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Australian Election

May 19, 2022

Sorry local politics again, but final election summary of the real issues for the governing Coalition:

1) Climate. The coalition will do nothing except make the problems worse.

2) Energy Transition. More taxpayers’ money for more fossil fuels.

3) Disaster preparation. Terrible Coalition record. No sign they will change as climate change is not real, and its always someone else’s responsibility.

4) Corruption so ingrained the PM has never noticed any. Coalition apparently worried that people will start noticing corruption. So lets avoid any form of investigation.

5) Aged care. Possibly, the most incompetent minister in history. Absolutely (and literally) shit conditions in many places, ignored royal commission….

6) Persecution of people on disability, or unemployment. Should this continue?

7) Allow people who claim to be religious to persecute others and run the government because they are so righteous?

8 ) Completely ignore Covid, increasing Covid deaths and long Covid, because people like me will be told we died of existing conditions which were not previously likely to kill us.

9) Increasing the cost of housing. Well that’s what the Coalition appears to want.

10) Do nothing about banking, ignore the royal commission….

11) Ignore aboriginal people, in the hope they will go away. What deaths in custody?

12) Surreptitiously keep on winding back Medicare until it becomes non-functional.

13) Keep running down hospitals.

14) More tax cuts for the very wealthy and tax increases due for the middle class, because we all know that works to increase the wealth in the right places.

15) Massive funding increases for wealthy private schools as an education reform.

16) Increasing inequality – what a surprise. Obviously the will of God in action.

17) Ignoring women worried about sexual harassment at work – it is still absolutely right for the PM not to have spoken to them and to have said they should be grateful they were not shot at. But making up a problem about trans women in sport, without any sporting organisations complaining about ‘the problem’?

18) Helping the Chinese gain more influence in the Area, through subsidising the sale of Darwin’s port to China, and ignoring or insulting the Pacific Islands.

19) Throwing away money for subs, buying expensive fighter planes that won’t arrive for decades. Buying tanks we cannot use.

20) Lots of ex-coalition members saying don’t vote for this lot, because they are so bad….

21) If you vote against them you will upset the media, particularly the Murdoch Empire.

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Labor and the Carbon Tax

April 26, 2022

Yesterday right wing radio host Ray Hadley asked Anthony Albanese, the leader of the Australian Opposition repeat after him: “There will be no carbon tax, ever.”

Personally I would have preferred, he had not been sick and that he had said to Hadley:

“Sorry but I’m not going to allow Australian Policy to be dictated by a Radio host, no matter how popular or well intentioned. If we get into government, we will do what is best for Australia, not what you think is some gotcha moment. Besides, as Peta Credlin has admitted, we never had a Carbon Tax; we put a price on Carbon, and we redistributed the money back to the electorate so they would not be affected by price increases. All the price rises that Mr. Abbott predicted to come from the carbon price turned out to be complete rubbish, and emissions came down. It turned out to be an inexpensive remedy for a problem which was scrapped for no reason.

However, as you know we do not plan to install another Carbon Price of that sort – we will just use the same mechanism of pricing that the government has installed, but we will try to stop it being a tax-payer subsidy to companies who may never reduce their actual emissions.

If we cannot make the government’s policy mechanism of carbon pricing work, then we may have to reconsider. After all we have just been told by two Coalition members that the Government’s targets are not even targets – this may imply they know that the government’s pricing method may not be able to work.

The question Ray, is whether you want Australia to continue with the highest temperature increases in the world, massive bushfires, massive droughts, and floods. We live in one of the most fragile ecologies on the planet, and all the government can do is make the conditions worse, and fail to help people after they have suffered the consequences. I pledge that we will not only try and diminish climate change, move away from fossil fuels, but be ready to help communities that suffer from the climate change we have known about for over 30 years.”

Something like that would have been better… although it would have had the media screaming.

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More on Climate Denial and Defence

April 24, 2022

This is to some extent a simplification, or recasting of this piece, reducing the main number of defenses to four.

1) Climate change is real but we only need to do one or two things to solve it

This is a standard position amongst the supposedly concerned.

  • We just need to put renewable energy in place.
  • We just need to curb population
  • We just need to follow the sustainable development goals

These points generally forget the massive, widespread and systemic, nature of the ecological decline we are facing, and the almost certain arrival of tipping points, such as methane release from those frozen ‘wastelands’ which are heating up and melting. The position minimises the problems and we may need to bother about all of these factors at once, and more. We cannot keep destroying ecologies through over-extraction, we cannot keep polluting and poisoning. We need to change the economic system which only flourishes through destruction and siphoning wealth up to a relatively small group of people – who probably think they can buy survival. Population will eventually become a problem if it does not plateau and decrease, but at the moment, the main problem is over-use of resources and destruction by the hyper-wealthy and powerful.

The crisis calls for almost a change of everything. Sure, this is difficult, and let us go one step at a time, as long as we take those steps. But just changing to renewables will not solve the problem. Culling population will not solve the problem (and how do we do this?). How do we attain the sustainable development goals, in the current system, without increasing use of energy and pollution?

2) Climate change is real but not that bad, we have no urgency to do anything. Everything is ok. We are already doing enough

This is the classic set of moves by those who don’t want to risk social change or disruption to the power and wealth arrangements. But ecological destruction and upheaval of the magnitude expected, will cause social change and social upheaval. The only way to preserve a destructive regime when the destruction bites back hard is through violence and enforced stability. This can only hold change back for a while until it becomes unavoidable for most people.

In this ‘relaxed’ set up, corporations who benefit from pollution simply lie about what they are doing to reassure people all is well. Carbon Capture and Storage is nowhere near being able to reduce emissions either significantly, or to zero, anywhere in the world. If they claim they are moving into renewables while actually increasing gas and coal production, they are not helping. If people are engaged in large amounts of destructive mining, deforestation or pollution, they are not helping, they are making the situation worse.

3) We can do nothing about Climate Change as it is natural. “The climate is always changing.”

The argument is that humans have done nothing to cause climate change and can do nothing to stop it. This is silly, humans have done lots to survive events they did not cause. They have not always given up immediately a ‘natural problem’ arises. Even if we did not know what human actions make climate change worse (pollution, greenhouse gases, ecological destruction) we could still start preparing for adaptation to the problem and surviving it, if this acknowledgment of Climate change was sincere. We could still ask: How are we going to deal with increased intense flooding, increased intense fires, increased intense storms, increased intense droughts, changes in weather generally, decrease of Ocean life, decrease in water supplies and dying rivers? etc… If we don’t act then many people will die and wars will be fought. The problem here is that the position surrenders to a fatalism which seems unnatural and overly defensive. The position is again from people who don’t want to do anything or recognise the problem.

4) Climate change is a complete falsehood

This is still relatively popular, with those embedded in the old system, who seem system change as fatal or massively uncertain. They are right. System change is fatal to the old system, and the results of conscious change are incredibly uncertain. However we are as certain as can be that ignoring the problem will not make it go away. It will just get worse and harder and more expensive and disruptive to deal with. We need to start acting now, even if we don’t completely know the effects of what we are doing.

Conclusion

The main obstacles to action are defensive political formations, not technology.

The system of destruction has grown up in a world of relative plenty, and we don’t know, for sure, how to get prosperity without it and this arouses fear.

The fact that society can grow around technology and particular forms of extraction and pollution, means the technology, extraction and pollution become ingrained into regulation and custom. Everything in the system tends to be geared to reinforce each other. Regulations assume centralised fossil fuel energy and need to be changed to support localised community energy, because they stop social change. This is not always visible until lots of people try to change and run into social, political and regulatory problems – which can discourage them if they don’t know what is happening.

Survival means:

  • Renewable energy
  • Electrification of most energy uses
  • Stopping new fossil fuel mines.
  • Reducing all pollution – even from renewable construction.
  • Reducing the damage of extraction in general.
  • New ways of large scale and small scale agriculture.
  • Conservation of fish stocks, and other natural bio-worlds.
  • Reducing the ecological footprint of populations.
  • Not exceeding the capacity of the planet to supply our lives.
  • Political change and experimental and exploratory policies.
  • Social and economic change, so destruction and pollution no longer look sensible.
  • Collapse of distant concern, so that pollution and destruction events which happen elsewhere, cannot be ignored.
  • Recognising, discovering and tending to planetary boundaries.

Non of this is impossible, and the main obstructions are political.

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The 2022 Australian Election???

April 18, 2022

What should this election be about?

1) Climate change and energy transition.

The Federal Coalition are demonstrably completely useless on this front. They are locked into more fossil fuels, extending the life of fossil fuels and increased ecological destruction to save “the economy” or really the fossil fuel and mining corporations. It is because of people like them we will be locked into massive floods, fires and droughts in one of the most fragile ecologies on earth. At best they don’t want to know there is a problem or don’t want to accept any responsibility.

Labor is not good enough, but it is better. So ’round 1′ to Labor.

2) Disaster response

“I don’t hold a hose” and help only for people who vote for them. These ‘facts’ make the point clear. The Coalition leave people alone to suffer, and send their prayers. They let go of any responsibility, and are completely useless in practical terms, and its clear the disaster situation is unlikely to get better by itself.

Labor could not be worse than the Coalition. So they win on the probabilities.

3) Corruption.

The Coalition seems to love corruption and rorts. There are so many examples around that its hard to list them. From Christian Porters’ anonymous donors, to Angus Taylor’s land deals, to sports and car parks, to carbon credits and land clearing, to travel expenses, the Coalition is wrapped in rorts.

The Coalition has delayed for over three years in bringing forth a federal ICAC, and has had its legislation for over a year but not brought it to Parliament for debate. The legislation seems designed to allow the government to continue to rort, and they blame Labor for them not bringing it forward. They are the government not Labor. “We don’t need no responsibility” is their slogan.

Labor at least has a plan for something. Round 3 to Labor.

4) Health and Medicare.

The Coalition have traditionally hated Medicare, apparently because it helps keep poor people alive. They have already started cutting away benefits on standard medical tests, and have appointed a new minister who appears to be hostile to medical or social services expenditure and has previously promoted big cuts for Medicare.

The Coalition cannot be trusted on this, Labor has a points score in this round on the probabilities. But we will be told this is another fake mediscare (even if the original mediscare was based on Coalition documents). Your health is your responsibility, and they have no responsibility to help you – you are not a fossil fuel company.

5) Growing suppression of free speech by a right wing media.

The Coalition’s response to this problem is to give more taxpayer funding to Murdoch for nothing, and to nobble the ABC.

They have no interest in fixing this problem as the situation benefits them, as is shown by most media headlines during this campaign.

Labor has some interest in balancing things out, but there is little they can do. Labor has a marginal victory in this area as they won’t try to make things worse.

6) Growing inequality

The predictable result of neoliberal policies and governing on behalf of the already rich, who then fund them to make the situation worse. This is tied in with almost everything that is going wrong. The Government is not responsible for what the market delivers, unless it does not profit the fossil fuel, mining or development companies, then it gets antsy.

Its hard to imagine Labor will do much about this, but at least they have shown some responsibility towards the less wealthy. Labor wins on the probabilities.

7) Indebtedness.

Government debt has grown under the Coalition, as is usually the case. Given the money thrown away on defense purchases we won’t ever see, or won’t see for years, or which is wasted through climate policies which are subsidies for polluters, Labor can’t be worse, so Labor wins again.

7) China

Is China a real threat to Australia? New ascending Empires always are a threat, but ‘when’ is the real question. Not in the immediate future, I’d guess, as we don’t share a border. The reality is that no one knows what to do with a potential enemy who is also one of our biggest markets.

However, allying with the UK and the US (again) is not a solution. The UK will not come to our rescue. Neither is selling Darwin port to them, or offending nations in the Pacific Region and giving the Chinese a way into our neighbourhood.

The Coalition has shown complete lack of competence again. No idea of how much different Labor would be, but this area is definitely not a win for the Coalition.

Conclusion

By my understanding the media should be jumping on the coalition for what they are: an incompetent bunch of corrupt, irresponsible, time wasters. But will it happen? Of course not.

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The ecological death spiral

March 26, 2022

Wealth and power inequality, seem to be increasing all the time. Inequality in wealth equals inequality of power. Due to the power inequalities, wealthy people continue to get tax breaks in times of crisis, they get legislation which suits them, they get special privileges and subsidies. So the inequality of wealth keeps growing without limit, when we all need to pull together. This is one of the aims of neoliberalism. The other is to protect corporations from democracy. We can summarise this by saying, neoliberalism supports the proposition, that only big business and big profit is good. Nothing else counts.

It appears that through right wing parties and media ownership, the wealth elites are setting up oligarchies through out the world, and carrying out disinformation campaigns, to support their power and distract people from the real causes of inequality and crises in living.

Inequalities of wealth, in capitalism, also equal inequalities of pollution. The wealthy are responsible for most of the world’s pollution through their earning, ownerships and lifestyles. They get to freeload pollution and ecological destruction onto poorer areas. They drive ecological breakdown and its side-effect of climate change. Wealthy companies continue to manage to get taxpayer subsidies for new fossil fuel fields, destroying agricultural areas, while dispossessing and poisoning local people. In Australia, they get all this and most pay more or less no tax.

It is likely that eco-system tipping points have started, such as release of methane from beneath permafrost, rapid temperature rises at the poles, and bleaching death of major coral reefs. Should the tipping points become established, then there is no going back. Systems out of equilibriium and heading for new equilibrium, or chaotic states, are hard, if not impossible, to return to normal.

Inequalities of wealth also distribute inequalities of resilience and capacity to avoid, or deal with floods, bushfires, droughts, pandemics and pollution. Poorer people suffer more substantially and for longer from ecological disasters, and appear to get less governmental help.

Inequalities of wealth and power, also mean that potential solutions to problems are corrupted. Corporations do Renewable Energy installations, ignore the needs of locals, and do not even power local communities. They fence off, perhaps destroy and privatise lands, and create inequalities when they pay royalties and rents to some, but not to others. This prevents any social transformation, lowers hope, and lowers the legitimacy of Renewables.

The Covid pandemic is not over. Where I live, in NSW, Australia, there have been 1485 deaths from Covid this year (March), according to my arithmetic. This is more deaths than for the whole of Australia last year. However, there is no longer any interest in reporting the trends – hence my arithmetic. There is no interest in reducing the deaths through simple public health measures, even less interest in preventing long Covid amongst working people, and there seem to be no fear about what could happen with new variants which defeat vaccines. In Australia we are no longer requiring people to have Covid tests to enter the country, so the new variants will spread. The trend seems to be that most wealthy people can work from home, and avoid some dangers, while poorer people (including hospital doctors) take the risks. Furthermore pandemics will not end with Covid. The possibility is high that worse pandemics will be transferred around the world by aeroplane, as we destroy more forests, and viruses which normally affect small mammals cross species and escape into the wider world.

Its as if we have decided that if we cannot suicide through ecological destruction and climate change, we should suicide through avoidable public health failures, and ignoring what is happening.

Warfare is another present danger which could escalate. Putin is threatening nuclear war. this means all other nuclear systems will now be on stand by, and ready to go. I suspect Putin is the kind of person that should he feel he is losing or under threat will be happy to take others with him.

Climate change plus the disruption of gas and oil supplies caused by the war, while possibly helping energy transition (although giving others excuses to boost fossil fuel production) has already put food prices up. Ukraine is one of the world’s great sources of food, and it will take years to put back together, and climate change and biofuel production seems to be affecting food anyway. Increasing food prices will render poorer people even less resilient and capable of surviving eco-destruction.

All of these interactions generate an existential crisis for most people. This is a crisis of meaning and meaning making. People’s worlds are falling apart, yet they have no idea what is going wrong, or what to do about it. They do their best and still fall behind. They work endlessly to survive and get completely exhausted This makes them more vulnerable to misinformation and distraction and unable to resist their losses, so the situation is likely to get worse.

There seem to be few working negative feedback loops which could encourage stability, or a return to equilibrium – and those which might exist are being destroyed.

This means every day is essential….

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George Marshall talk and comments

March 22, 2022

George Marshall (author of Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change [1], [2]) gave a really interesting talk/discussion to the Climate Psychology Alliance last night, and this is a two part summary and comments.

He opened by pointing out two things

  1. That we have already started to slip into probably irreversible climate change (not only the recent massively high Australian floods, but even more importantly the recent temperatures in the polar regions)
  2. We need to understand our possible psychological responses to this ongoing disaster.

He began by saying that psychologically, we have been guided by our approach to problems by a myth of the hero.

Essentially in that story, the hero (often with unexpected aid) faces up to the challenge (the monster, the wizard, the king, the enemy army etc) and defeats the challenge and all is restored to its right place, or a new piece of culture, picked up in the adventure, is added to the cultural repertoire (fire, iron, a magic weapon, some new understanding, a new god, etc). Essentially all is solved.

However, he went on to suggest that climate change is not a monster which can be slain, or an enemy which can be defeated anymore. We have left it too late. Climate change is now more like a terminal disease, which will keep getting worse, or an attack in which the missiles and bombs never stop and will never stop. The effects are out of control; in term of a human life time, they probably without end or resolution. The hero myth is not useful to us, and may even sabotage our responses.

I’d like to suggest that there are other hero myths which might be more useful. In these the hero makes a tragic mistake, or their strengths, successes and overconfidence lead to failure and death, while the rest of the world often carries on. We can think of the end of King Arthur and the Round Table, a burst of ‘civilisation’ comes to an end through Arthur’s attempts to keep himself safe. Oedipus’s valour leads to famine and shame. Hercules’ bravery and agression leads to an intensely painful death.

What we face seems more easily generalised into something like Toynbee’s challenge and response idea. Sometimes a culture succeeds and changes (or changes and succeeds), but people often fail to deal with the challenge. A recurring theme is that this happens because those in power keep the old and previously successful ways of functioning going despite the fact those ways of success are now deadly and destructive. Just as fossil fuel burning is now deadly and destructive and needs to be phased out.

The effects of a continual storm, or impossible to deal with disaster, is socially common. Many indigenous societies have withered for a long time under colonialism, and a violence which was inconceivable to them. Some of these societies have also survived under hideous conditions, and many are being brought back. This will probably not be exactly the same as what was lost, but the movements help restore something and to regain the fight for people’s lives and ways of being. This is success.

It may sound hideous but we, whose societies participated in this cruelty and destruction, may now be able to learn from these rebirths when we face up to the climate change we have also created. This could also be seen as part of the way that indigenous societies are succeeding. And it is interesting how many people in the climate movement, seem to have been influenced by directly received (public) indigenous teachings or been influenced by books written by indigenous authors. This appears to be part of the growing eco-consciousness.

Toynbee implies that successful responses to new challenges often involve a new religion or cosmology. In this sense a religion or cosmology is a way of understanding the world and perceiving the world, which has a large symbolic component.

I suspect that a religious response is extremely likely to result during climate change, as climate change has to be represented symbolically: its too big to perceive directly; it is way too complex to enumerate all the possible factors involved; it’s unpredictable; its not controllable, etc. Given this kind of state a response will have to involve a completely new (to capitalism) world view or religion. It’s clear enough that our current views will not work, and are not working to deal with the problem. It is also probable that the variant which arises will not be consciously designed, but emerge from unconscious processes of pattern seeking and symbolisation. This process does not have to result in a beneficial conception, we could argue that Nazism was an unconscious symbolic response to the crises of the post WW1 era, and it was not beneficial at all.

The process is dangerous, but it will happen, and in processes like Q, and ‘Trumpism’ you can see the delusional versions occurring, in some forms of eco-consciousness you might see the constructive forms emerging. The point is to be aware it is happening, and that it has both good and bad sides.

The next article in this series will discuss Marshall’s list of psychological states.

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“Behavioural Realism: Neoliberal ‘Human Nature’ and Climate action

March 14, 2022

Steve Westlake on twitter points to an ideological hypothesis about human nature which is used to justify not doing anything about climate change. He calls it “behavioural realism” based on Mark Fisher’s idea of ‘Capitalist Realism.’ I’m not keen on this term, as it implies the idea about human behaviour, which it is criticising, is real. I’d prefer something like “neoliberal realism”, because putting the emphasis on the social part of the expression suggests that the problem is social and political rather than behavioural, but let’s stay with what we have, as it nicely clarifies and names an identifiable issue.

Westlake defines behavioural realism as:

the doctrine that people won’t change their behaviour to tackle the climate crisis, so existing activities must be swapped with low-carbon duplicates, eg. EVs, flying.

This ideology about human nature “props up power structures and protects high-emitters and elites” who don’t want to change, or whose profits, status or power, would be threatened by change; such as the fossil fuel industry or the standard automobile industry.

As seems clear: the major polluters are the wealth elites. So, if we were to be fair, then they should change first – which would also set a good example that people could follow. But neoliberalism’s view of human nature also assures us people are selfish, and thus the neoliberal elites seem unlikely to change.

Obviously the ideology works by suggesting that significant, profit affecting, behavioural change is impossible, and should not even be considered – “nobody wants to change”. What’s more by suggesting that change is unnatural and impossible, the ideology allows people in favour of change to be dismissed as “virtue signallers,” “politically correct” “wanting us all to live in caves,” “communists” or whatever the corporate establishment’s call for silence is dressed up as this month.

However, as another reader of the thread points out, almost all the behaviours which require massive pollution and energy usage are recent behaviours. They are not native to humanity, as such. Furthermore, continuing with the present day “behavioural realism” will eventually deliver a crisis that will disrupt that “realism”, because the climate will not allow it to happen, and will force behavioural change on all of us except, perhaps, for the real wealth elites who can stay safe.

Even ideas of change can be caught in this paradox, as sometimes the idea of change refers to behaving in a way which keeps contemporary life and social structure functioning for a bit longer.

Westlake remarks: “maybe [it] just needs pointing out when [the idea of change is] not really referring to actual change, or [is referring] to counterproductive change.”

I would say behavioural change not only requires a vision of something better to strive towards, but a change in social patterns and organisation, which requires civil disobedience and political participation.

So perhaps the first behavioural/conceptual change is to convince people they can and should participate in local politics to make things better, and then increase that participation to the national and world stage, however much the elites try and convince you that politics should be left to them as it is dirty and corrupt.

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Moral change – Moral uncertainty

February 27, 2022

Morals change – partly because morals are inherently uncertain.

  1. Morals change when the situation changes. People behave differently in war and peace for example. Defining such changes in advance can be difficult and uncertain.
  2. Technologies introduce possibilities of action which were previously unthinkable. So people have to change or develop morals to deal with those courses of action, or stop the tech which is also a moral decision. What changes will be introduced is uncertain. It is often uncertain as to whether preventing a technology will be harmful as it may curtail good.
  3. Morals change with Culture. Different cultures have different moral sets and emphases. We no longer behave as the ancient Romans behave – and this would often seem a good thing. However, there is no real reason given the difference in cultures that Romans would accept present day Western morals. Moral improvement involves moral judgements.
  4. Morals change with social order. The moral rules of a feudal society are not appropriate for the smooth running of a democratic society, or a capitalist society, or any stateless society. Again, and for similar reasons, it is uncertain that moral arguments could resolve these issues.
  5. Morals usually support the behaviour of the power elites, to show that they are dominant because they are moral. For example, in capitalist societies wealth is often taken as an indicator of virtue. Not attempting to control corporations is taken as a virtue, money making is a virtue. People are said to be poor because they are judged to be lacking in a whole range of virtues, such as hard work, fortitude, persistence, talent etc
  6. Morals, and moral exceptions, change with ‘side’ and allegiance. We can have no doubt that had Clinton or any Democrat done what Trump has done, Republicans would be calling for prosecution. This is common. ‘Respectable people’ usually suffer less for their crimes than disreputable people and so on. Morality is uncertain in its application.
  7. When any people rise up from a position of oppression, then the morals enforcing that oppression may increasingly seem to be less good, and more arbitrary. Indeed part of the struggle will be to disqualify the old morals that keep them down.
  8. Morals usually involve some kind of socially enforced penalty. The penalty expected can sometimes overwhelm the moral position as the punishment can come to seem immoral in itself, again involving uncertainty, should the person be found not guilty, or the punishment changed.
  9. Morals can change when people try to be consistent. I would suggest that the decline of Christianity since the 18th Century had much to do with people realising the moral standards of Christianity were incoherent. It seemed increasingly unlikely to people that a supposedly loving God could have commanded genocide, rape, murder and eternal torture for anyone. Yet this is uncertain as after all God is supposedly infinitely powerful and wise.
  10. Morals can change when supposed moral exemplars are discovered to have behaved badly. The defense of pedophiles and rapists by various churches is an example of this, and it also explains why Churches defended them – because they feared losing moral influence. Perhaps the moral position was still valid even if proves impossible, or is used to shelter ‘evil’?
  11. Morals nearly always involve dispute because of social and situational change, alliance, and levels of consistency. Almost any legal case, political case, or so on will involve moral argument, and arguments about punishment and retribution. The argument may increase the apparent arbitrary nature of the morality, and point to its inevitable uncertainty, and lead to people trying to advance to another stage, or to them trying to fix the problems with violence and compulsions – which others may say is immoral. Ambiguity and uncertainty is present again.
  12. Whether morals should change is a moral question. All I’m saying is they will change. However, I suspect that if your morals will not change, then you are not open to the complexities of life, and you will make immoral decisions as a result.

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Technologies and struggles over use

February 21, 2022

None of this is original.

There is a long standing argument, going back at least to the early 19th Century, that complicated technologies intrinsically distance, or alienate, people from the natural world. Rather than interacting with the world face to face, as it were, complicated tech separates us from reality. It does most of the thinking and interaction and transformative work. It is like the difference between swords and missiles. They are both designed to kill. One gives you responsibility and the presence of death and what it means, while the other distances you from the mass death you are causing.

To some extent I think this argument might be correct. For example, the idea of overlaying reality with virtual images, could be the absolute instance of separation from the real world and its dynamics. We could, in theory, choose only to see days without pollution, destruction, misery or poverty, and thus cease to recognise that these problems exist. We could choose to make the world more interesting in fantastic ways, to also distract us from the accumulation of real problems which might require political action, rather than heroic questing for virtual items.

However, there is another argument that the problem is not so much technologies themselves, or the development of new technologies, but that technologies can be used and designed for oppressive or alienating purposes. For instance, industrial technology, throughout the 20th Century and now was generally not used to boost the craft, creativity or involvement of the workers in production and work, but to deskill them, control them second by second, and render them as replaceable as possible so as to increase the profit and power of another class of people who owned the tech.

Similarly with the media. We have the capacity for a ‘democratic’ and mass participatory media, but we do not have this – we have billionaire owned and controlled huge media corporations which are primarily devoted towards gaining an audience for advertising and to promote the media owner’s power and influence. We have online ghettoization into conflicting ‘information groups’ which reinforce bias and unreality (of other people of course!), which is encouraged by the algorithms set up by facebook and twitter etc. Youtube shows just tend to reuse the mainstream politicised material and exaggerate the views of the audience they want to attract – also for subscriptions and advertising purposes.

This is quite natural. Systems of social power and organisation generally aim at perpetuating those systems of power and organisaton, or increasing the rigour and effectiveness of that power, so as to benefit the dominant groups, and technology can be designed to be one of the tools in that process.

However sometimes technology can have unintended effects which may undermine dominance, produce destruction or which can be exploited by those who have to use it. This may undermine power and organisation. Thus fossil fuel use while responsible for many societies success, is likely to produce the conditions for their failure. Computers and internet, allowed the boom of new companies and new business models which have disrupted the corporate sector, and allowed new groups to participate, but the technologies have become reintegrated into that sector, transforming it in some ways and extending its power in others.

In all of these senses, technology is often a site of political struggle between dominant and exploited or oppressed groups, to use the tech as either a mode of control or a mode of ‘humanisation’.

It is for example, possible to see a struggle in energy transition. To simplify. There are those who struggle to retain: the established modes of energy production; the value of the capital invested in that technology; and the social dominance, and market influence, control over that technology gives them. There are those who seek to replace the established powers with massive wind or solar farms which retain the centralised energy and power structures of the old system, and those who seek to use renewable energy to boost the social power, independence, resilience and control of local communities who share and distribute the energy generated.

At the moment, it is not clear who will win the energy technology struggle, but governments tend to side with the first two positions. This should change. People into community energy usually now realise that they don’t just face technical problems, but the political and organisational problems of possibly deliberate resistance.

Hence the importance of the recognition that the problem may not always be the technology but the way it is used, and the power relations embedded in it.

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Modes of Denial and Defense

January 30, 2022

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.

  1. Climate change is unreal or is not happening.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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…
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. Climate change is just one of many problems. So let’s do nothing about all of them.
  10. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Climate change already seems to be costly in terms of natural disasters, and the cost will likely increase.
  4. 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.
  5. Surviving climate change involves curtailing greenhouse gas production, and adaptation to the changes in weather and ecology.
  6. How we decide to make, or not make, these changes will result in political struggles.

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