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Dealing with complexity 1: Political Risk Analysis

July 3, 2022

I’ve been reading John C. Hulsman’s To Dare More Boldly: The audacious story of Political Risk (Princeton University Press 2018). I have no idea whether this is considered a good book or not but its interesting. He gives ten principles for political risk and, in so doing, points towards principles useful for dealing with complexity, as what could more complex than political behaviour between nations?

Today I’m going to consider the first principle, and show that while its good, he actually ignores it in favour of ‘received knowledge,’ ‘individualism,’ and apparently ‘meaningless words’….

“We are the risk”

The point here is that we tend to ignore our own possible failings, or the failings of the systems we like. We look elsewhere for the problems.

For example, the author attended a Council of Foreign Relations meeting, and he suggested that American “political sclerosis” (whatever that is) was one of the ten most significant political risks in the world today, he was told it was the rest of the world that was the problem, not the USA, which could be left out of the problem sphere (p.45).

This is pretty clearly not a useful form of analysis, as the USA interacts with everyone else (complexity) and therefore has an effect on the result – no matter how ‘healthy’ it might be.

Another way of looking at his point, is that civilisations which collapse under external attack first suffer an internal collapse that makes them vulnerable.

He suggests that 18th Century Historian Edward Gibbon makes this kind of analysis in his Decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Or as he summarises:

Rome fell not primarily because of outside pressures but rather owing to an internal and gradual loss of civic virtue amongst its citizens

(P.43)

Now as an anthropologist I’m going to state that a decline in civic virtue, is not an explanation of anything. It is a statement of what might have happened. We may also need to ask, what caused this decline? What made the decline seem reasonable to people? What are the structures and processes involved? What are the complex interactions that lead to collapse, or slow phase out. I doubt that many individual people woke up one morning and said to themselves: “that’s it for civic virtue” and then Rome fell, or as Hulsman puts it

society atrophied as a result of personal failings that accumulated over time

(p 48).

If its personal failings there is nothing we can do, except blame others. However, if its shared personal failings or social dynamics then we can look around to find common causes and remedy them. Pretty obviously Rome in the East continued on for quite a long time (falling in 1453) so its a bit foolish to just focus on Rome in the West (476, almost a thousand years earlier), and we need to know what civic virtue (or personal failings) even are, and how they changed – not just assume they are immediately obvious, and obviously important because we like the idea and maybe think we are virtuous and have them.

Gibbon may have thought that Roman civic virtue was a matter of militarism.

The victorious legions, who, in distant wars, acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries, first oppressed the freedom of the republic, and afterwards violated the majesty of the purple. The emperors, anxious for their personal safety and the public peace, were reduced to the base expedient of corrupting the discipline which rendered them alike formidable to their sovereign and to the enemy; the vigour of the military government was relaxed, and finally dissolved, by the partial institutions of Constantine

Christians, while violent, did not support the military as such, and hence helped the downfall. However, Gibbon begins this passage by making an added point.

Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.

The Roman Empire became too big, and to clumsy to control, and to respond properly to challenges, as well as Romans becoming less interested in constant military ventures which consumed even more energy away from making it work. It is doubtful that even a modern empire with internet, jets and satellite can expand forever and hold its conquered land, as its context of supply chains, identity failure and local resistances grow more and more complicated.

However the point is clear, as Hulsman says, Rome may have eventually fallen because of a failure “to recognise and combat [the] home grown problems” of its Empire. This is a form of societal suicide which he calls ‘decadence’ (nothing like having a word that already tells you something is bad to help your judgements, and think you mean something) which he defines as “a society’s loss of ability to deal with its problem, coupled over time with a long-term abdication of responsibility for them” (p44).

My personal guess is that a lot of Romans probably tried to take responsibility for the problems, by blaming other people for them – despised classes like passive people, lazy workers, prostitutes, gays, people reveling in Luxury, nouveau riche, freed-slaves, Christians and later pagan philosophers etc. and they probably felt quite proud of facing up to the faults of others and berating them (Juvenal for example). Our vocabulary for condemning decadence (not being the same as we once were) very likely comes from Romans condemning each other.

Anyway, the point is that the Empire grew to such a size that it had to use barbarians to make its legions – which might have lengthened the decline – after all it gave the Barbarians something to fight for that wasn’t the fall of Rome, and made them invested in the Empire itself to an extent – they could become Roman citizens. They lived dangerous lives and got paid for it.

However, it is possible that ordinary citizens no longer saw the Empire as a particular advantage for them and lost interest…. It solved problems which did not seem that relevant to them, or it created problems for them – such as finding work, finding land, not having political representation, being unable to make social change and so on. Sport, public murder, and religious dispute, was all they might have had left to make a meaning for life

Hulsman further discusses the dangers of the Praetorian guard who were meant to defend the Emperor and family, but became a force in themselves from quite early on. They slaughtered emperors they did not like, appointed new people to the throne, and demanded higher and higher payments for loyalty – because they were necessary. Obviously not a mechanism for stable government, but it did not immediately cause the collapse of Rome, as the Emperor Constantine disbanded them and destroyed their barracks when he invaded Rome in AD 312.

So the main take away is the problems may issue from us, from the way we approach the problems, or the way we organise ourselves – but it is not simple.

The ‘Perfidious French’

Rather oddly, instead of moving to look at his own society from this point of view, he moves to condemn the modern day French. Let’s charitably assume that this is because he thinks Europe is part of the US, or he will talk about the US later on….

He discusses the events of August 2003 when Paris suffered a heat wave and large numbers of people died. To quote wiki:

In France, 14,802 heat-related deaths (mostly among the elderly) occurred during the heat wave, according to the French National Institute of Health.[6][7] France does not commonly have very hot summers, particularly in the northern areas,[8] but eight consecutive days with temperatures of more than 40 °C (104 °F) were recorded in Auxerre, Yonne in early August 2003.[9]

Wiki 2003 European heat wave.

Houses in France are not generally built for heat waves. Hulsman alleges that the French government, and doctors (?), did nothing. The relevant ministers were on holiday and reluctant to come back to the heat. Many people who died where healthy people living alone, and the government blamed French Families for not taking care or elderly relatives.

Hulsman blames:

  • The sanctity of French summer Holidays (Lazy selfish people)
  • Worship of an unsustainable mode of living (not ecologically unsustainable, but unsustainable in terms of capitalist economics.)
  • Europe “rotting from within” with decadence.
  • People avoiding responsibility for their kin.
  • Growing older populations
  • People wanting too much from work.

His solution, is pretty obvious for a North American. Capitalism.

Lets not bother to look at whether the Capitalist system still works or not. Let’s not bother to ask whether something we like, or participate within, is a problem or not. Capitalism may be great for getting development going, but after its reached a point in which a very few of the people own nearly everything, and have bought the political system and taken it away from the people, is it still the solver of all problems? Or is it a generator of at least some significant problems? Is economic growth a solution or a problem? Not asking these questions is like avoiding American “political sclerosis.” It is violating the principle that “We are the risk”.

Let us assume he is correct and that capitalist markets in Europe are not allocating most people enough money for what they want to do, and that it will all crash down. Then how are you going to sell a project which means – YOU (other people) work harder, take home less pay, get less benefits, retire later, pay increased personal taxes if middle class, have pensions privatised and subject to risk and rip off, in return for an uncertain promise that allowing other people to earn more in half an hour than you do all year round, might fix the problem or might not. This sounds like a standard neoliberal solution in which austerity is for the poor and the middle classes. Indeed Austerity seems to be both the solution and the result.

The wider questions around Are we the problem?

Capitalism as a problem?

He may be correct that Euro-capitalism is dying, but is the only solution US style capitalism, which could also be said to be dying? Or could it be something new?

Do we need to abandon capitalism? I’m not suggesting we always do (although there are obvious problems with neoliberal capitalism and its theories which I’ve discussed elsewhere), but it needs to be examined if the Anglo-sphere is not just to rest on its claimed laurels.

Are people uninvolved because neoliberalism encourages a “selfish” individual focus?

Are people uninvolved because capitalism encourages obedience to bosses, and irrational managerial restructures in which no one affected is ever listened to?

Are people uninvolved, because all spiritual and psychological questions become reduced to purchases?

Are people uninvolved because capitalism reduces tradition to obstruction?

Are people uninvolved because capitalism:

has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. 

Marx and Engels Communist Manifesto

I don’t know, but they, and other questions, are questions worth asking.

We could also note that pro-corporate media is very keen on the idea that people who die of Covid, die with Covid, have existing conditions, or are old and useless and would die anyway. We repeatedly here how old people are a cost not a benefit, and so it is perhaps no wonder that people ignore the elderly and leave them to die. That they are solely a cost and burden, as they are retired, might even be an implicit message in his own arguments…

If people cannot labor, in relevant fields, or have no money to invest, do they have any value in capitalism?

That a form of capitalism worked well in the 60s to 70s in the Anglo-sphere to bring prosperity, social mobility, art, and education to all is not a guarantee that neoliberal capitalism will do the same, work now, or could not be modified with consultation. We could look at it as a potential cause of problems. Or do we have to protect capitalism from being considered even briefly a problem generator? There is plenty of degrowth economics around.

While it is cynical, we might find the answer to the question of why are these questions completely avoided in a chapter on not avoiding questions which implicate ourselves by reading the opening chapter and finding out that most political risk analysis is sold to corporations. Telling them capitalism might need to be changed is possibly limiting the market.

Climate

Lets look in a wider sphere, dragging in events or contexts he seems to be ignoring. Events only have meaning in context.

Can you publish a book on real political risk in 2018 without mentioning climate change and ecological decay. I don’t know yet, but I suspect you can. There is no entry for these problems in the index.

People did not normally die in late summer in Paris from heat. The contexts of events are changing. Climate change was already here in 2003. However at that time, probably no government or corporation on Earth recognised climate change as a current problem. There was little to no preparation for it. It was in the distant future, despite the warnings. So it is not surprising that few people were prepared. This was unusual. Nights in Paris are usually cool, but this time they were not. Houses did not cool over night.

Summer 2003 was the hottest in Europe since 1500, very likely due in part to anthropogenic climate change. The French experience confirms research establishing that heat waves are a major mortal risk, number one among so-called natural hazards in postindustrial societies. Yet France had no policy in place, as if dangerous climate were restricted to a distant or uncertain future of climate change, or to preindustrial countries. 

Marc Poumadère, Claire Mays, Sophie Le Mer, Russell Blong. The 2003 Heat Wave in France: Dangerous Climate Change Here and Now. Risk Analysis 25(6): 1327-1687

Let us remember the Australian Governments some 15 years later and their complete lack of interest in climate change, and complete lack of preparedness for the “black summer” bushfires and the huge floods a few years later. It is much harder to excuse these pro-market people for their failure, than the French; especially after all the warnings and the wild events around the world. However, people like Bjorn Lomborg are still trying to argue that heat is not as deadly as a cold people will be unlikely to suffer in France; indeed that heat saves lives [1], [2].

Capitalism, and pro-capitalist governments, have not been good at dealing with climate change, although they have been good at denying climate change and resisting social change to deal with it. Given this, it seems even more odd to argue that capitalism is a solution for either the problems of climate change in France, or the long-term problems of the French Economy.

Conclusions

It is worthwhile looking at the failures of our own system, or the systems we like, and not to protect them from questions, when we are considering the future. “We, and what we like, are (part of) the risk“.

It is also useful to look at the contexts of those system we live within, such as the global ecology and the global climate. These are changing and will challenge established systems which grew up within different systems and developed different expectations as a result.

Something which once worked ‘well-enough,’ may now no longer work, because it operates differently dues to internal changes, or the context it is working within is now different.

In terms of climate politics we might need to look at how our attempts to initiate lower emissions, renewable energy, ecological care and so on, are maladaptive, remembering again that: “We, and what we like, are part of the risk to our own success and to our own future.”

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The Great Delay on Climate

June 22, 2022

We gave up on climate long ago. We have known since the 70s of last century what the result of burning fossil fuels would be, and…..

  • We have had decades of avoidance.
  • Decades of pretending it is not a problem.
  • We’ve had fossil fuel companies and corporate networks pushing against action.
  • Corporately owned and controlled media has pretended that there is a major divergence of opinion about climate change, and promoted the fossil fuel company line.
  • Various pro-corporate think tanks have spread false information, to delay action and keep the system going.
  • We’ve had governments trying to make sure its always someone else who acts first.
  • We’ve had pro-corporate political parties refusing to act at all.
  • We’ve had pro-corporate political parties claiming that climate change was politicized, as they went about politicizing it.
  • We’ve had governments sponsor and encourage fossil fuels with taxpayers’ money.
  • We’ve had confusion as in Germany where they increased emissions from lignite and locked in diesel while they almost went renewable.
  • We have had a reduction in emissions, accidentally due to Covid, but (in the last 30 years) we have never reduced the trend of increasing CO2 in the atmosphere.
  • We’ve had pro-corporate think tanks, media and parties shouting out that it will be the end of the world if we act to reduce pollution and environmental destruction.

As a result, the world will almost certainly will not act to achieve the Paris goals, and those goals will probably not have been steep enough to change the trajectory in any case.

We are gaining truly bizarre temperature levels in various places including the poles. We are getting almost global extreme flood and fire events. We are having collapses in animal and insect populations, that will disrupt the ecologies we depend upon for food.

It is logical to assume that as we reach tipping points, and the tundras release vast clouds of methane and we keep increasing the mining and burning of fossil fuels, that things will get much worse. This is only now the beginning.

And still we keep refusing to act.

It gets more difficult to act the more we wait, and the worse the conditions get.

However, we are learning the truth. Many corporations do not care whether your life and livelihood is threatened or whether their civilization is likely to collapse etc, as long as they can keep making an easy profit. Governments will rarely act against established corporate interests. We have also learnt that there are lots of people who will go along with them rather than face up to significant problems – and that they will think they are virtuous for acting that way.

The main problem hindering action on climate change remains politics and power relations, and there is little sign it is changing in the large scale. Governments and business will not do it for us. If we want action, we have to act ourselves and organize and act together.

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More Information Mess: “This is generally bad, but this is an exception – and the exceptions do not add up…..”

May 27, 2022

The issue:

Just something obvious I’ve noticed recently – which suspect others will have noticed before me

People seem to be using a formulation of a rule which seems designed to discredit the rule it is supposed to be protecting. The formulation is of the form: “X is terrible and should be stopped. But any particular incidence of X can always be dismissed or excused.” These supposedly excusable cases are then claimed to not reinforce the problem of X.

The Heard Depp Dispute

I first noticed this as a regular thing, in a discussion about the Heard Depp trial. I’m not that interested in this trial, but I have noticed that it seems to be caught in a massive propaganda war, and that the ‘reporting’ I’ve seen seems to be overtly trying to influence my opinion on the subject and promote particular agendas and emotional reactions in its audience. Reporting seems to coagulate around two poles

  • a) women are hysterical liars who try to frame men by accusing them of rape and cruelty, when really the problem was the woman. Believe the man, castigate the woman. This is the position I have come across most often.

OR

  • b) Men are inherently violent and untrustworthy and women are constantly in danger all the time. Believe the woman, castigate the man.

I suspect that the divisions are likely to be based on gender and on Democrat and Republican political allegiance. It is also not surprising given the apparent aims of some of the reporting, that Heard claims she has received a torrent of abuse and death threats. The reporting would often seem to be aiming for that level of anger and interaction – perhaps apolitically, just to get eyeballs for advertising as the phrase goes.

To get back to the subject. In this charged atmosphere, I met someone who appeared to argue that he was opposed to Heard because she was ruining #Metoo for other women.

[I am not alleging anything about this particular person, this is a social phenomenon, not necessarily anything to do with individuals or their intentions.]

Anyway, in this case, the proposition mentioned above, appears to go:

“#Metoo is right for pointing out that women get beaten and raped by men regularly and that they then have their protests and charges casually and demeaningly dismissed as falsehoods, hysteria or malevolence.

“However in this particular case Heard is clearly hysterically and malevolently claiming to have suffered from threats and violence, and so her claims should be dismissed.

“This quick dismissal does not reinforce the difficulties that women face in coming forward.”

Given this dismissal, the death threats etc, she has likely received, can be ignored. It appears likely to me that after seeing what Heard has been through, even if she is proven to have lied, other women will feel inhibited about coming forward. Why, if they have been assaulted, should they suffer twice from the violence of the attack, and the violence of the manipulated (?) audience?

I have no idea of Heard or Depp’s real motives of course, or the real events that each interprets differently, or why it is obvious she (or he) is lying. I do know that a British judge thought that “the great majority of alleged assaults” on Heard by Depp had been “proved to the civil standard”. But this is largely ignored. The argument that the person is defending #Metoo does not seem to be neutral or encouraging women to stand up to violence and intimidation, but discouraging it.

This discouragement may be the argument’s intention, but it would seem to be its function.

In using the argument, the person can claim to be virtuous and recognising that violence against women is bad, at the same time as encouraging people to dismiss claims of violence by any particular woman, especially against men they like.

BLM

This argument strikes me as similar to many US based arguments I’ve heard over Black Lives Matter, in this case the formulation appears to be:

“Of course it is bad that so many people get shot by police (avoiding the race issue). We should protest against this and stop it. But in this particular case (whatever it is) when a black person was shot in a confrontation with police they were: a known criminal (even if they were not making threats or engaged in violence); they could have been on drugs; they are unsavory; the police thought they went for a weapon; they were not obeying the police; they were running away in terror; they shouted at the cops threatening them; they acted surprised and guilty when the police knocked down their door by mistake, and so on.”

Again while the person can concede that police shooting people is supposed to be bad, in practice they say this black person deserved it, or it was a sad mistake. The formulation suggests that there is nothing to worry about really. With each particular murder a person excuses, they can still claim to they are virtuous and opposing police violence. In reality, the formulation excuses the police violence it is supposed to be against.

Climate Change

This is a slight variant. The Australian government admits that climate change is bad, and that emissions are bad – but in any particular case of mining fossil fuels, the emissions or burning that result should be ignored, because one case cannot make any difference and is beneficial for someone (usually the mining company). No matter how much the ‘single cases’ add up to produce harm that is supposedly recognised by the arguer, any single case is fine, which eventually means no case should be stopped. Again the person can claim to be virtuous and recognise climate change is a problem, while still doing everything they can to make it worse.

Conclusion

The point of the formulation is that it is a way, the person seeks to establish their moral credibility on the issue (violence against women, police shooting unarmed or unresisting people, or avoiding climate change), while actually excusing the crime they are supposed to be condemning.

A constant use of special cases, undermines getting rid of the evil we are supposed to be condemning, and yet there may be occasions in which the exception is real: the woman is lying or the police responded appropriately. This is the deadly paradox, and its certainly possible and needs to be factored into trials.

However, in climate the special exception is probably more rarely justifiable, because the cumulative bad is inevitable, no matter the virtue of any particular mine or power station.

If the formulation is common, then we can be reasonably sure that people are using it to reassert the established ways of dismissing and denying the problem, while pretending to virtue. Becoming aware of this standard formulation, may help us become aware of it, so we can try and escape it, or argue against it – and remain more neutral during the trial whatever politics gathers around it.

If we were to identify something as “virtue signaling” then this would be a fine candidate. It signals virtue to the audience while allowing the condition to continue, and using the person’s signaled virtue to excuse the crime in this case, and possibly in every case. The exception functions to break the rule completely.

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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 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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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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Will Miami become uninbhabitable due to flooding in 10 years?

January 16, 2022

This is a complex problem. Miami, is chosen because it is the centre of a lot of arguments, not because it is in Australia. I assume everyone knows the place in Florida USA.

If the rate of ocean rise remains linear over the next ten years, or longer, then Miami may get some increased surge effects, but it should probably be ok – although it is likely the limestone ‘bedrock’ will suffer before then, and salt water will permeate the water table. Many people claim that the average rise per year has been millimeters a year, or less, over the last 100 years, and thus it is impossible for the rise to be a problem in a short term.

However, the sea level rise may not be linear and stay at the same rates as it has done in the past. The real problem occurs if the rate of melting of land ice accelerates, or accelerates wildly in a feedback loop: less ice, so the temperature is higher, less light is reflected, and so more ice melts etc. etc. The high temperatures we are reaching in normally cold regions, suggests the melt rate could stop being linear soon, if it hasn’t already. This is the worry. Likewise if Siberia starts releasing stored methane as its permafrost melts, which it seems to be doing, then this will speed temperature rises and lead to more ice melting elsewhere.

On the other hand if the Gulf stream collapses, which some think is likely, and the UK does not get its warming currents, then the UK and northern Europe might have more severe winters, and lead to more ice formation. My guess is that this will not be permafrost, so waters will rise.

The earth climate system is a complex system, predicting behaviours in complex systems is very difficult. You certainly cannot give an exact date for when Miami will likely become unlivable because of recurrent flooding. I read that floods there seem to be getting worse, and that “sunny day flooding” (ie no rain) is now relatively common when it was not before.

It may take 30 of more years as opposed to 10 for Miami to become uninhabitable but its very likely to happen – there are no absolute certainties. If you want to bet against climate change then buy coastal properties, or properties in recent flood zones, to help those who are concerned move out. That way you may make a killing, and be useful to people.

One of the main problems we seem to face is that many people seem uncomfortable with non-linear thinking. They seem to think that if something has been going along at a particular rate then that rate will not change, or that everything will continue to proceed calmly, rather than that there can be tipping points and feed back loops which produce acceleration and can lead us rapidly into the unknown. It also seems difficult to recognise that small changes can have big effects, or that they can combine with other small changes to produce big effects. Thus even an increase in ocean levels of .5 cm or less can changes the patters we observe, and lead to much greater, and more common, storm surges which can lead to significant flooding and significant effects on the land…. There are already places in the world where people have had to leave, despite the smallness of the changes. Changes effectively multiply.

Despite all this, it is, however, probably sensible to plan for the worst, do what we can to slow rates of climate change down, and then relax a bit if less than the maximum tragedy occurs.

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Psychological Comparisons

January 6, 2022

Psychology and energy transition

Continued from A New Energy Crisis

We need a new way of thinking about ecological, climate and energy problems. I’m going to suggest that some forms of human psychology and therapy may provide a useful model for that change and its consequences. We are facing several existential crises, or crises of finding understanding and meaningful action. Our worldviews and habits appear to contradict survival These crises are both shared (social) and individual.

We may say that human psychology, like human society, is partly driven by habits and worldviews – In the individual we might call habits and worldviews ‘the ego’. Habit and worldview support each other. Worldview generates habits and reactions to the world, and habits generate worldview. Worldview and habits structure and limit consciousness, producing an unconsciousness of both personal and social realities. Surviving in a society encourages and promulgates worldviews and habits – living an individual life encourages particular habits and worldviews. When those limits of consciousness hit the limits, or complexities, of the world in a painful manner, a person (or society) may:

  • Retreat into neuroticism and denial,
  • Breakdown into chaos,
  • Stubbornly continue in the established ways, only to create worse problems for themselves,
  • Resist change, not participate in constructive change, keep old habits, or
  • Allow the process to break down the ego and be open to allowing something new to emerge in terms of world view and habitual behaviour, which is more appropriate to reality.

Letting something new arise can be painful and depressing, but it seems to be the natural way through existential crises.

With the current civilisational collapse, these four kinds of crisis response are shared by many people who are probably finding their habits and world views are distracting them from the problems, not helping to solve the problems, or leading to misery.

Civilisation may not be able to continue the same forms of life and survive – those forms of life seem to be generating crises which cannot be solved. Society, and our selves, may need to change. Social action may need to repair or replace the sickness that the habits, worldviews and psychologies, neoliberal capitalism appear to generate. Such as

  • The emptiness which is replaced by purchase.
  • The endless quest for growth in possessions which naturalises trying to fill emptiness by purchse.
  • The lack of relationship, other than monetary or use relationships, which allows ecological destruction and contempt for others.
  • Wasting life through wage labour.
  • Non participation in politics and decision making.

Perhaps the goods of capitalism carry harms as well? Perhaps healthy people do not desire the continuing expansion of material wealth after a certain point?

I have previously discussed practices of staying with the felt or logical contradictions, listening openly to one’s inner movements, or to what you have suppressed. Making use of the two (?) minds. Paying attention to dreams and to spontaneously arising symbols, as modes of coming to creatively intuit and understand the world you are in. The Australian Aboriginal practice of Dadirri also seems relevant to relating to nature, yourself and complexity. Acting with climate generosity seems to be a potential way through existential crisis and finding meaning.

As you are continually interpreting the world, you can choose to interpret it the way you might interpret a dream, taking back whatever is distressing to you, into fantasy where it originated, and relating to it, and what it means for you – and seeing it as at least partially coming from yourself.

Symbols may point to another way of living and being. The arising of symbols, images and other ‘sensory analogues’ is the process of something struggling to be born which you resist in yourself. In a similar way we can also look at the world and wonder what new formations are struggling to be born, what they might look like, and what opposes them?

As implied by the old saying (often attributed to Einstein): “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking (mindset) we used when we created them,” we need new thinking and new habits. This involves a beginning in which we consciously note that we do not know the way out. If we did we would be doing it successfully. Everything we think we know, other than change will happen, may be wrong. We may need to listen for that which we don’t know, and that requires acknowledging ignorance and uncertainty.

Through these forms of listening and paying attention, solutions for collective personal problems can arise, you can share them, and test them. Although not everything that appears to be a solution will be, no matter how much you might want it to be.

All of this change process may be reinforced by ‘climate conversations‘ in which you talk with trusted others about feelings about climate and feelings about the political responses we are suffering, and discuss the ‘images’ which arise. The idea is not to get worked up with rage or distress, but to allow feelings, ideas and metaphors to surface. To become aware of processes of which you are currently not aware.

Change is partly social and partly psychological. It requires people to venture into the unknown, but with care…. World views and habits can change and be replaced.

One important thing is to support mainstream efforts to change, but to note they are probably going to be too slow – don’t expect that government or corporations will save you. Hence the climate generosity and supporting organisations which support it.

If you do the work, then not only may you give up the habits and worldviews that are holding you back, you may come to realise that working together at a local level is something you can influence strongly.

You can try to find the best way of setting up your own community energy situation with others. There are myriads of ways that people have attempted to raise money for this, and organise it. Try and explore some advocacy organisations and sites, and ask for help.

That will teach you about problems, and you can then try and change policies, as well as talk to other groups.

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Why is climate science political?

November 6, 2021

The Science

‘The science’ is fairly clear. Some, but not all, humans are causing massive environmental damage. One result is climate change, but there are many other harmful effects which are exceedingly likely to have very bad consequences for humans and others.

Part of the reason some humans are causing massive environmental damage is the way they dig for minerals, grow wood, grow food, pollute, catch fish, consume fossil fuels and energy, engage in transport, use concrete, and so on. The way modern industrial society interacts with ‘nature,’ or ecological systems, is harmful to nature and ecological systems and eventually harmful to humans, as humans are part of nature and most depend on nature for food and water.

There is a feedback loop here. Some gases that would be easily ‘recycled,’ such as CO2 by vegetation, get less recycled as forests are cut down and ocean plankton poisoned, so those gasses become more of a problem as we go along, trapping in heat which will desertify much land, produce droughts and storms, and kill large numbers of plants. Other plants may grow more, but probably not enough to make up for the destruction – its complicated.

Society, power and wealth

This harmful interaction of pollution, destruction and climate occurs because of social factors involving cheapness and power. Cheap extraction make higher profits for some people in the short term, it also makes material ‘development’ easier. Modern society, and its hierarchies, were built on fossil fuels. It is contentious as to whether such a society can exist as easily without such cheap and easy sources of energy. However, oil is getting harder to find, and requires more and more energy to extract – tar sands consume lots of energy to process, leaving little left over. Changing fuels will likely change society in unpredictable ways, and thus disturbs those people who benefit from that society and those ‘some people’ who benefit from the destruction.

Another more contentious reason, might be that high status people can indicate their status by their production of pollution (more air travel, bigger energy hungry cars, bigger homes, luxury yachts, more stuff bought from overseas, etc.), and often the pollution and destruction is channeled onto far less wealthy and powerful people, who have little chance of objecting.

Cheap extraction and pollution comes about because laws allow it. The people who benefit from the pollution and destruction, and who become wealthy or otherwise powerful, control the laws to make pollution allowable, or make the penalties trivial in terms of profits. Some of them may even argue that harmful pollution is good for you.

Some ‘do nothingness’ arises because some States are trying to gain parity with the West (economically and militarily) and cheap fossil fuel energy is one known way to do that. They may also feel that the West had over a hundred years of pollution for free, and should allow them to ‘catch up.’

Agitation against fossil fuels arises, because there is no evidence that it has been diminishing naturally over the last 30 years, and so people who worry about climate change also feel they have to use political solutions.

So ecological destructiveness arises through politics and power, and attempts to curtail it through science also requires politics (and probably technological development which cannot be guaranteed).

That science has become political is because of resistance to change from the established wealth polluter elites.

Factionalisation/Polarisation as Politics

However, even if everyone benefitted immediately from lowering destruction and recognized this, people would still have different ideas about how to deal with the problems, just as they have different politics and approaches to life in general. This situation is made worse by political polarisation, so that one side will not listen to anything proposed by the other side, and dismisses it automatically as ‘political’.

Some groups seem to be trying to increase polarisation to prevent discussion about what we should do to solve the problems, to prevent action that might reduce the problems, and sometimes to encourage what look to be fantasy solutions like carbon capture and storage. Some of those groups seem to be funded by people who might think they would loose on profit if the problems were corrected. For example, if we stop burning fossil fuels, that is likely to have an effect on the viability of fossil fuel companies, and their continuing resistance to climate action seems pretty well documented.

Complexity

Another significant cause of problems is that economic, social and ecological systems are all complex systems, and hence difficult to predict in specific, hard to separate from other systems, and have so many interactions that we cannot observe them all, or understand them completely. It can be hard to formulate a policy which is not experimental (i.e. we learn how effective it is by implementing it). If you require simple and dogmatic solutions you may not find them, you certainly will not get agreement on them because of already established differences in beliefs, and the chance of getting agreement is lowered still further by cultivated polarisation.

Conclusion

So there are three main causes of politics about science even when the science is well agreed: 

  • a) natural differences of opinion, probably based on political inclinations, about what to do; 
  • b) the difficulty of completely understanding the systems we are trying to ‘heal’, and of knowing the exact results of actions in advance, and; 
  • c) wealthy and powerful vested interests that don’t want to do anything to threaten their habits and wealth.

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