomatic clearance because your country is trying to kill you, not matter that if you return to your country you will die, spend the rest of your life as a political prisoner etc. etc… Coming by boat = bad.
This is a complex problem. Miami, is chosen because it is the centre of a lot of arguments, not because it is in Australia. I assume everyone knows the place in Florida USA.
If the rate of ocean rise remains linear over the next ten years, or longer, then Miami may get some increased surge effects, but it should probably be ok – although it is likely the limestone ‘bedrock’ will suffer before then, and salt water will permeate the water table. Many people claim that the average rise per year has been millimeters a year, or less, over the last 100 years, and thus it is impossible for the rise to be a problem in a short term.
However, the sea level rise may not be linear and stay at the same rates as it has done in the past. The real problem occurs if the rate of melting of land ice accelerates, or accelerates wildly in a feedback loop: less ice, so the temperature is higher, less light is reflected, and so more ice melts etc. etc. The high temperatures we are reaching in normally cold regions, suggests the melt rate could stop being linear soon, if it hasn’t already. This is the worry. Likewise if Siberia starts releasing stored methane as its permafrost melts, which it seems to be doing, then this will speed temperature rises and lead to more ice melting elsewhere.
On the other hand if the Gulf stream collapses, which some think is likely, and the UK does not get its warming currents, then the UK and northern Europe might have more severe winters, and lead to more ice formation. My guess is that this will not be permafrost, so waters will rise.
The earth climate system is a complex system, predicting behaviours in complex systems is very difficult. You certainly cannot give an exact date for when Miami will likely become unlivable because of recurrent flooding. I read that floods there seem to be getting worse, and that “sunny day flooding” (ie no rain) is now relatively common when it was not before.
It may take 30 of more years as opposed to 10 for Miami to become uninhabitable but its very likely to happen – there are no absolute certainties. If you want to bet against climate change then buy coastal properties, or properties in recent flood zones, to help those who are concerned move out. That way you may make a killing, and be useful to people.
One of the main problems we seem to face is that many people seem uncomfortable with non-linear thinking. They seem to think that if something has been going along at a particular rate then that rate will not change, or that everything will continue to proceed calmly, rather than that there can be tipping points and feed back loops which produce acceleration and can lead us rapidly into the unknown. It also seems difficult to recognise that small changes can have big effects, or that they can combine with other small changes to produce big effects. Thus even an increase in ocean levels of .5 cm or less can changes the patters we observe, and lead to much greater, and more common, storm surges which can lead to significant flooding and significant effects on the land…. There are already places in the world where people have had to leave, despite the smallness of the changes. Changes effectively multiply.
Despite all this, it is, however, probably sensible to plan for the worst, do what we can to slow rates of climate change down, and then relax a bit if less than the maximum tragedy occurs.
Some obvious remarks on the Djokovic scandal. I doubt there is anything new here.
Background: Government in Crisis
The right wing Australian federal government has recently been obviously stuffing up on issues related to Covid. Covid is exploding, hospitals are being overwhelmed, people are dying, etc. We won’t know how bad it will get for a while longer – by January 18 2022 about 256 people in NSW had died with or of Covid in 2022 – that seems to be over a third of those who died the whole of last year. The Government did not have enough vaccines, or Rapid Antigen tests, even though they demanded that people have them. Reports suggest the vaccination of kids before school returns is ‘stressful,’ to say the least, without the vaccines. Presumably the Federal government had all summer to prepare if they wanted schools to go ahead. The economy which was doing well, until the “Let it Rip” approach to Covid was implemented, is now tanking. Supply chain systems are breaking down for lack of healthy workers. Small businesses are taking it really hard.
While the federal government is not responsible for what State governments do, until it suits them, in December 2021, while omicron was emerging (omicron was first reported to WHO on 24 November), the Prime Minister Scot Morrison was gung-ho about the economy opening up and governments getting out of people’s lives. This lead was followed by Perrottet, the current Premier of NSW, who repealed constraints pretty quickly.
For all her faults I simply cannot imagine Berejiklian (the former Premier of NSW), going along with the Federal Government saying “Oh goody here is a new Covid variant we know nothing about other than it spreads really quickly, lets remove most of our public health measures before we learn more about it, and risk spreading it through all of Australia.” Perrottet just placated the Coalition and went ahead.
Even if they had delayed by a month or so to let it rip, to find out more about what was going to happen with Omicron without ripping, the decision would have been better informed.
These are not the only major problems the Federal government was facing at this moment, and it was declining in the polls with a federal election nearing.
A distraction is needed! One that will take up lots of air time…. What can be manufactured?
The Looming Australian Tennis Open attracts lots of eyes and minds
Originally the government (the Prime Minister himself) said it was up to the State government in Victoria to decide if Novak Djokovic could come in. Djokovic filled in forms and everything looked ok. According to Djokovic the Department of Home Affairs approved him directly (I cannot find evidence one way or the other). It turned out later he, or someone else, filled in the forms incorrectly and therefore lied to get a visa. He also was out and about in Europe, in public maskless, supposedly a day after after a positive Covid test – not an indicator of trustworthy behaviour. So there is plenty of reason to deny him a visa, or revoke the visa.
Legally it was never the Victorian government’s say so that counted – it is the Federal Government’s responsibility to issue and confirm the visa. So the PM was either wrong, deliberately misleading, hedging his bets, or at that time he did not think he needed a distraction beyond the tennis itself.
If the PM had a resolution about the visas and what was acceptable, he should have made it clear and visible before all this happened, rather than saying it was up to Victoria, when it never was. What stopped the Federal Government from saying beforehand publicly it was not possible for unvaccinated people to enter Australia to play tennis? Why let other unvaccinated tennis players through before Djokovic? Why wait until he was here? Perhaps, initially, they weren’t seeking a distraction. However, it looks completely capricious. Just as it does to release the decision Friday evening, when it would normally have been too late to arrange anything over the weekend, if it wasn’t for ‘extremely kind’ judges.
It is not as if it was unknown that the World Number One had refused to be vaccinated, so the Government could have prepared. But they had not, which could imply that they suddenly needed something which they thought might do them some good.
The distraction
The argument is that it is not implausible that they may have decided to distract people from their Chaos and change the news focus, by being Strong on Australian Borders which seems popular with voters, and their one sure public policy for near 20 years…. So to be strong, they seized upon the moment, and revoked Djokovic’s visa, and put him in immigration detention. A judge ruled the Feds had not followed procedural fairness, which was pretty blatantly correct – Djokovic was not allowed to speak to his lawyers before the visa was revoked, he was pressured by Border force to give up his rights, he did not have the reasons explained to him, etc.
The lying was then discovered, and the government had to decide whether alienating the sports mad Australian people was going to undo the protecting borders shtick.
Bizarre Reasons for a second removal of Visa
Then after a week or so, on Friday evening, the Minister for immigration, who basically has arbitrary power to decide who gets a visa, cancelled the visa again saying the visa was cancelled the second time because Djokovic’s presence: “creates a risk of strengthening the anti-vaccination sentiment of a minority of the Australian community”.
This is bizarre for a number of reasons:
1) The Federal government is not particularly anti-anti-vaxers. It has largely accepted demonstrations as an expression of free speech. It has members who spread what seems to be anti-vax information, who participate in demonstrations and who do not get reprimanded by the government, and they have done their best not to make vaccination compulsory. They were also trying to open the economy up, before ‘safe levels of vaccination’ were reached. Whether this is bad or good is up to you, but given this background, why worry about Djokovic so openly and so late?
2) The argument also has little legal force, when the lying on the visa forms would have done for the purpose of revoking a visa. Why not just deport him because of the failure to vaccinate, the false forms, or the deceits and stupidities he had practiced. These are all straight forward evidence of breaking the visa rules?
3) If you truly want to silence something, you do not go shouting it from the rooftops. Every anti-vaxer in the world has now been told to seize on Djokovic for their cause. This technique also leaves the government open to having to prove that he would be a political problem for them – which is not illegal in any case, and is he only a political problem for them because of the minister’s statement?
I quote Djokovic’s lawyers:
One could see a situation in which it was plain to anyone with common sense that cancelling the visa would cause overwhelming public discord and risks of transmission through very large public gatherings.
If the Minister’s argument is accepted by the courts it reinforces the arbitrary powers of that immigration minister. People can now be deported on the basis of how the Government thinks other people may respond to them if the government takes them to court. Yep this is bizarre. Either this is complete incompetence or a real double handed game. It is difficult to tell.
The final verdict
The case went back to a full bench of the Federal Court over the weekend – which is not normal I believe, and I’ve read lawyers wondering about this as well. I’m ignorant, but when was the last time a federal court sat on a Sunday? If not for a while, what does that say about priorities in Australia? Everything has been sped up so a decision can be reached in time for the tournament.
We now know Djokovic lost unanimously. The minister assumed that Djokovic “entered Australia consistently” with Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation documents, although the minister noted there was a dispute about this in the earlier court proceedings.
“For present purposes, I will assume that Mr Djokovic’s position is correct rather than seeking to get to the bottom of this here,” Hawke wrote.
Basically he argued the decision would have been the same regardless of the travel declaration and vaccination issues which were were the real rule based grounds for deportation, which they are claiming to have asserted – or at least the PM is.
The court also appears to have asserted that the Minister does not really have to give reasons or conduct investigations into breaches of visas. So the banning was purely on the grounds that people might have protested against the government as a result of Djokovic being here. And the court agreed that the minister was within his rights.
Now while it might be debatable if this is a good thing or not, people are usually banned for political effects before they get here, or after they start agitating, and this supposed effect would have to have been known in advance, and the visa could have already been refused if they were not seeking a distraction
We now know, the minister can deport anyone and apparently does not have to give any evidence for that decision other than their ‘common sense’.
Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems that once such discretionary powers are granted no laws govern them. Especially when courts rule the minister does not need coherent reasons, fairness or evidence. This probably should worry you.
There have been people waiting in the ‘confinement hotel’ Djokovic was briefly in, for 8 years or more, to have their refugee status decided, and its now clear to everyone the minister could arbitrarily release them if he chose. But they are not wealthy or famous, so they will continue to languish in jail for attempting to entry the country and claim refuge from persecution, rather than play in a tennis match or two.
Incidentally the PM seems to have misrepresented the position that most people held in the ‘hotel’ were refugees, by saying they were not. Amnesty International tweeted:
We’ve written to PM @ScottMorrisonMP asking to correct the public record on the false statement he made regarding refugees in the #ParkHotel on @BenFordham‘s program on @2GB873. Most of the people being held are refugees and are languishing in limbo due to his govt’s policies
There does not appear to be any record of the Minister’s arguments currently on the minister’s web site, but but the official document is now on the court website.
Firstly, there are lots of economic theories and practices guided by those theories- there is not just one economic theory, although people tend not to realise this. Some theories may be better than others. However, evaluating different theories is not the point of this post.
Nearly all economics faces some incredible difficulties.
Economics tends to be caught up in social values. After all, economic theory encourages behaviours, forms of organisation, government policies and aims for particular results. It is difficult to conduct social theory without importing values into it, and much harder to be objective about such issues, than it can be when studying physics for example. I suspect that values cannot be separated from what a person perceives to be reality, and what they ignore of reality. Values can prompt unreality, but we cannot not have values.
Values also get caught up in the dynamics of politics and power. The economic theories and practices which tend to be well known and used in a society will nearly always be those which support the wealth and power of the dominant groups in that society. Who else gets to promote theories and their proposers easily? Even if the theories were ok, they will be distorted by this practice, and become ideological tools to hide important processes, or to justify inequalities of power and opportunity. We could ask if some action is avoided because of economic damage, what kind of economic damage counts, whom does it primarily effect, and what might be a way of avoiding that damage?
As a result of these political processes, most current well known western economics, tends to assume that capitalism is an inherent given, rather than one mode of social organisation among many, even in capitalist societies. For example, people generally do not treat their children as only being cheap labor, or as a cost.
Societies and economic systems seem to be what people call “complex systems”. That means they are composed of ‘events’ which are influencing each other. A theory may have been a good theory, but after a while the practices associated with that theory change the system, so that the theory no longer works – sometimes people say that the system is ‘self-reflexive’. Complexity means that all knowledge is a simplification at best, and that the only accurate model of the system is the system itself, and that reality includes people working with the theories. [This does not mean models of complex systems are useless, they are the best we can do, but they are not completely accurate in their predictions, and this should always be remembered]. ‘Items and events’ within complex systems do not exist apart from those systems, or without being influenced by those systems.
Complex systems don’t have firm boundaries. Economics, in its current forms tends to forget that John Stuart Mill’s removal of social factors, culture, politics and psychology was only an attempt to simplify the system to make a start at analysing it. He did not, and economists should not, think that economics is independent of these factors. If you remove these factors then you are going to be erroneous.
These factors seem to be relevant for all kinds of social and political understanding. They are one reason it is difficult to engineer a ‘good society’, whether we try to do this by regulation or unregulated capitalism.
This does not mean it is impossible to get a better society, but we probably should remember:
Our values can distort what we perceive and what we do.
Models can have values and politics and self-benefit hidden within them.
Capitalism is not natural, inevitable or inherently good.
Complexity seems to be a fact of life. Uncertainty, degrees of ignorance, unintended conseuqences, and unpredictability are normal. Useful values and policies probably have to reflect this ‘fact’. Everything we do is experimental, not given as true in advance.
Different fields overlap. You cannot have a healthy non-ecological politics, or an economics which disregards power, the power of wealth, or the existence of varied modes of exchange.
We need a new way of thinking about ecological, climate and energy problems. I’m going to suggest that some forms of human psychology and therapy may provide a useful model for that change and its consequences. We are facing several existential crises, or crises of finding understanding and meaningful action. Our worldviews and habits appear to contradict survival These crises are both shared (social) and individual.
We may say that human psychology, like human society, is partly driven by habits and worldviews – In the individual we might call habits and worldviews ‘the ego’. Habit and worldview support each other. Worldview generates habits and reactions to the world, and habits generate worldview. Worldview and habits structure and limit consciousness, producing an unconsciousness of both personal and social realities. Surviving in a society encourages and promulgates worldviews and habits – living an individual life encourages particular habits and worldviews. When those limits of consciousness hit the limits, or complexities, of the world in a painful manner, a person (or society) may:
Retreat into neuroticism and denial,
Breakdown into chaos,
Stubbornly continue in the established ways, only to create worse problems for themselves,
Resist change, not participate in constructive change, keep old habits, or
Allow the process to break down the ego and be open to allowing something new to emerge in terms of world view and habitual behaviour, which is more appropriate to reality.
Letting something new arise can be painful and depressing, but it seems to be the natural way through existential crises.
With the current civilisational collapse, these four kinds of crisis response are shared by many people who are probably finding their habits and world views are distracting them from the problems, not helping to solve the problems, or leading to misery.
Civilisation may not be able to continue the same forms of life and survive – those forms of life seem to be generating crises which cannot be solved. Society, and our selves, may need to change. Social action may need to repair or replace the sickness that the habits, worldviews and psychologies, neoliberal capitalism appear to generate. Such as
The emptiness which is replaced by purchase.
The endless quest for growth in possessions which naturalises trying to fill emptiness by purchse.
The lack of relationship, other than monetary or use relationships, which allows ecological destruction and contempt for others.
Wasting life through wage labour.
Non participation in politics and decision making.
Perhaps the goods of capitalism carry harms as well? Perhaps healthy people do not desire the continuing expansion of material wealth after a certain point?
I have previously discussed practices of staying with the felt or logical contradictions, listening openly to one’s inner movements, or to what you have suppressed. Making use of the two (?) minds. Paying attention to dreams and to spontaneously arising symbols, as modes of coming to creatively intuit and understand the world you are in. The Australian Aboriginal practice of Dadirri also seems relevant to relating to nature, yourself and complexity. Acting with climate generosity seems to be a potential way through existential crisis and finding meaning.
As you are continually interpreting the world, you can choose to interpret it the way you might interpret a dream, taking back whatever is distressing to you, into fantasy where it originated, and relating to it, and what it means for you – and seeing it as at least partially coming from yourself.
Symbols may point to another way of living and being. The arising of symbols, images and other ‘sensory analogues’ is the process of something struggling to be born which you resist in yourself. In a similar way we can also look at the world and wonder what new formations are struggling to be born, what they might look like, and what opposes them?
As implied by the old saying (often attributed to Einstein): “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking (mindset) we used when we created them,” we need new thinking and new habits. This involves a beginning in which we consciously note that we do not know the way out. If we did we would be doing it successfully. Everything we think we know, other than change will happen, may be wrong. We may need to listen for that which we don’t know, and that requires acknowledging ignorance and uncertainty.
Through these forms of listening and paying attention, solutions for collective personal problems can arise, you can share them, and test them. Although not everything that appears to be a solution will be, no matter how much you might want it to be.
All of this change process may be reinforced by ‘climate conversations‘ in which you talk with trusted others about feelings about climate and feelings about the political responses we are suffering, and discuss the ‘images’ which arise. The idea is not to get worked up with rage or distress, but to allow feelings, ideas and metaphors to surface. To become aware of processes of which you are currently not aware.
Change is partly social and partly psychological. It requires people to venture into the unknown, but with care…. World views and habits can change and be replaced.
One important thing is to support mainstream efforts to change, but to note they are probably going to be too slow – don’t expect that government or corporations will save you. Hence the climate generosity and supporting organisations which support it.
If you do the work, then not only may you give up the habits and worldviews that are holding you back, you may come to realise that working together at a local level is something you can influence strongly.
You can try to find the best way of setting up your own community energy situation with others. There are myriads of ways that people have attempted to raise money for this, and organise it. Try and explore some advocacy organisations and sites, and ask for help.
That will teach you about problems, and you can then try and change policies, as well as talk to other groups.
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 