Posts Tagged ‘climate change’

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Further reflections on energy and entropy in economics – Jancovici again

February 25, 2019

In the previous post, I suggested that Jean-Marc Jancovici insists that economists ignore problems of energy availability, and this distorts their (and our) economic expectations.

As previously implied, we can add that life and economics exist on this planet because of the slow self-destruction of our Sun. If the Sun emitted too much radiation (or the planet received too much radiation) it is doubtful that sophisticated life could exist anywhere on the planet – although possibly some life could survive deep underground or near vents in the deep oceans. If we received too little radiation, life might be similarly constrained. Eventually in the far distant future the sun will die, but this is way too far in the future for us to bother about at the moment.

In this sense solar energy is fundamental to life and society. Manual labour (the basis of many economic theories) and human thought, experiment or design only exist because of the energy humans and creatures extract from food, and that ultimately depends upon the Sun’s radiation and self-destruction. Energy from the sun is stored by, amongst other things, coal and oil, and is released in fire.

As we know, forms of organisation can massively magnify the power of human thought and labour (and massively disorganise them, or waste then, as well). Putting these points together, Jancovici’s argument declares that the energy we can extract through the ways we organise burning fossil fuels massively overshadows the power of human labour in creating social ‘value’ and material goods.

To restate:
Energy consumption and its organisation and implementation through social organisations and other technologies (the social aspects) is fundamental for the kind of economies we have today.

We should note that we also adapt our economies to the kinds of availabilities of energy that we have to deal with. Power is currently cheap at night because coal fueled electricity has not been ‘dispatchable,’ or particularly variable, and much energy is wasted.

Changes in energy supply and availability will have economic and organisational consequences, and we currently need to change energy supplies because an unintended consequence of fossil fuel based energy supplies is climate change. There are other forms of ecological destruction happening which are as important, and which reinforce climate change, but I’m currently putting them to onside – not, I hope, ignoring them. The prime cause of climate change reintroduces the importance of entropy.

Entropy is one of those scientific concepts over which there seems a fair bit of dispute, and a relative ease of misunderstanding. I’m warning any readers that this may be all be wrong. Please let me know if you know better. ‘Entropy’ is a description of a process, rather than a thing, so it is possibly better to talk about ‘entropic processes’ rather than ‘entropy’. The point of entropy is that any use of energy, any ‘work,’ engages entropic processes alongside that usage. These entropic processes are usually dissipated as heat (random molecular movement) and/or through reduction of what appears to be constructive order or demarcation.

It is often postulated that entropic processes will lead to “universal heat death.” This is a state in which there is no more energy in one part of the universe than in another. Particles are completely randomly distributed. Whether this state is a state of total order or total disorder is up to you – the paradox is obvious and implies life is a ‘mess’ (or ‘balance’ if you prefer) of order and disorder.

At the extreme, this idea also implies that too much work will generate too many entropic processes and the planet will warm independently of what precautions we take. The use of air-conditioners in some Cities is supposed to increase the heat of those cities (as the heat involved in producing the cooling dissipates outside the area of cooling), and thus encourages more air-conditioning and more heating. The same may be true of automobiles (engines moving people around get hot, and dissipate that heat). An economy necessarily produces (semi-organized forms of?) dissipated heat.

We all hope that this extreme fate is ultimately avoidable or far off, or avoidable because we have spare energy to do something about it. We could develop more efficient engines or ways of cooling, or better ways of organising those processes (but this can never stop excess heat being dissipated). Ordering processes can always create disordering processes – and we should not ignore the disordering, or entropic, processes simply because we like, or are impressed by, the order. What we define as order and disorder come together. Another problem here is that the more complex the processes we use to prevent the entropy we generate from overwhelming our order, then the more energy the order may take to keep going, and the more prone the system may be to accident or collapse.

Entropy also suggests that, while we use energy to produce useful transformations, we also produce waste or pollution by breaking things down. This is furthered by forms of social organisation which make it acceptable to create waste, or allow waste and poisons to be allocated to ‘unimportant’ areas, and onto relatively powerless people, where the effects can be ignored. If you like, blockage of information (in this case about pollution) is as important a part of current economic life as is accurate and resolvable transmission of information.

Just as wealth gets allocated by patterns and processes of ‘social class’, so does waste, probably in an inverse form; waste and risk of harm gets distributed away from wealth. However, as waste tends to randomness, this distribution may not be quite as rigorous. Few will totally escape climate change.

So we may say that the implications of Jancovici’s argument suggests orthodox economists not only ignore the availability and organisation of energy as important to economy (other than as labour), they also ignore entropic processes and waste and their forms of organisation and disorganistion.

It therefore appears we need a new orthodox economics which deal with these things. So part of the next stage is to look at some criticisms of Jancovici and the work that has been done to factor energy and entropy into economics.

To restate, yet again:

Energy availability, its capacities, organisation, distribution, implementation and consumption through social organisations and other technologies, and the effects (both intended and unintended, such as entropy waste and pollutions etc) of its production and organisation (etc.) is fundamental for understanding the kind of economies we have today.

Energy cannot be ignored

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More on Population and River flow

February 22, 2019

I have a somewhat cynical tendency to think that blaming population is a way that Western people (of a largely Protestant heritage) like dealing with climate change because it absolves them. Population growth is not happening because of ‘us’, it has happening because of people in India, China (now the one child policy is gone) and because of Muslims and Catholics who breed uncontrollably. This could be seen as an example of social category theory in action: it is an outgroup that is the problem, not us.

It probably does need to be said population could become a problem. 100 billion people is probably too many for any kind of civilization to survive and it probably would alter nature irreparably however we lived or died. We need to deal with population, but it is not our primary problem at the moment. It just intensifies the problem – we would still be in a mess if population growth stopped immediately.

A bigger issue is the question of how much in the way of resources people consume. The Murray Darling’s water was largely consumed by business, and these businesses were draining the water not because of population, but because of the demands that business always grow and because government values business over the environment (and everything else, we might add). Water could have been held back, but as we know through an article in the SMH yesterday, more water was allocated to business despite knowledge of the likely pressures faced by the river and its marginal safety. There was no consideration for the environment at all.

We have this reinforced by the official Coalition sponsored report which surprisingly mentions the forbidden term ‘climate change’ to explain the problem. [“The fish death events in the lower Darling were preceded and affected by exceptional climatic conditions, unparalleled in the observed climate record“. and “The recent extreme weather events in the northern Basin have been amplified by climate change.”] However, it hardly mentions irrigation usage at all. It also does not mention the facts that these irrigation businesses appear to have stolen water and engaged in fraud to get more water. Business as a explanatory cause is even more forbidden to the Right than ‘climate change’.

This has nothing to do with population – it has to do with an ideology that says business, and short term profit, must come first.

However, if we are going to blame population then how many people do we have to kill to solve the issue? 2 billion? 3 Billion? Reduction cannot happen naturally fast enough.

We as a population in Australia consume and destroy far, far more (massively more) than an equivalent population of people in India. Again this points to the fact that degree and style of consumption of resources by a population is the problem, not the population by itself. If the Average person in Australia or the US consumes 20 or more times what the average person does in China should we wipe out Australians or Chinese? It would clearly be more economic and easier to wipe out Australians and people in the US. Is that such an attractive proposition?

However, if we could solve the Murray-Darling crisis by penalising or regulating a few inappropriate businesses who use way too much water, wouldn’t that be easier and better? If businesses cannot work with the Murray Darling flowing, then they should not be there.

Clearly if we think that people in India or China have to consume as much as we have done, or as much as our businesses do, then there will be a problem in the future. Perhaps a solution is that we should consume and destroy less, rather than they consume and destroy more? But, in any case, lets not distract ourselves with future problems when we have problems which are being generated now, and can be fixed now through being aware of what they are.

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Population and Rivers

February 15, 2019

The other day, Dick Smith (a retired Australian businessman), launched an advertisement asking “why don’t you link the Murray Darling crisis to record population growth?”

Now it is true that infinite population growth is not sustainable in any situation, so population growth is a problem. However it is not what has caused the Murray Darling issue NOW. Current population figures do not necessitate pumping the river dry for cotton, or for other large scale agri-businesses. Partly because the cotton and food is largely grown for export: we don’t even process the cotton into goods for sale overseas. It is pretty much independent of the current population size in Australia.

Talking of population is, in this case, an avoidance of the real ‘elephant in the room’ – business – and the idea that business must always grow. If business must always grow then, in the current situation, it will always attempt to consume more water, more raw materials, and extract as much as it can from the land. This is irrespective of population growth. And these actions become particularly bad when the government thinks its main priority is increase the profit of big business, and to increase the consumption or extraction of limited natural resources by such businesses (to keep them going). And that thinking and action is well documented. The Right in particular govern for business profit alone.

Population growth may add to the pressures, but it does so in an environment which makes development, and high profit for some, more important than water conservation or conservation of land for food production and wildlife.

This is the ideology of neoliberalism. Profit and growth of profit is the only thing that counts.

Maybe we do need to slow population growth, but don’t pretend that will solve problems generated by business and compliant government.

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IPCC, complexity and climate

February 8, 2019

There seems to be a meme going around that the IPCC disproved climate change in one sentence and removed that sentence from reports. The sentence is:

“The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future exact climate states is not possible.”

The sentence is found in the “Climate Change 2001: Synthesis Report” edited by Robert T. Watson and the ‘Core Writing Team’, Published by Cambridge University Press, and recently available on the IPCC website.
here https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/SYR_TAR_full_report.pdf

(The IPCC website is being reorganized and hence stuff can be difficult to find – google does not appear to have caught up yet)

It is in the Technical Summary Section, p.58. or page 215 of the full report
According to Archive.org the text version of this was available between at least August 4 2009 until at least November 4 2018.

There is no particular evidence that they hid this sentence.

The sentence is included on a section entitled “Advancing Understanding” and is about further research into uncertainties. It is prefixed by the requirement that we need to “Explore more fully the probabilistic character of future climate states by developing multiple ensembles of model calculations.” I’d add that, it seems nowadays more generally realized that we cannot understand ecological, climate and social systems without an understanding of complexity theory.

By my understandings of complex systems, this apparently unsuppressed sentence is entirely true: we cannot predict exact weather, or climate states, within any accuracy in the relatively distant future for a particular date or year. That is the nature of complex systems. However that does not mean we cannot predict trends, or that any result at all is possible.

The sentence is not embarrassing, or disproving of climate science, it is, however, easily misunderstood.

People do not understand the limits on chaos and complexity. Because we cannot predict exactly what will happen does not mean that anything can happen, or that any predictable event has equal probability, which is what ‘deniers’ seem to argue.

It is, for example, if you will pardon the political implications, possible, but exceedingly improbable that President Trump will stop making things up, and everyone will agree that he is constantly telling the truth – at least I cannot predict the exact circumstances under which this would happen, and when it will happen. It is not an impossible event, but it is highly improbable based on the trends. Similarly, because I do not know where an ant will be on a moated table top in exactly quarter of an hour (assuming I have not placed some kind of sticky substance on the table on one spot etc.), does not mean it will start flying, or that it will talk to me. It is, likewise, extremely improbable that despite lack of certainty, and assuming weather stays stable, that it will snow in Sydney Australia in January or February.

The point is that the inability to predict an exact climate or weather state, does not mean we cannot make informed predictions based on the trends, provided we correct for further information as it arises.

The trends so far suggest, and seem confirmed by observation, that sea ice and land ice is thinning near the poles. Likewise glaciers seem to have been getting smaller over the last 30 years. There is no indication that these trends are reversing, and some that they are speeding up. The rate of disappearance appeared to slow down for a while, but it continued and never reversed. This in all probability means that sea levels will increase – it may mean water shortages in some places that depend on glaciation for water supply.

It is possible that as the gulf stream shuts down, some parts of Northern Europe (especially the UK) will freeze up and ice will accumulate there. But this probably will not help that much, and is no evidence that climate change is not happening or not going to have disruptive effects.

Similarly, if the average temperature keeps increasing elsewhere then weather patterns will be disrupted. Disruptions of the standard patterns of complex systems are nearly always fierce as the system ‘seeks’ a new equilibrium. This is especially so, if the pressures towards change continue or increase (ie if we keep emitting greenhouse gasses). It is a good prediction that we can expect more extreme weather (which is what we seem to be observing). We cannot pinpoint exactly when and where that weather will happen, but it would be foolish to pretend that this pattern is extremely unlikely to happen anywhere, or that it will discontinue in the near future. We can also expect it to become increasingly difficult to get insurance, or to find the money to rebuild cities wrecked by these storms.

Likewise increased heat in places which are already difficult for agriculture or prolonged human labour, will probably mean that these areas become increasingly uninhabitable and production will be lowered. If people try to air condition fields with fossil fuel power (or something), that will in the long term increase pressures. This trend probably means population movements as people try to move somewhere more habitable with better food supplies. That probably means national boundary defense issues will increase. Again there is nothing, at present, to suggest that these currently existing trends will not continue.

To encapsulate: While we cannot predict exact events, the trends are clear. If we keep emitting greenhouse gasses then the global average temperature will continue to rise. What we consider normal climate/weather will end. Sea levels will rise. Extreme weather events will become more frequent as the climate system destabilizes – the cost of repairing devastated cities may become prohibitive because there are so many crises happening simultaneously. Agricultural systems are highly likely to break down. People movement will intensify as people can no longer live in the areas they have lived recently. This may mean increased armed conflict, which is one reason why the Pentagon would be interested in climate change.

This does not mean that people should not struggle to change the trends and therefore change the likely course of climate disruption, but those actions are likely to have unintended consequences (which are almost inevitable in complex systems), and we need to be aware of this.

However there is almost no sign of such action happening, as people would rather pretend the unlikely is equally probable to the disastrous.

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How to tell if climate crisis is unlikely

January 13, 2019

I’m sometimes asked what would convince me that global warming was not getting worse and that we did not need to do anything. This is easy. There are straight-forward observations and trends which, if present, would indicate we are not heading for climate disaster.

  • Average global temperatures returning to mid 20th Century levels or below.
  • The increase in temperature to reverse so that most of the hottest record years were not in the last 20 or so years.
  • Ocean temperatures to decline, rather than apparently warm faster than predicted.
  • Glaciers to start re-appearing on mountains
  • Ice shelfs to start thickening and stay thickened.

    • It would also be nice if we saw:

  • Fish populations start rising, with tropical fish moving back to the tropics.
  • A decline in pollution and deforestation (because if they don’t decline then you will have other problems).
  • Measurements of CO2 concentration declining back to mid 20th Century levels, rather than increasing, because the theory highly suggests that too much CO2 will increase temperatures and acidify the oceans leading to massive die-off.
  • A solution to the loss of phosphorus problem.
  • The halt of increasing numbers of species going extinct – as that is not a sign of a healthy ecology. (Really climate change is just one symptom of massive ecological destruction and we need a healthy ecology to prosper.)
  • Some common sense from denialists, and those who wish to increase pollution.

    • But I’m not holding my breath for any of these events.

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    CO2 and non-linear systems

    December 19, 2018

    The amount of CO2 in the air has dramatic effects out of all proportion to the amount of the gas in the air or in proportion to the amount emitted by humans. It produces a non-linear effect.

    Concentrations of CO2 have been much greater than they are now, in times when there were no humans around. Nobody is arguing that the world would end with much higher CO2 levels, just that relative climate stability would end, as the climate system shifts into new patterns, and human civilization would be extremely likely to suffer significant disruption and possibly destruction depending on how bad it gets.

    As far as we can tell for the last half million years or so CO2 levels have remained between 180 and 300 parts per million (again, that’s pretty low compared to some other geological periods). In the last 100 years or so, this has risen to about to 410 parts per million (people were hoping the rise would stop at 350 parts per million, but it hasn’t).

    There is no indication that this increase in CO2 concentration is slowing. That is a pretty rapid and significant change and most of it seems to have come from human emissions. The theory of greenhouse gases which has been around for well over 100 years would lead us to expect a rise in global average temperatures as a result, and this is happening – and it is happening pretty much as predicted (although a bit higher and more rapid than some official predictions).

    Again it needs to be said that the average temperature rises are relatively small, but these small rises appear to be disrupting climate stability already. What seems small to us can have large effects on the system as a whole.

    Now natural emissions of CO2 are huge – figures usually suggest around 800 giga tonnes per year. Natural ‘carbon sinks’ and conversion processes handle these emissions quite well. Human emissions are much, much, less than that, even now about 30 giga tonnes per year but increasing.

    You might think its a matter of common sense that this little overshoot would not make that much of a difference, but we are not dealing with a simple linear system here. Small changes (in CO2 levels and temperature) can make large differences, due to the way feedback loops work and trigger, or disrupt, other systems.

    For some while these emissions made little difference because natural carbon sinks could deal with the extra burdens – these sinks produced the well known pause in the rate of increase of average temperature (not a decrease in temperature or even a stabilizing of temperature, but a decrease in acceleration of temperature increase). These now seem to have been used up. The more we destroy the ecology and engage in deforestation etc. then the worse the accumulation gets and the higher the temperature increases. The rapidity of the change together with environmental destruction renders natural evolutionary or adaptational processes irrelevant – natural sinks do not appear to be able to handle the increase any more.

    The more that the average temperature increases, the more that some natural sinks will start releasing CO2, methane and other greenhouse gases. For example the Russian Steppes might already be releasing previously frozen methane for more green house emissions.

    This makes the situation even worse; it compounds the problems and shifts them into a whole other realm. We have to stop temperature increases now, if we don’t want extreme weather events to become more and more common, and remediation to become more difficult than it already is. Also as you probably know, land ice is melting and glaciers are disappearing and this will also likely lead to temperature increases and to rising sea levels. Neither of which is good for coastal cities or for human water supplies.

    So if we continue with our current patterns of CO2 emissions we are heading for likely catastrophe – we are certainly not heading for good times.

    This whole process is difficult to predict in its entirety, because of the way local conditions act with global conditions. For example, higher average temperatures could disrupt the patterns of the Gulf Stream which has kept the UK relatively warm. If the Gulf stream moves southward, then parts of Europe could heat up while the UK’s average temperature lowers. Whatever, happens the weather will change and probably change violently. If we do not stabilize CO2 emissions then the system fluctuations will get wilder, as it is subject to greater stress.

    We need to stop CO2 emissions as quickly as possible, and start protecting the rest of the environment to allow its resilience to function. So we have to stop massive deforestation and other forms of pollution as well as stop CO2 emissions.

    Human CO2 emissions largely come from burning fossil fuels, some forms of agriculture, and with some from building (concrete use). For some reason official figures for fossil fuel emissions often split the burning into electricity production, transport, industry, domestic and so on, but they all have the same cause.

    We can pretty much end coal fired power for electricity now if we put money into it and impose regulations bringing coal burning to an end. We are helped in this as building new coal fired power stations is becoming more expensive than renewables, even with all the subsidies that fossil fuel mining and power receives. Ending coal burning won’t necessarily be pretty, but it can be done. Coal is poisonous during the mining and during the burning, and devastates fertile land during mining, so its a good thing on the whole. Petrol/oil burning may be a bit more difficult. We need an excess of renewable power and storage to allow transport to work like it does now. Possibly generating hydrogen from water is one way around that, but we need heaps of excess renewables to do that and that may then come up against material limits. Changing agriculture will be more difficult still, but people are claiming low emissions concrete is becoming available (I’m not sure).

    However, there is a problem, even if we could stop tomorrow. The natural carbon sinks are over-stretched and unlikely to recover quickly. They will not remove the “excess” CO2 from the atmosphere quickly enough to prevent already dangerous average temperature increases. We may need to research Carbon dioxide removal techniques as well. These are being developed, but more money for research is needed, and we need to find some way to dispose of the extracted CO2, so it is not returned to the atmosphere in a couple of years. This is a massive technical problem, which is not really close to being solved (that is a matter of argument, but that is my opinion). Hopefully the problem can be solved.

    We need to cut back emissions quickly. We will then almost certainly need to develop an extraction technology. If we can’t do either of these, then we face truly massive disruption: more extreme weather, flooding, city destruction, people movements, food shortages, and warfare.

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    Random remarks on climate and politics

    November 4, 2018

    There are at least two ways of looking at the planet: one as isolated being, and one as relational being in which the planet exists in the cosmos, in relation to the sun, the solar system, vast emptiness and so on.

    With the first view you can imagine manipulating and dominating the planet, because that is all there is. With the second the planet is what keeps you alive in the vast emptiness of space; without it we cannot survive, it is something that needs tending and repairing as best we can. It is our vehicle of life. There is no practical alternative, we cannot all move to Mars.

    You cannot do politics the way we normally do politics with the planet because it does not negotiate – it just acts. In particular it has no truck with authoritarian politics, where people tell others what will happen and there is no negotiation or little interest in the way things work, because an ideology is more important than checking if that ideology works. I suspect the less well the ideology works, the stronger this tendency can be when bonded to group loyalty.

    One problem with Republicans is not that there are not Republicans who don’t admit climate change, but it seems far more necessary for them to abuse Democrats than to discuss practical solutions. This is probably because they need to demonstrate that they are really Republicans to other Republicans. If we were of a particular brand of irony, we would call this virtue signalling.

    Being virtuous in the face of destruction is not particularly useful, especially when that virtue favours destruction, but at least you know you are not betraying your identity group.

    However, while it may not be possible to tell the planet anything, we can try to listen to the planet, paying attention to what is happening, and attempting to perceive what the results of our actions are with the planet. This is almost the exact opposite of geoengineering… Listening to the planet and using basic logic, we cannot keep dumping waste which cannot be absorbed and reprocessed by the system – and this involves changing our economic and manufacturing processes to change the waste we produce.

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    Climate change is an ethical and justice challenge: consequently it will never be solved

    October 14, 2018

    Climate change and ecological destruction are often framed as ethical challenges, to be solved by a new ethics or a better notion of justice. While I agree that ecological destruction is an ethical challenge, I suggest that this means it will not be solved in the time frame available.

    This occurs for four reasons. First there is no basis for ethics which is not already ethical; therefore it is highly improbable we can have an agreed ethics take form across the globe in the needed time frame. Second, we live in complex systems which are unpredictable and not completely knowable, so the results of ethically intended actions are uncertain. Third we influence the meaning of what is good or bad through the context we perceive or bring to the events; given complexity and given cultural variety, the chances of agreeing on a context for these acts and events is small. Four, because context is important and caught in group-dynamics, ethics always gets caught up in the politics between groups, is influenced by those politics and their history, and there is no non-political space in which to discuss ecological destruction.

    I prefer to talk about ‘ecological destruction’ rather than ‘climate change’ because, while people can disagree about climate change, there is less chance of disagreement about ecological destruction: it is pretty obvious, almost everywhere, with new highways, new dense housing, destruction of agricultural fields, destruction of forests, accumulation of waste, pollution of seas and over-fishing. We face far more ecological challenges than just climate change. Climate change is a subset of the consequences of ecological destruction and the dumping of products defined as waste, into the air, the ocean or vital water tables. The fact that we live in complex systems also means that deleterious effects in one system, spill out into others, and eventually cannot be kept local; we all interact with each other and the rest of the ecology. Everything is interdependent. Without plants we cannot survive. Without drinkable water we cannot survive. Without breathable air we cannot survive. These are basics for almost everything on earth.

    However, given climate change is a moral issue, this decline in human liveability is not necessarily a bad thing. You have to already take the moral position that human survival, or that not harming fellow humans (in some circumstances), is good or the basis of virtue. You could decide that humans should be eliminated for the greater good; that they (or a subset of humans) are destructive parasites who should be exterminated. You might decide that only those humans with some qualification (intelligence, religious purity, dedication to the party, or wealthy, for example) should survive as they are ‘the best’ and the exemplification of what is moral. This is not unusual, most ethical systems do discriminate ethically between different people. Children do not have exactly the same ‘rights and responsibilities’ as adults. People defined as immoral or criminal usually face sanctions, and lessened ethical responsibility from the virtuous – indeed the virtuous may have be said to have the responsibility to harm the immoral.

    No moral basis
    If human survival is not a fundamental part of morality, then what is? ‘Care?’ why should care be thought of as good? Some moralities argue that care is a corruption, that care encourages bad habits and laziness, or that true care involves violently correcting behaviour defined as ‘bad’. Care is already a moral proposition, not the beginning of a morality. ‘Obedience to God’s rules?’ Assuming that we could agree on what God’s rules were, then why is obedience to God good? Could it be that God is a tyrant and we need to disobey to discover moral reality? Could it be that God expects us to solve problems ourselves, as the rules presumably have a basis other than the mere whim of God – if not why should we assume that whim is good? The idea that we should obey God is already a moral proposition. ‘We should do our best?’ Sounds great, but what is ‘best?’ Is our version of the best, actually the best? what if someone else says it is not the best, or their best contradicts ours? Why does following our inner guide/instincts lead to the best – what if it does not? Should we bring ‘the greatest good to the greatest number?’ leaving aside that this does not resolve what is good, then why is it good to consider the greatest number? Perhaps some minorities need a good that conflicts with the good of the greatest number? Again the proposition assumes the moral position that the more people gain the good, then the better it is – which could be ethically challengeable. Some other people think that taking good and evil as undecidable and therefor not worrying about it is the root of virtue, but who decides this is good? What evidence is there that personal peace is better than personal indecision? Valuing personal peace above all else, is already a moral proposition. Some people may even define what appears as ecological destruction as ecological improvement, partly because it is bringing the natural world under human control. What is destructive or not, is in itself an ethical question which runs into this problem of ethical presuppositions.

    There is no way of resolving these dilemmas that I am aware of, and the presence of differing moralities and irresolvable questions, seems to demonstrate this. Moral uniformity, historically seems to depend on violence, and why should we accept that as good?

    Complexity
    In complexity we have multitudes of interactive systems which interact with each other. Nodes in these systems are constantly being modified by other nodes and events in the systems, or they are modifying their own behaviour and responses to events in the system. Sometimes the modifications are successful, or relatively harmless, and the new shape continues, sometimes they fail and it dies out. This is the basis of evolution, which happens all the time – there is no stability to ecologies.

    The multitude of these links between nodes, are usually beyond full comprehension or enumeration by humans. Such systems are constantly in flux, often around recurrent positions, but they are open to sudden, rapid and unexpected change.

    Complexity means that we cannot always predict the result of specific actions, especially when other people (and their reactions, and their attempts to ‘game’ the system) are involved, and when the situation is constantly changing and old points of balance are shifting. This change is something we face with ecological destruction. Patterns cannot remains stable. We can predict trends such as the more average global temperature increases, the more unstable the weather, and the more likely that violent weather events will occur. Similarly, the more destruction the more the unstable the ecology will become, and the more pollution the more unstable the ecology will become – unless it reaches the temporary stability of death.

    Because so many events occur, are connected and are simultaneous, it may be impossible to tell what the full results of any particular action are. This is often expressed in the metaphor of the butterfly’s wing flaps eventually leading a major storm. Normally we would expect the multitude of butterfly actions to cancel each other out, and they may well do this most of the time, but not always. The reality is that small events can have major consequences, and we probably cannot tell which small events are significant until after the results have occurred. This lack of predictability means that we never have full control over complex system, we always have to adjust our actions given what occurs, should we try and work with the system.

    This has particular consequences for ethics, in that the results of ethical actions, and ethical rules will not be predictable. The actions may be well-intentioned, but unexpected consequences are normal. If the consequences of an ethical action cannot be predicted, then how can it be guaranteed to be ethical? You can state that an ethical action is ethical irrespective of its results, but this is already an ethical position, and most people would probably not be completely indifferent to the results of their actions. The flux also means that propositions like the “categorical imperative” do not work, because we cannot assume situations are ‘the same’ or similar even in principle. Complexity means we cannot behave as we would want all others to behave in the same situation, because the situation could be unique. Besides perhaps different classes of people should behave with different intentions and different ethics. Why should ethics be uniform? Uniformity is already a moral decision.

    Arguments about the results of actions and the similarity of situations are more or less inevitable.

    Context
    What this last statement implies is that the context of an event influences our understanding of the event. This is particularly the case given that we do not know all the connections and all the possible responses that parts of the system may make. We cannot list them all. We are always only partially understanding of the world we are living in, and this is influenced by the context we bring to those events. Possible contexts are modified by peoples’ connections to the events, and the cultural repertoire of possible responses and languages they have available. Given the 1000s of different cultures on Earth, and the multitude of different ways people are connected to the events and the people involved, then the possibility of agreement is low.

    Politics
    One important context is political conflict. One way of giving an ethical statement, ethical decision making, or an event, context is to frame it by your relationship to the people involved. If they are people you identify with, or consider an exemplar of what humans should be, then their statements are more persuasive and they are more likely to seem ethically good to you. If they seem outsiders or people you don’t identify with, or seem to be an exemplar of an out-group, then the less persuasive they will appear to be. Consequently ethics in always entangled in group conflict and group politics. This politics pre-exists and the groups involved may have different relationships to ecological destruction, and so have different politics towards that destruction, and towards other groups involved. Thus we frequently see people in favour of fossil fuels argue that developing countries need fossil fuels to develop, and that preventing the ecological destruction which comes with fossil fuels, prevents that development, and retains people in dire poverty and misery. What ethical right do already developed countries have to do that? What makes this poverty good? in this case developed countries may be considered evil for being concerned about ecology. Similarly developed countries may argue that most of the true destructiveness comes during development, and that while they are stabilising or reducing destruction, the level of destruction from developing countries will destroy us all. In this context, developing countries are wrong, or provide an excuse for inaction. The situation is already caught in the struggles for political dominance and safety in the world, as one reason for development is military security and a refusal to be dominated by the developed world again. There is a history of colonial despoliation involved here – although again to others, the despoliation can be defined (ethically) as bringing prosperity and development.

    ‘Climate Justice’, does not solve these problems because, in practice, justice involves defining some people as evil (which automatically sets up politics), it cannot limit contexts, and the machinery of justice depends on violence or the threat of violence. If a person is defined as a criminal and either punished or forced to make recompense, that occurs because of the potential of the powerful to use violence to enforce the sentence. In the current world system, there is no organisation or collection of organisations, which can impose penalties, or generate a collective agreement on what justice is in all circumstances, for the kinds of reasons we discussed above. Climate Justice is simply likely to encourage more blame allocation and conflict.

    Recap and conclusion

    Ecological destruction is embedded in ethical interpretations. These ethical interpretations are influenced by, and undermined by:

  • The difficulty of establishing a universally agreed ethical basis for actions. Ethics problems are essentially irresolvable, and yet all action involves ethics.
  • The complexity which means we cannot predict the results of all actions, we cannot control the system and we cannot understand the system completely.
  • Context, or the meaning which influences meanings, mean that different people will bring different contexts to events and understand them differently, and treat them differently ethically.
  • Context includes politics between groups and the different ethical systems belonging to different groups. Ecological destruction is already tied into different interpretations and different developmental (and other) demands and conflicts.

    • Thus it is extremely unlikely that we will spontaneously develop a universal ethical system which will allow us to decide what actions to take to resolve ecological destruction, or stop ecological destruction. Indeed the ethical conflicts will probably further delay our ability to respond.

    Ethics may well be the death of us.

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    Skepticism and Evident climate change

    July 30, 2018

    I guess everyone interested in climate change will have encountered people who state three things. One; that climate change is not evident, Two; that climate change has happened in the past and is part of the natural cycles, and Three; that we cannot predict exactly what will happen…

    Changes that happen slowly are rarely evident to bare human sensory apparatus. We acclimatize, and declare it has always been this way – despite the record of above average temperatures we have been registering (and of course averages are undermined by people’s experience of variations, and by their desires to keep seeing normality and experience tranquility) People who move from cold countries to hot countries may soon feel that temperatures which would have once been ‘hot’ feel ‘cold’. Unaided senses may not always be accurate enough to detect climate change, that does not mean it is not happening. When we can detect climate change with unaided senses it will probably be too late.

    After saying that Climate change is not evident, then people may point to previous incidents of climate change and imply it is relatively harmless, or that we cannot do anything about it, and it has nothing to do with us. While I think the idea that climate change has happened in the past is probably correct, the rest may not be.

    I particularly have no idea how the concept that “the planet has been going through heating and cooling waves for millions of years” can be considered ‘evident’ in itself – especially if contemporary climate change is not evident. The concept of previous climate change is based on a whole lot of theory, interpretation and data gathering.

    Most of that theory is part of the web of theory which also suggests that the current climate change (even if natural) will be rapid (in geological terms) and devastating for ecologies and human civilization.

    Current climate change is also compounded with widespread ecological devastation from human sources (deforestation, over-fishing, chemical pollution, depletion of phosphorus etc.), all of which are likely to make the change even more violent and which were not present in previous ‘natural’ periods of change.

    The further assertions that because the planet has had changes of climate many times before we should not be worried about it this time, do not seem evident at all to me. Especially as rapid climate change in the past does seem to have been harmful for species.

    The third point about uncertainty of what will happen is true; the future is always uncertain. However, because the future is uncertain does not give us the right to assume that the least unpleasant events are the most likely. That is actually a refusal to accept uncertainty.

    So what is evident? To me it is evident that we depend on ecologies, and creatures depend on each other (I do not live alone in a vacuum) – this is also backed up by many studies, which give what I would call evidence. Other people may deny this for whatever reasons. But if you accept that some kind of mutual dependence is evident, then continually messing up, destroying and injecting waste into these ecologies is evidently harmful to us all, and likely to result in catastrophic change past a certain point. So its probably best to stop doing it, and try something else. Harm may also result from these remedial actions, but that harm is not evident – it is supposition.

    Is it evident that a bullet through the chest will kill me? No, not until it happens – and if it is evident, then there will probably be no me for it to be evident to. There is a level at which it may be best to work with some supposition.

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    Nuclear Energy

    July 18, 2018

    People keep praising nuclear as the way out of out climate and energy problems but I’m not convinced. So this is a quick list of well known problems, which I will expand as more come to mind.

    a) Expense. The new cheap small reactors which people talk about, don’t seem to have been built yet in anything resembling commercial operational conditions. Real reactors which are under construction appear to keep going up in price. They also regularly have price blowouts, and require taxpayer subsidy.

    b) Finding a location. Few people want them built near them or, if they are neutral, near cities where they are vaguely economical. If we put them in the desolate outback, hardly anyone will voluntarily go to work there, and the power loss through cables may become significant. Reactors also need water for cooling, so we are not going to put them in the outback, probably on the coast, which may significantly change coastal ecologies.

    c) They seem to take a long time to build, although there are massive divergences in the figures people give (5 to 25 years!). Certainly anyone who says they can be built quickly and safely is probably being optimistic. Hinkley Point in the UK which is probably a fair comparison with anything that would be built here in Australia, is both massively over budget, and quite late.

    d) Accidents may be rare but when they happen can be catastrophic. Insurance companies will not cover them, because of this unlimited risk. So taxpayers are up for even more expense, and may have little input into safety when they are built by private companies using cost cutting to make money (as they won’t be responsible for insurance).

    e) Disposing of waste. No one has yet solved that problem, for all time, yet.

    f) Expensive electricity. The promised price of electricity from the UK’s yet to be built reactors is far greater than that of renewables or coal now.

    g) When a reactor gets old, it has to be decommissioned. This can be a very expensive and dangerous process, with large amounts of radioactive waste. It is rarely added to the cost of use, because the cost is most likely borne by taxpayers. As usual costs are socialized and profits privatized.

    h) They require massive amounts of concrete which is currently a source of greenhouse gases. There are reputed to be new concretes, but I’ve no idea how good they are at supporting this kind of use.

    i) Thorium reactors. Nice idea but it has apparently failed once before i Germany, and does not currently seem to be in use anywhere. So we are probably looking at 20 to 30 years before they become commercially available, even if we were doing any research into them – which we don’t seem to be.

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