climate change

Posts Tagged ‘climate change’

A denial diagram

July 8, 2020

I think this diagram is quite neat and useful… Hopefully I can say more about it tomorrow

From:

William F. Lamb, Giulio Mattioli, Sebastian Levi, J. Timmons Roberts 2020. “Discourses of climate delay”. Global Sustainability 3, e17, 1–5
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2020.13. Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2020.

The Diagram can help you avoid your own resistances, and forms of delay, by simply inverting it….

1) Take responsibility now – do what you can, don’t pretend its some one else’s job to go first. Going early will make transitions easier and quicker. Be generous – don’t expect rewards or praise
2) Human nature is pretty flexible. That something is hard does not mean it is impossible. If we act now we can at least stop it getting maximally bad, which is a really good thing.
3) We don’t have to be perfect, just act as best we can. Accept what you are offered by the politics and take it further. Fossil fuels are poisons, lets get healthy. Burn as little as you can. Climate chaos will affect everyone, but poor people much worse, so help them out. Just stop doing things which harm the environment directly. By stopping, you support all our lives.
4) While we support research, we need to solve the problem, as best we can, with the tools we have now. We can’t depend on fantasies that we will develop wonderful super-tech, or that everything will turn out ok, because Murdoch tells us so. We may need to penalise those who would destroy the lives of the rest of us, by continuing emissions. They might need warning, and gradually increasing penalties and costs, but that will help them change. Conversely we can reward those who do well.
5) Doing the right thing is not always easy, but we do it anyway.

Tags:climate change, Disinformation, politics
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

COVID and CO2

June 1, 2020

We have heard a lot about how you can see now see the Himalayas and air pollution has gone down markedly.

However a few stats from the Guardian’s “Green Mail”:

Weekly average CO₂ readings

1) 1 March 2020: 413.84 ppm
Last year: 411.91 ppm

2) 29 March 2020: 415.74 ppm
Last year: 412.39 ppm

3) 18 April 2020: 416.27 ppm
Last year: 413.62 ppm

4) 25 April 2020: 415.88 ppm
Last year: 413.71 ppm

5) 16 May 2020: 416.79 ppm
Last year: 415.31 ppm

6) 23 May 2020: 416.97 ppm
Last year: 414.72 ppm

Despite the reduction in economic activity and visible pollution, CO2 readings are still up on last year.

Tags:climate change, pandemic
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Imaginary Technology and Climate Change

May 27, 2020

This blog article is largely a summary and brief discussion of a short paper published in Nature Climate Change. “The co-evolution of technological promises, modelling, policies and climate change targets” by Duncan McLaren & Nils Markusson. I mesh some of the summary with a blog article written by McLaren, as this appears to give extra information and more clarity to the general argument. Unless specified, quotations come from the article.

The paper discusses “technologies of prevarication” which form part of an “an ongoing cycle that repeatedly avoids transformative social and economic change” (p.392).

The ‘gentle’ argument is that the international goals of avoiding climate change have been reinterpreted in the light of new technological and modelling methods, and the promises these new ‘devices’ have allowed. These technological promises, in general, allow the sidelining of social transformation, and the delay of any real cut back in emissions.

In the terms I’ve deployed elsewhere, these fantasies about technologies act as defense mechanisms against change and political challenge.

The article proposes five different stages in the global climate policy process. These stages overlap, but policy debates about targets in these stages “was noticeably framed primarily in [certain] terms while previous formulations retreated from the public eye” (p.392).

The stages they argue for are:
1) Stabilizsation c.Rio 1992
2) Percentage emissions reductions c.Kyoto 1997
3) Atmospheric concentrations c.Copenhagen 2009
4) Cumulative budgets c.Durban 2011, Doha 2012
5) Outcome temperatures c.Paris 2015

I should add that I don’t think these stages are proven and fully documented (the article is short), but they are plausible, and I’m sure the authors will document them more rigorously later.

Stage 1: at Rio, when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was negotiated,

the UN settled on a goal of ‘stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of GHGs [Green House Gases] at a level commensurate with avoiding dangerous anthropogenic climate change’…
p.392

This was associated with coupled ‘general circulation models‘ [1] and ‘integrated assessment models‘ [2] which allowed the exploration of emissions reductions techniques and their economic costs. As the authors say in a blog post:

assessing specific policy interventions with these early models was difficult, and responses were often discussed in very broad-brush terms.
13 May 2020 Guest post: A brief history of climate targets

Policy responses included: energy efficiency, promotion of forest carbon sinks (the blog adds ocean iron fertilisation), and finally nuclear energy. Nuclear energy stalled largely because of costs and public concerns about risks, and voters not wanting to live near one.

Stage 2: The debate around Kyoto was largely over speed of emissions reductions, usually with percentage reductions of emissions by target dates.

Models enabled people to relate emmissions cuts to concentrations of GHGs, but not to outcome temperatures.

Policy and promises focused on emissions reductions from fossil fuels, through the technologies of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) (promising up to 90% reductions from fossil fuels) and fuel switching, and on energy efficiency. Trading schemes were proposed, [although were often so slackly developed, in order to reduce costs to business, that they had little result.] The IPCC issued a report on CCS. The blog mentions that in some parts of the world there was talk of building new “capture ready” coal power stations, with licenses being granted before the term was even defined. The blog states:

CCS was selected preferentially by the model algorithms because the simulated costs of continued expansion and use of fossil-fuel power – linked to retrofitting with CCS – were lower than those associated with phasing out electricity generation using coal and gas.
13 May 2020 Guest post: A brief history of climate targets

However,

practical development of CCS got little further than research facilities, while the promise of ‘CCS readiness’ even facilitated continued construction of new fossil power plants.
p.394

Fuel also switching did not live up to its promise.

Modelling

continued to become more sophisticated. It moved on to establish direct links between economic activity and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.
13 May 2020 Guest post: A brief history of climate targets

Stage 3: Atmospheric concentrations c.Copenhagen 2009

The blog asserts that in the lead up to the Copenhagen COP, there was intense debate over setting a goal for atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Initially 550 ppm was considered adequate but the debate saw that lowered to 450 ppm.

There had been little progress, in reducing emissions. Bioenergy came to the fore as a promise, especially Bioenergy with CCS (BECCS) which implied a lowering of GHG concentrations at a future date. At the time BECCS was more or less completely conceptual, but it merged two apparently known technologies so was considered practicable.

Like CCS before it, BECCS promised ways to cut the costs of meeting a particular target, slowing the transition even more by its promise to effectively reverse emissions at a future date.
p.394

The blog phrases this more strongly. BECCS “allow[ed] the justification of a slower transition by its promise to effectively reverse emissions at a future date.”

Computer modelling became more complicated, with many 450 ppm of CO2 scenarios using the postulate of imagined CCS. The fact that this target appeared, to some, nowhere near adequate to prevent destructive climate change led to 350.org being founded.

There was less talk of emissions cuts and more talk of concentrations, and some possible confusion over the connection to temperature outcomes, even if the Copenhagen was officially focused on keeping the increase in temperature at about 2 degrees.

Yet again, CCS, or BECCS, had failed to be deployed, or we might add, even researched, to any useful extent.

Stage 4: Cumulative budgets Durban 2011, Doha 2012

some negotiators argued… for the pursuit of ‘a clear limit on GHG concentrations, and consequently a scientifically calculated carbon budget’…
p.394

A Carbon Budget attempts to set a total limit on the CO2 that can be emitted by States, to keep global temperature rise below a certain level. According to the blog “the UK began setting periodic five-year carbon budgets under its Climate Change Act in 2008″.

At around the same time:

the development of a simple inversion tool in the MAGICC model enabled not only the development of RCPs [Representative Concentration Pathways], but also more sophisticated global carbon budgeting models.
p.394

The idea of limiting cumulative emissions seemed to be more robust than previous methods, but opened the idea of imagined ‘negative emissions technologies’, which again reinforced the fantasy of underdeveloped BECCS. Indeed these imagined technologies became the only way forward, even if they largely remained imaginary.

As the blog states:

In addition, [these negative emissions technologies] enabled promises of future carbon removal as a means to reverse any “overshoot” of the budget…. And there is a fine line between inadvertent and planned overshoot
13 May 2020 Guest post: A brief history of climate targets

Stage 5: Outcome Temperatures. The carbon budgets idea never really got put into play – possibly because they were too empirical and demanded emissions cutbacks, and the non-use of fossil fuel reserves. So the Paris COP shifted to a focus on temperature increase – officially 2 degrees, but possibly 1.5 – as the boundary around dangerous climate change. This further boosted talk of negative emissions technology.

Looking ahead, although [Negative Emissions Technologies] might retrospectively balance carbon budgets, delayed action would still make a temperature overshoot more likely.
p.395

This helps construct “a space for an imaginary technology that can act directly to reduce temperatures”, such as Geoengineering. This, in turn, makes the use of geoengineering, and attempts to control the ecology of the whole world, more likely to be factored into models.

However, it is extremely difficult to accurately model the ecological consequences of geoengineering (especially without large scale testing), so the likely undesired effects become a cost left out of the models.

The blog remarks:

Many national and business targets are now framed as “net-zero” carbon, explicitly – or implicitly – achieved through substantial future deployment of carbon removal.
13 May 2020 Guest post: A brief history of climate targets

Conclusion

Policy change looks like to be a co-evolutionary process involving implicit policy, politics, models, and imagined technologies.

In this process, the ‘evolutionary fitness’ of each technological promise is less a product of its (potential) climate impact than a measure of how well it can be modelled, and how well it matches the extant framings of climate policy.
p.395

These imagined techs then become embedded in the models and in the policy projects even if they do not exist at sufficient scale, after years of opportunity. The blog argues that the problem is magnified because the “integrated assessment models” focus on:

cost optimisation with time discounting. This means they favour future promises of action over plausible, but potentially costly, near-term interventions.
13 May 2020 Guest post: A brief history of climate targets

The delays make the policies look cheaper to deliver, and cheapness is, in neoliberalism, a virtue; but over time little has been delivered – for example it appears that during the first decade of the twenty-first century, world coal production almost doubled, and it has not declined back to dangerous 1990s levels, yet.

Critically, in this process, each technological promise has enabled a continued politics of prevarication and inadequate action by raising expectations of more effective policy options becoming available in the future, in turn justifying existing limited and gradualist policy choices and thus diminishing the perceived urgency of deploying costly and unpopular, but better understood and tested, options for policy in the short term.
p.395

These technologies of prevarication have rarely delivered on their promises, or been as cheap as expected, and have rarely been embraced by governments or business in practice as opposed to imaginal rhetoric.

Often the problems, or unintended consequences, of the imagined technologies were not seen until people started to implement them. BECCS for example can result in deforestation, impingement on food production, require large amounts of energy input, and the extracted CO2 can be used to help push oil out of wells to be burnt to produce more CO2. At the best talk of CCS and carbon extraction merely slows down transition.

There is a possibility that:

each promise has, to some degree, fed systemic ‘moral corruption’ in which current elites are enabled to pursue self-serving pathways while passing off risk to vulnerable people in the future and in the Global South.
p.395

The technological promises, promise to save neoliberalism and market based developmentalism, and “promised future action, rather than immediate sacrifice.”

Carbon sinks may have perhaps gone backwards. Nuclear power has almost ceased being built, even though the promise remains to allow people to imagine future cuts in emissions. Efficiency gains have enabled growth in consumption and energy expectations have expanded. Often technologies etc have allowed additional energy capacity rather than reduced emissions. We can add that it appears that many countries (particularly China and the US) have encouraged poorer countries to lock-in to coal dependency to keep the exporters coal mines running, as emissions are counted on a per country basis. This increases the cost of conversion to renewables – all the money which could have been spent getting the countries self sufficient in renewables has been wasted in fossil fuels. While cheaper renewables make a change apparently more practicable, it is an extra expense and destruction of invested capital that poorer countries, and some wealthier ones, cannot afford easily – they have more immediate expenses, and few powerful people like to admit they have wasted money for nothing.

The whole process has downplayed urgency and helped defer deadlines for action.

We have played into the imagined technological fix, rather than the social change we need. There is no suggestion that the people who have invented and worked on this technology are to blame, the problem is the way their imaginings have been used to in policy and modelling to maintain small scale action. It has been more important for politicians to maintain neoliberalism, and development, than to act on climate.

[L]ayers of past unredeemed technological promises have become sedimented in climate pathway models. Contemporary imaginaries may prove just as unrealizable as the previous generations of promises,and there is no logical end to the set of possible technological promises that could be added to ‘resolve’ the models.
p.396

This ‘sedimentation’ of failed technological promises is now so standard that risks of technology disappointment and failure should be incorporated into models and policy discussions, and research.

Thirty years of failure, should show that we cannot continue our society working as it does, and expect to solve problems of climate change. We have to, as the blog states, “deliver behavioural, cultural and economic transformations.”

Comment

Assuming the figures used to make this graph are accurate, the image shows how well we have reduced energy production from fossil fuels, and how much we have increased renewable energy in the last 40 years.

source: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-energy-prod-source?time=1980..2018

We have failed. We have had years of climate action, discussion between nations, and targets have been set, yet the actions taken have ignored the problem and made the situation worse. The idea that technologies are largely defense mechanisms or modes of prevarication, is graphically illustrated. If we keep the same social organisation, and the same development processes going, then we are committing suicide. Whatever the appearance our States are failed States, when it comes to dealing with this problem.

We cannot rely on the State or big business to save us, or even to try to save us. We have been doing that, and this faith has not been repaid. We may need to get to work outside the State and outside big business…

This is where ideas of degrowth and community energy democracy come in. Degrowth will almost certainly not be a popular response to politicians, but it does allow us to ask questions which are otherwise not being asked. These questions have the potential to open the unconscious of our social dynamic towards destruction.

What, for example, if we tried to reduce burning fossil fuels without replacing them? This would be world changing, it would also start debates about wealth distribution, and energy distribution. What do we really need the energy for? How do we need the energy production distributed, to make these cuts possible? How can we levelise consumption to give everyone what they need to survive comfortably and freely? Can communities build and manage their own energy supplies? Can any of this be achieved along with the maintenance of rivalrous military based nation states? Will those in power who love the maintenance of violence-based hierarchies fight with all they can muster to go to destruction before surrendering their power?

I doubt such questions will be asked, but they are essential, otherwise technology is likely to primarily remain either a prevarication or a defense mechanism, which maintains our self-destruction.

Tags:carbon capture, climate change, degrowth, depth psychology, Disinformation, social action
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Lomborg cannot be blamed for this

March 25, 2020

The article by Bjorn Lomborg I discussed recently was followed by an editorial in the same Newspaper which significantly distorts Lomborg’s position, twists it into total denial, and do-nothingness, and shows the dangers of that position once it becomes political and is used to argue much harder and far more incoherently than Lomborg himself.

The editorial asserted that the problem with the bushfires was simply their visibility through social media. There was no mention of the clouds of smoke dust and ash which hung around the city making the fires visible to everyone outside social media, of course. Presumably we are expected to have short memories.

The other problem was apparently the unscrupulous “climate evangelists” who were prepared to exploit this visibility through social media: “People have promoted misinformation to push a policy barrow.”

We might even be able to agree with this, but it may not only be the climate activists who have promoted misinformation, or even illogic, for political reasons.

Use of the word unprecedented has been instrumental; by politicians, activists and journalists. It has been deployed since November last year in an attempt to invoke climate change as the root cause of the fire disasters.
This has been contrived and dishonest.

The editorial argues that the reality is that the fires were a once in a generation experience, but we have them all the time (yes the argument was that coherent). They continue by suggesting that maybe the fires were unprecedented, but not all of the fires were unprecedented, so none of them were unprecedented. There have been lots of fire disasters in Australian history, so to say that this one was unprecedented, is dishonest.

Fires are not a new threat, and, even if they were, they cannot be neutered by climate policy, they will still exist.

This is proven by Bjorn Lomborg:

annual areas burned by bushfire across our continent are on a clear downward trend; and this year’s total, so far, is well below average.

Presumably what we are to conclude from all this, is that all fires are similar, and no Australian fire could ever be unprecedented in its intensity or spread, because there have been fires previously. Area of blaze is more significant than intensity of blaze. So nothing to worry about here…

Let me repeat Prof. Lomborg gives no evidence for his assertions about decline in fire areas, and does not explore alternative explanations for these figures. He merely asserts there is evidence. He may be right. He may have irrefutable evidence. But from that article we do not know.

The editorial does admit that the drought probably had something to do with the fires, but the drought is “not directly linked to climate change” – we have droughts don’t cha know? The fires could have been influenced by high temperatures and strong winds which also apparently have nothing to do with climate change. Fires were also caused by “Natural and human-induced ignition, and heavy fuel loads because of insufficient hazard reduction”. So the ‘natural’ apparently makes it ok or inevitable, and the human implies that it was all the fault of arsonists. No mention of the fact that the fire service could not find many wet or cool months to do the hazard reduction, with the addition that that had nothing to do with climate change either. Perhaps three denials of climate change in a row would look to be pushing it.

People also built houses in the bush and were not prepared. So there you are: its all the fault of the NSW State government for not finding the right times for burning, and if people had not built houses in the bush there wouldn’t have been any blaze. No they are not arguing that latter point, but they are probably trying to diminish the number of properties destroyed – by implying it was all the home owner’s fault for being stupid or unprepared. That is what I would call politicising the fires at the cost of the victims…. which is a recurrent theme of theirs used to berate people for talking about climate change.

The editorial remarks that in the good old days we would have all come together with “the all-too-familiar smell of bushfire smoke” but this time the evil greenies split us apart and those days of unity and uniform agreement with Mr Murdoch are gone forever.

Then we learn the crisis was magnified by the mainstream green left-oriented media (!!!) who are hell bent on getting revenge on the Coalition for winning an election. This ‘Love media’ includes channel 9 and “online Twitter feeders such as Guardian Australia.” (‘Love’ obviously has some unique The Australian meaning here.) And there were other jejune people on social media reporting what they experienced as “social media memes”.

“Displaying the corporate and professional memories of goldfish, they gave us a sickeningly revisionist perspective” in which climate change was relevant to the fire, when all sensible people know it was not, even if they didn’t at the time.

This green left media deliberately discourages tourism and politicises everything by disagreeing with us. They engage in abuse! People will eventually see this overreach of climate activists and come back to supporting the government – and we can live in natural harmony once more….

“Facts do matter.” Yes they do whatever the editorial writer asserts,

Whatever climate policies are adopted in Australia, they cannot change our climate because global emissions are still rising sharply.

Yes and they will continue to rise rapidly as long as we have editorials like this, prepared to sacrifice everyone and everything for the continuance of a failed and flailing order.

“Alarmism is the order of the day”. No, unfortunately this kind of editorial silliness is the order of the day: extremism posing as rationality; the victim blamers pretending to be the victim; politicisation pretending to be apolitical and dispassionate.

If “alarmism” was the order of the day, we would have policies to deal with climate change and its consequences. We would be phasing out coal mining, we would not be talking about new coal power stations, we would be limiting land-clearing and deforestation, we would be discussing how to protect our low lying areas from sea level rises, we would be building new energy grids, we would be clarifying energy regulations in consultation with industry and communities, we would enable rather than hinder community energy, we would discontinue subsidies for fossil fuel mining, we would be seriously investigating regenerative agriculture and so on. The fact that we are not doing any of these things suggests that denial, and fossil fuel companies reign supreme.

Apparently this editorial describes what many politicians might believe, or believe it is safe to believe…

To finish with a remark from Lomborg on the glaring inadequacies of the Paris agreement:

President Trump…. failed to acknowledge that global warming is real and wrongly claimed that China and India are the “world’s leading polluters.” (China and the U.S. are the largest emitters of carbon dioxide, and the U.S. is the biggest per capita.)… the White House now has no response to climate change….
The real misfortune for the planet isn’t that Mr. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris treaty. Rather, it is that his administration has shown no interest in helping to launch the green-energy revolution that the world so urgently needs.
Wall Street Journal 17 June 2017

Just like the Murdoch Empire.

Tags:climate change, Disinformation, politics
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Spirit, soul, flesh and the climate crisis

March 24, 2020

The issue of spirituality again….

There seems to be a lot of people claiming that ‘materialism’ is the problem and ‘spirituality’ is the solution. It is not always clear what they mean by either of these terms, but these terms are binary, and define the other by what it is not. To the materialist the spirit is nothing, and to spiritualists matter is nothing. But both form a category based division of the world, which depends on each other for their meaning and sense of reality.

As I’ve discussed before binary and ‘mono-ary’ thinking are reductive. You seem to need at least three terms to start thinking non reductively, and even then it is difficult not to reduce one’s thought to the one or the two. You may always need a prime number of terms, to begin to avoid the reduction into binaries. A four term layout may easily reduce to two binaries and so on.

With the two terms, spirit and matter, we generate ‘opposites’ and ‘oppositions’, in which one term is valued more than the other, rather than complements, but you cannot have one without the other, even if they go as far as to deny or slancer the other to give themselves meaning.

James Hillman tries to broaden thinking and perceptions, by using the old Christian terms ‘soul’ (psyche), ‘spirit’ (pneuma) and ‘flesh’ (sarx or apparently sometimes soma although this latter could mark some further differentiation ). For a long time, it has seemed odd to me that this triadic distinction gets reduced to spirit and matter, especially if you hold that God is a Trinity, which was the official position….

In Western Culture, in a slightly modified use of Hillman’s terms, ‘spirit’ is the force of ascension – that which tries to leave the world and the flesh behind. It is that which is convinced its true habitation is elsewhere in spiritual clarity of pure mind and, at the extreme, sees the flesh as a prison, a tomb, or as unreal, by comparison with the freedom, might, power and reality of spirit. Often, with visions of the spirit, individuality, isolation, etc dies in the realisation of that spirit, in its “oneness”.

Soul, on the other hand, is that which seeks meaning in the dark, in the depths, of feeling, imagery and in recognition of our unconscious. It seeks the light of nature. It is the descent into and through the flesh into this world.

It could easily be suggested, that in these terms, pure spirituality is destructive of the flesh and the body. It is the parent of lack of care for the Earth, for the trope of abandoning the Earth or destroying the prison of the Earth. In its view ‘positivity’ overcomes everything, because the world and the flesh have no mind, no thought, no real being, they are at best obstacles for spirit which have to be overcome to reach our real home in immaterial spirit and God.
In other words, the problem with our world is not materialism, but the spirituality which generates materialism as an opposite, as part of its path of ascent away from matter. It, as a matter of course, generates ecological crisis, because it has no care for such things. Nature is irrelevant. We can gather in thousands to glorify the spirit in the midst of plague and no harm will befall us.

On the other hand, again in these terms, soul accepts the reality of the world and our literal attachment to the world. It accepts it is part of the flesh, and feels the flesh, and is the ‘salvation of the flesh’ perhaps through suffering. As love it is sensitive to the movements of matter and flesh, and the images that arise from matter and are transformed and recombined by the soul into its visions, and translate the unknown and unconscious into something it can intimate. The world has meaning through its synthesis with soul. The soul does not turn away from misery, but does its best to help, and its idea of help is not to increase their suffering so that they die into spirit, but for them to live with what is, and what can be improved and transformed as in alchemy. The soul sees the divine as here already, and not as about to leave. It may even produce the divine that is here. The soul sees the golden light and mind of matter. Soul tends ecologies because it expresses them and loves them as its basis.

If we wanted to, we could say that the approach of the soul does not create a barren materialism, like the approach of spirit, but a divine materialism in which the word is made flesh, and flesh becomes the word, and is alive.

Where we to go further, we could say that this triad is a model of continual circulation. That matter is ‘coarser’ spirit and spirit ‘refined ‘matter, but never separate, and the soul is a perspective on this dynamic procession.

We descend into the world and the flesh to find experience and to imagine, think, feel, pleasure and exist, and then move into the spirit bringing what we have learnt to learn again, and then return to the flesh, bringing what we have learnt to learn again. And this is not just ‘between lives’ for those who believe in reincarnation, but within the one life. The soul holds us together feeling and imagining all as we progress. But none of the three exist apart, and cannot exist apart without collapse. The procession is circular.

Separating the flesh and spirit, which the spirit does so easily is a form of death, recombining within soul is a form of enlivening, and thus the cycle continues and the earth is continually reborn, in reality and in our eyes.

Tags:Anthropocene, climate change, depth psychology, religion
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

The latest from Project Drawdown

March 17, 2020

From The latest report slightly rephrased.

1) We can reach Drawdown by mid-century if we use the climate solutions already in hand at a large enough scale. We can solve our problems even without technological innovation.

2) Climate solutions are interconnected as a system, and they should reinforce each other.

3) Climate solutions have other benefits for people as well, such as no longer being poisoned by pollution, or having their land destroyed.

4) Savings significantly outweigh costs.

5) We need to accelerate moves to reduce or replace the use of fossil fuels. We need to actively stop the use of coal, oil, and gas and replace them with other sources of energy – renewables, hydrogen etc.

6) We need to simultaneously start reducing emissions towards zero and support, or expand, nature’s carbon sinks

7) Some powerful climate solutions receive comparably little attention, reminding us to widen our lens.

Food waste reduction and plant-rich diets
Regenerating eco-systems
Restoration of temperate and tropical forests
Rehabilitating peat lands
Encouraging Ocean based Carbon sinks (which improve fisheries)
Preventing leaks and improving disposal of chemical refrigerants
New cements, which exist
Building recycling responsibility into products
Bio-plastics
Electric Transport and improved public transport running on zero-emissions energy.
Access to high-quality, voluntary reproductive healthcare and high-quality, inclusive education

8) Solutions do not scale themselves. We need means of removing barriers and accelerating their implementation and expansion. That is, we need political and cultural action.

9) The climate crisis requires systemic, structural change across our global society and economy. Footholds of agency exist at every level, for all individuals and institutions, to participate in advancing climate solutions.

10) Greta Thunberg: “You must take action. You must do the impossible. Because giving up can never ever be an option.”

We should probably add that we need to stop, as quickly as possible, all pollution – that is all waste which cannot be processed by the ecology in the amounts that are emitted. We also need to stop deforestation, and over-fishing.

We need to phase out all subsidies for fossil fuels, whether they are taxpayer handouts, tax breaks, tax evasions, royalty holidays or anything else. If needed the recovered money could be used to help renewable development.

All of these moves will cause lots of opposition, but they are necessary. It is not just a matter of what we do, but what we refrain from doing.

Tags:climate change, social action, technology
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

A sketch of the Dynamics of Climate Argument

March 13, 2020

There are several points which seem relevant to the question of the politics of ‘disbelief’ in climate change, and the popularity of refusal to act when it seems needed, even if surveys continually report the result that people say they want action.

General factors affecting information in “information society”

The dominance of neoliberalism with its long established belief in economic growth at all costs, the sanctity of corporate profit, hostility to environmentalism (especially when this affects the profit of established companies), active disempowering of political participation by ordinary people, and its tendencies to plutocracy, is vital to the promotion of climate change denial or do-nothingness. Wealth gives groups of people the power to promote information that suits them. However, I’m not going to consider that here, it remains a background. This post will be about the dynamics of information society and what I call ‘information groups’.

Most of the problems with climate inaction stem from the obvious fact that, in an ‘information society,’ even one with lots of good knowledge, nobody can accurately ‘know’ everything. People cannot accurately know even a fraction of what is relevant to them. Even if they specialise in a field they almost certainly do not know everything in that field either.

Most of us are stunningly ignorant about all kinds of things. The more ignorant a person is, the harder it is for them to recognise their own ignorance – they have little accurate knowledge with which to judge what is plausible or what are the likely consequences of their actions.

Furthermore:

1) Information and communication are only secondarily about accuracy. Information and communication primarily function to create group bonds and group memberships (what Malinowski called phatic communication), and to persuade others to do as the speaker prefers.

Given this, information and communication can be thought of almost entirely in terms of strategy and tactics, or the effect that the message has on others. Rather than keep talking of strategy and tactics, I will, from now on, use the term ‘politics’. If accuracy contributes to this politics then it can be important, but it tends to be secondary. We all know that in everyday life people lie to keep others on side, to avoid hurting them, or to keep bonds functional and relatively harmonious. This is normal in conversation. It is a daily experience at work, in encounters with management in particular.

Truth is not always necessary, and is often avoided to help social functioning, avoid conflict, and get on with those in power.

Although complete inaccuracy could eventually lead to breakdown, it may in the short term contribute to political success in terms of producing harmony and co-operation within the group, and asserting dominance over other groups.

2) Need for information filtering. In ‘information society; with massive amounts of information available, people need to filter information otherwise they cannot orient themselves in the world or act in the world. There are too many contrary positions for ease of functioning, and given that people know information is often false, expressions of ignorance, or deliberate lies for political purposes, they cannot accept (particularly uncomfortable or disruptive information) immediately.

This lack of accuracy and certainty in information, is so fundamental to modern life that it is more useful and accurate to talk of ‘disinformation society‘ than of ‘information society’. The society does not function entirely through accurate knowledge, but through using or dealing with an ‘information mess’. Information mess can be increased deliberately, as when Steven Bannon, who was an adviser to President Trump, recommended “flood[ing] the zone with shit.” This prevents consensus about accuracy or probability from forming, and it creates a disorientation, which might help people to be manipulated by dominant people within the group.

3) Information groups as filters. Because of the disorientation arising from too much contradictory information, people end up relying on other people (groups) for filtering information and belief. This involves the creation of strong group identification, and a level of trust and distrust of that group and other groups. These groups I call ‘information groups,’ they help people decide what is real. In disinformation society, many of the primary information groups seem to be politically oriented. Perhaps this is because politics is about action and orientation in the world, and this is what has become confused.

This kind of group identification involves personal identity as well, as it sets forth who one is to like, admire and emulate, and who one dislikes, avoids and tries to be different to. In that way, a person’s sense of who they are in disinformation society can come from those they identify with and the principles, or information, they identify with. The stronger the boundaries around the groups a person identifies with, the more strongly the group acts as a filter, and can reject unwelcome data in general.

Because of these processes of self-identification, the people in the group have a claim to be moral, while those outside the group (especially if classified as oppositional) rarely appear to have such a claim. Leftwingers are communist, satanist, effeminate whimps who cry a lot. Rightwingers are stupid, ill-educated, redneck, racists.

The prime point of these processes is that if an information source seems to be an exemplar of the group and its values, then its information will seem more trustworthy than if not. If the information appears to come from a source which is not exemplary, or is exemplary of the ‘opposition group’ then the information will seem untrustworthy, or ‘politically motivated’. If a source can make contrary information seem to come from an ‘opposition group’, while their own information matches the information groups’ values and beliefs, then they will often have achieved persuasion, without any mention of ‘facts’ or any real evidence.

Group alliance and identification becomes the primary (and unconscious) way of determining what is to be believed and what is to orient action.

There is also some research that suggests that having one’s opinions confirmed by others is pleasurable, and having others disagree is unpleasurable, so there is further incentive to seek out sources and others who agree with you and thus join information groups, even if without being aware of it.

4) Knowledge and Status. One way of claiming high status and functionality in information society, is to claim, and persuade others in your information group, that you are knowledgeable, well informed and certain, and that others are not. This probably decreases the chance of the person being well informed, because they ‘know’ the truth of their own certainty, and ignore counter arguments and data. However, the certainty (especially if the person is enunciating positions of group identity) can be attractive to other people in the group, and helps those people gain certainty in their own knowledge and orientation, and in the incorrectness, or immorality, of those who disagree. It also grants the original person more power, authority and influence; so it becomes a self-reinforcing loop.

To repeat: Solidarity, or lack of solidarity with the information group, acts as a filter for the information a person receives and accepts. Consequently, it is important for successful propagandists to manufacture a strong degree of solidarity and identity amongst those who support them, and to break the solidarity and identity of those who oppose them. The more confused the information mess, the more the zone is flooded with shit, the more that any hostility of ‘information outgroups’, to the group and its identities, will appear to make the solidarity of within the group reassuring. This also has the result that most conveyors of misinformation will be repeating what others have told them and not be deliberate propagandists.

Experience of repetition of information from multiple sources (even if they are from the same information group), makes that information more compelling, it gives it social backing and certainty – as well as implying people who disagree must be mistaken.

The other side of keeping the information groups’ truth going, involves, increasing the distrust of sources the person might disagree with (because of their group identification), and a degree of building trust for those sources they agree with.

In capitalist information society, distrust can be a general framework, not only because there is so much counter-information, and so much alienation from the ‘establishment’, but because distrust allows a person who finds their favoured sources have deceived them, to say that they never trusted them anyway, and to keep on following them and keep their group identification. It declares their wisdom and freedom – they are not being manipulated, they can tell themselves and others, they know how to evaluate news.

Practical consequences of the above.

Within this framework

1) Winning Rhetoric.

The modern right appear to want to win at all costs, they do not appear that interested in accuracy, truth or principle, which does not contribute to victory. Indeed they may well regard ‘the masses’ as needing to be led, and have no problem manipulating people and lying to them. The current left (such that it is), on the whole, tend to regard the people as equals and as needing to be informed, rather than manipulated. In disinformation society the left is vulnerable, and will generally lose.

2) The Process of Persuasion has several prongs:

a) Binarism. You need to make an opposed binary, ‘us and them’, and to convince people that they cannot trust the institutions and information of the other side.

b) Condemnation In pro-fossil fuel thought, this involves attacks on scientists as socialist conspirators, or as only being in it for the money. In climate action thought this involves condemning people on the other side as corporate tools, trolls, or ignorant ‘rednecks’. The abuse helps keep parties apart when they attempt to discuss the issue (“the other side is so abusive, they can’t think”). If this strategy works, people on our side no longer even have to listen to the other side.

c) Trust? This leads to the situation in which we are virtuous, and (on the whole) can be trusted, while those immoral people who support the other side cannot be trusted with anything.

d) Messy contradictory messages. For example, when Lomborg implies we don’t have to do anything, but research is necessary, nuclear is necessary, CCS is necessary and so on. This allows people to take a flexible position, with regard to winning an argument. “We need do nothing and we must do research into green technology, but not their green technology.”

It actually appears, in this case, that the idea seems to be that we don’t research or explore nuclear or the CCS, even while promoting them as solutions. That way you can confuse the issue, and attract both those who think something should be done but that renewables or social transformation is not the answer, and those who want to do nothing.

These strategies are so common, that people may not even think about them, but just deploy them.

3) Muddy the waters by:

a) Playing on the idea that ‘consensus’ means that scientists got together and agreed on something for their own purposes, rather than were persuaded by the evidence. Its a conspiracy!!

b) Providing other scientists or even non-scientists who can put forward the position there is no climate change, or its not humanly caused. This confuses the issue.

This is effective because in information society, most people are ignorant and confused, and cannot check the research themselves. They probably will not check whether the sources ‘refuting’ climate change are climate scientists or not, but if it turns out the source does not have experience in that field, then it does not matter as climate scientists are immoral and conspire.

c) Insist the media cover ‘both sides’ of the controversy equally. If they won’t then they are biased. Everyone on the right ‘knows’ the media is left wing, because it occasionally criticises the right, so this is easy to believe. This is despite the obvious fact that the media is owned and sponsored by the corporate sector, and hence is likely to support that sector and its established authority. Those people who insist that the media cover all sides of the climate ‘debate’, never insist that the media cover all sides of the economic debate, and that debate is actually a real debate. So this insistence seems purely political.

d) If you can persuade people on your side that only a few media organisations are truthful because they support “our side,” and those organisations run specific campaigns, then people will tend to believe those campaigns, because those media organisations are part of the information group.

e) Flooding the zone with shit, means that much real information will be ignored or become normal, as when the repetitive narratives of President Trump and his allies’ corruption, deceit and convictions become normal, and they pass away beneath new showers of shit, and are not repeated ad nauseam as were the allegations of Clinton corruption, which then appear true, even if they never resulted in anything.

4) Emphasise the costs and uncertainties of action.

Do not mention the costs and uncertainties of inaction. In a social situation where neoliberalism is based on the idea that cost to profit is bad, this will help emphasise the immorality of action.

5) Heroic individualism

The US has a guiding belief in heroic individualism, which grows out of, and feeds into contemporary neoliberalism. Not only does this individualism fit with the survival politics of neoliberalism and disguises the fact that we don’t come to know things by ourselves, it also sets up the idea that the person taking what is portrayed as a ‘minority’ position is heroically doing the research by themselves. They will not realise that most of their heroic research is being channeled by their own side (or propagandists for the establishment, or people appearing to be on their side) into work which supports their sides objectives – which may not be their own objectives of finding ‘truth’.

I have met many climate change deniers who seem to consider they have done research, when that research only involves reading what deniers say. If the group opposition is established strongly enough they don’t have to read that which they might disagree with, as it is clearly faked. They have little to no contact with real research, don’t know how to recognise it if they did, and frequently misuse it when they find it (apparently not even having read it, in many cases). Those people who tell them they are wrong, are clearly being persuaded by the group mind, the dominant faction, the uniformity of the media etc. Again they do not have to listen.

6) Claims of persecution

Another important tactic is to imply the information group is being persecuted for its knowledge by a dominant group. This reinforces the idea that counter-information is purely a matter of the other groups’ politics, and thus dismissable. However those in our information group are heroic individuals struggling to get the truth out against powerful opposition. This is so, even if the side one is on is actually the powerful one largely successful in stopping information from circulating. Thus rightwing governments often insist employees not discuss climate change, take down information from government websites, scrap research and so on, while claiming to be in a persecuted and censored position.

7) Role of Wealth

Information is spread by the use of wealth, which helps generate repetition. If information is considered only in strategic terms (as opposed to accuracy terms) then, if you are wealthy enough, information can be easily disseminated, through the use of people who are not officially connected with you, and who sound like they are members of particular groupings. We can instance the mud that has stuck on ‘Hilary Clinton-criminal’ despite continuing long term ‘witch hunts’ which have never resulted in enough evidence for her, or her associates, to be charged with anything. The repeated allegations are enough, and become reason to stay with the opposition to her.

8) Information hangs around

In information society, refuted information remains, and can always be found by those who don’t know of the refutation and be used again. In any case the refutation can usually be dismissed as biased.

Climate change is particularly challenging for human groups, because climate change information generates what we might call an existential crisis in individuals and in society.

If climate change is true, then it changes everything. Almost all the actions we now think of as normal and which contribute to our security and orientation in the world, are harmful. The patterns of order and life-meaning that society has developed disrupt the orders and meanings of that society, and our way of life. There is no easy solution to such problems. We cannot safely simply continue to act in the ways that we have previously supported. Traditional socialism, traditional capitalism, and traditional developmentalism all seem to be dead ends. Historically, and at present, they produce more pollution than functional ecologies can process. Through that action these modes of life destroy their ability to establish and maintain themselves. We cannot return to Lenin with ecological success any more than we can return to Nehru, Menzies or Atlee. This means that our previous understandings and life patterns are useless. This is disorienting in itself.

Likewise, if a person decides to deny the importance or reality of climate change, they still face an existential threat, because they know that others wish to completely change their ways of life, and it is not clear what is to be done to stop them, except to deny the problem, or say it is out of human hands, and continue on as best they can.

In this kind of situation, optimism is both easy and deadly. It is relatively easy, in a situation in which there is no agreed upon solution, to convince people that the established modes of life, and/or theories of life, are both necessary and relatively harmless. People want to continue, and are encouraged to shelter in their established group identities and to enforce them, as the breaking of those identities is an apparently obvious form of disintegration. The strengthening of identity groups serves to reinforce the power of those established in those groups (particularly true in religion, eg. Islam and fundamentalist Christianity), which can lead to encouragement of those identities by dominant factions.

The crisis apparently strengthens the function of information groups, and the need for information groups and leads to political inaction and paralysis.

The only way out is to understand these dynamics and the mess they produce, and start using them properly or undermining them.

Tags:climate change, Disinformation, politics
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

On a Bjorn Lomborg Article 02: Rhetoric

March 11, 2020

Continuing from part 1

1) Do not mention that pollution can cause problems, so we do not have this drawn to our attention. Particularly don’t mention that if pollution cannot be processed by ecologies, or disrupts or poisons ecologies then we are playing a losing game. You certainly don’t want people to think that modern economies seem to function through pollution and destruction. If things are not mentioned, and people want to believe the economic/survival system is ok, then they will forget them, at least for a while.

2) Do not mention that some forms of pollution (carbon emissions) cause global warming, so we do not have to think about this.

3) Do not mention that emissions have been increasing steadily over the last 20 years so the problem is becoming more intense.

4) Do not mention that rapid climate change (which is caused by emissions) will have severely costly and disruptive effects on society, so we do not have to think about the consequences of continuing to emit, and only think of the costs of acting.

5) Have a dramatic headline, so that the article implies an attack on all green actions, while in the article suggest that the most practical policy… “is… investment in low and zero-carbon energy innovation.” That way you can satisfy the hard core ‘let’s do nothing brigade’, and should anyone object to your support for inaction, say that you are clearly arguing for sensible research.

6) Refer to sources, but do not identify them, and imply the results are uniform and everyone agrees on them.

7) Mix up basic issues like intensity of fires with areas of fire, so that the problem can seem to be diminishing and it appears that worrying about fire is bad.

8) State as fact something which is a matter of interpretation, or dispute, such as renewables cannot replace fossil fuels because they are too expensive.

9) Do not mention the subsidies that fossil fuels do receive and have received in handouts, tax breaks, or State funded building.

10) Make token suggestions for nuclear and CCS research, but do not mention that they are costly and difficult, and therefore, by the argument being followed, not worth pursuing. Also mention batteries, but forget to mention that the reason for being interested in batteries is renewable energy.

11) Suggest that if this research does not eventuate, it is because climate action people are afraid of innovation or have agendas, rather than because the fields are costly, and uncertain, and less commercially attractive than renewables, or because the right is apparently not interested in anything that does not support fossil fuels.

12) Suggest that the fires have been exaggerated by those with a “specific agenda”. Do not mention that the seriousness of the fires has likely been downplayed by those with a specific agenda, and that the downplayers only solution to the problem is to keep on with what we are doing, have more fires, and get used to it.

13) Be certain about the figures you use, but imply other figures are not calculable.

14) Extract Australian actions from world actions, when both climate change and Australia actions are world phenomena.

15) Extract the effect of actions taken now, from the history. If we had acted earlier then this would not be as much a problem as it is now, but we did not act earlier because of similar arguments. If we don’t act now, then we are ignoring the increasing consequences.

16) Use spurious accuracy in the figures, to imply scientific veracity

17) Suggest some remedies to lower fire spread. Forgetting to mention that we already do controlled burns but it is getting harder to do enough because of lack of rain and changing climate. Forget to mention that fire proof houses have burnt down, or that the temperatures were so great that apparently aluminium vaporised. Don’t mention that grasses and crops burnt fiercely.

18) In summary we can say the technique involves asserting certainty and reassurance where there is none (the fire was not that bad, renewables are too expensive, nuclear and carbon capture are useful, we cannot proceed with the technologies we have, any bad effects will be in the distant future, climate action will not help, action is too expensive, and we can just manage as we are), and uncertainty where there is little (assertions, or implied assertions, that climate change is not getting worse, climate change does not make intense fires in Australia more likely, emissions do not matter, continued growth is not harmful, nuclear and CCS are cheap and sensible, and fossil fuels are neither harmful nor expensive to taxpayers). He may also hope that his readers are so longing for his answers, that they do not notice the reverse plausibility of his claims – or maybe he is primarily engaged in persuading himself.

19) Basically he provides a screen for avoiding the issues, or the changes we are experiencing, and while we cannot be sure, that seems to be his purpose.

There is a third article on a rather silly editorial which uses Lomborg as an excuse.

Tags:climate change, Disinformation, politics
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

On a Bjorn Lomborg Article 01: The Argument

March 11, 2020

I was recommended to read an article by Bjorn Lomborg in The Australian the other day. So lets look at it.

It was called “We don’t have money to burn on green mania”

Presumably the headline is meant to imply that we should not spend money on climate change, new green technology, or developing the green technology we already have that works? However the headline might be the Murdoch Empire’s gloss and not his. So we should probably ignore it, even if it is part of the articles’ rhetoric.

The article opens by arguing that the bushfires we have had were not that significant, and do not call for “drastic climate policies”

Apparently in 1900 “11 per cent of [Australia’s] surface burned annually. These days, 5 per cent of the country burns every year.” I’m not sure where the satellite pictures for that information came from, and he gives no source, but let us assume he is correct. Does this mean what we call traditional burning was still happening across Australia? How intense were these burns? For instance, were long established rain forests burning (the type that have not burned in 100s or perhaps thousands of years)? Where the burns patchy, leaving areas which could shelter animals and plants and let them spread out again, as is normal, but unlike the current burns?

Everything else I’ve read and heard implies that the bushfires last year, were more extensive than previously after we started using modern firefighting techniques. For example the Bureau of Meteorology, in its annual Climate statement, says:

The extensive and long-lived fires appear to be the largest in scale in the modern record in New South Wales, while the total area burnt appears to be the largest in a single recorded fire season for eastern Australia.

Although it is not a formal study the chief of the Rural Fire service in a press released entitled ‘Fire season comes to a close in NSW‘ remarked:

Today marks the official end to the most devastating bush fire season in the state’s history.
NSW Rural Fire Service (NSW RFS) Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons said this season had been unprecedented in terms of conditions experienced, the loss of lives and property, and the threat to communities across large parts of NSW.
“NSW RFS crews and other agencies have responded to more than 11,400 bush and grass fires that have burnt more than 5.5 million hectares, the equivalent of 6.2% of the state,” Commissioner Fitzsimmons said.
“Fires this season have destroyed 2,448 homes; however, the great work of firefighters saw 14,481 homes saved.”
“This season there were six days where areas across NSW recorded catastrophic fire weather conditions.
“At the height of activity, there was on average around 2,500 firefighters in the field each shift with up to 4,000 on days of increased fire danger and impact.

The fires were behaving in manners seen rarely by fire fighters (such as burning back over the same areas (making hazard reduction burns less useful than normal), generating their own weather, burning down previously untouched rainforests, and so on). We had weeks of dust and ash in Sydney, which I’ve never seen before. It certainly looked different. I’ve written about this before, and plenty of commercial media has discussed reports from fire fighters. Even newsltd can point out:

The deadliest bushfires in the past 200 years took place in 1851, then 1939, then 1983, 2009, now 2019-20. The years between them are shrinking rapidly.
news.com.au 17 Jan 2020

For a summary see the climate council.

The point is that it is the intensity and destructiveness of burns which count, not the area of burning, and he should know that.

He might even be missing the fact that some parts of Australia are wetter as a result of climate change and may have fewer fires as a result; that could seem to explain his argument and observations, assuming they are correct in the first place.

It is odd, but throughout his article, which is (at best) arguing for an ‘unusual position’, he gives no references at all. For example “A new review of available data suggests it’s not actually possible to detect a link between global warming and fire for Australia today.” Surely it would not be hard to name this review and where it was, or will be, published? Given that Lomborg is supposedly a scientist and an expert, who is not writing a blog but in the public media to convince people of a position, this lack is pretty inexcusable (whether it comes from him, or his copy editor).

Then he implies that doing something (presumably in Australia alone, as that seems to be his focus?) would not make any appreciable difference to the fires. This is something which might be possible, but he simply cannot know, and he gives a spuriously accurate figure, so it seems empty talk. (The “burnt area in 2100 would be 5.997 per cent instead of 6 per cent.” Given the precision of 5.997% then we can accurately predict that the burnt area will be exactly 6%?) But obviously the situation would be better if everyone did something.

In the long run, climate change action has to be global, but if we wait for everyone to act then it will be too late. Countries who can, and are relatively wealthy have to move first. Nobody will act if the wealthy countries do not act first.

He suggests that “for decades to come, solar and wind energy will be neither cheap enough nor effective enough to replace fossil fuels.” That is something that many people dispute (including the CSIRO). See also [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]. In Australia people are prepared to build renewable energy, or to put it on their rooftops, but no one will build coal power without government subsidy. It would be nice to have some arguments and figures in favour of Lomborg’s position, but none are presented.

He is correct that the IEA reports state that the amounts of energy currently (2018) coming from renewables is trivial, although it is going to be significant soon in some parts of the world (the UK apparently, for not that much cost outside the Hinkley Point reactor which will be boosting electricity prices, way above their current levels).

Lomborg oddly neglects the parts of the IEA reports where they state we have to reduce emissions, and we have to do carbon extraction because of those emissions, if we are not going to face massive and extremely costly disaster. There is a real problem with emissions which he chooses to ignore, altogether. I guess he hopes his audience will not remember the stuff about carbon budgets and how we are exceeding them.

He then seems to imply that people concerned about climate don’t want innovation, which is odd. He writes:

We need to find breakthroughs for batteries, nuclear, carbon capture and a plethora of other promising technologies. Innovation can solve our climate challenge. Unfortunately, many reports on Australia’s fires have exploited the carnage to push a specific agenda.

First of all, wanting to do something is an agenda – well I guess that is True!

However, the only people opposed to innovation are those that don’t want anything to happen to fossil fuels.

It would be great if Australia was supporting innovation, but politically this is not happening. The federal government even ran scare campaigns about electric vehicles…. hardly an innovative, or constructive move. And of course there is the Federal government’s continuing war against science and the CSIRO, which was almost the first move of the Abbott regime (cf The Land), and has been continued since. That is war against both innovation and accurate data. It seems to be a war in favour of ignorance or ideology.

But putting all hope in innovation is silly; we have to work with what we have as well. While innovation is great, we cannot guarantee innovation will come in time, or in the form we want it, or cheaply. Indeed his talk of costs, implies he would only accept innovation if it did not cost that much; for example “The costs alone make this ‘solution’ to climate change [that is, reducing carbon emissions] wishful thinking.” Perhaps, to both himself and neoliberals, not spending taxpayers’ money on anything other than themselves is more important than survival?

He also neglects to mention the cost of the massive amounts of subsidy still pouring into fossil fuels, through direct taxpayer handouts and special tax and royalty favours. There were people in the Coalition wanting to give Adani billions of dollars, including the royalty holiday they are already getting, for a mine which will produce trivial numbers of jobs, as admitted by Adani in court, where there are penalties for lying. But Australia is not the only place cheerfully using taxpayers’ money to subsidise fossil fuels, and harm the taxpayer.

Conservative estimates put U.S. direct subsidies to the fossil fuel industry at roughly $20 billion per year; with 20 percent currently allocated to coal and 80 percent to natural gas and crude oil. European Union subsidies are estimated to total 55 billion euros annually.
Environmental and Energy Study Institute 29 July 2019

An IMF working paper, argued that figuring in destruction (including deaths from air pollution) as part of the free costs that fossil fuel companies receive, then global fossil fuel subsidies grew to $4.7 trillion, representing 6.3 per cent of combined global GDP, with annual energy subsidies in Australia totaling $29 billion. They said:

Efficient fossil fuel pricing in 2015 would have lowered global carbon emissions by 28 percent and fossil fuel air pollution deaths by 46 percent, and increased government revenue by 3.8 percent of GDP

In 2017, the IEA estimated direct subsidies to be in the order of $300 billion. The IEA stated:

untargeted subsidy policies encourage wasteful consumption, pushing up emissions and straining government budgets. Phasing out fossil fuel consumption subsidies is a pillar of sound energy policy.

Forbes, not known as a radical magazine, summed it up as:

“the $649 billion the US spent on these subsidies in 2015 is more than the country’s defense budget and 10 times the federal spending for education”

To return to Australia, the group, Market Forces, estimates:

that tax-based fossil fuel subsidies cost over $12 billion a year federally… Direct handouts and contributions to the industry are doled out at both federal and state levels. On top of this, public money is used to finance fossil fuels through our national export credit agency EFIC, as well as our involvement with international financial institutions.
Market forces

It would probably be useful to reduce handouts for harmful industries. Fossil fuels are established and destructive and should not need help if they are still viable. At this moment fossil fuels not only cost us death through pollution, despoilation of the environment, and climate change, but they also cost taxpayers large amounts of money which could be used elsewhere.

What is odd about this, is that a recurring theme in Lomborg’s earlier work is a call for ending fossil fuel subsidies. For example:

Governments around the world still subsidise the use of fossil fuels to the tune of over $500bn each year. Cutting these subsidies would reduce pollution and free up resources for investments in health, education and infrastructure.
The Guardian 20 Jul 2016

It might sound cynical, but it is more than likely he knows who he is writing for.

It also seems to be the case that conventional nuclear needs massive governmental support, not only to get built and decommissioned, but for insurance purposes which could encourage shortcuts as the company does not pay for damage, as I have written before. So I guess for him, nuclear is out, even if he gives it a token welcome in his list of needed research.

This seems to be the standard neoliberal approach to problem solving. They say the left is causing a problem by stopping them from having nuclear energy, but they neglect that they are in power, and could have nuclear energy if they wanted, and they rarely actually do anything towards getting it; probably because of the costs, and possibly because it would go against their support for fossil fuels at all costs.

Carbon Capture and Storage has numerous problems, as I have mentioned before. It is also massively expensive, and nowhere near ready to solve any climate problems. It has had money thrown at it, and little has resulted. So that is two out of three of his recommended research areas which he then seems to delete because of costs.

So while we can agree “We need to spend far more resources on green energy research”, Lomborg’s argument seems directed at reducing our real ability to do green energy research. Again in previous articles for a different audience he has said things like:

[a better option than compulsory emissions reduction is to] make low-carbon alternatives like solar and wind energy competitive with old carbon sources. This requires much more spending on research and development of low-carbon energy technology…..
The New York Times 25 April 2009

I should probably add that, at least according to the people I’ve discussed these issue with in business, local councils, community energy and so on, the main obstacle to renewable energy in NSW is not lack of subsidy and not the supposed cheapness of fossil fuels, as renewables are said to be relatively cheap to build and supply, but government regulation which favours the fossil fuel and established power companies, and makes doing supposedly simple things like having solar power on one roof power a building over the road, or on a new piece of property, more or less impossible.

The grids are also not where the renewable power stations are due to be set up, the private grid owners generally see no reason to help their competition, and the Market regulator is cutting new business off until the late 2020s. So if we want to lower costs, let’s get rid of some of these restrictions, or start an infrastructure program to extend and refurbish the grid. We might make a significant path into that project for much less that the pointless and polluting Westconnex thing.

He says, correctly, that we also need to “to develop medium-term solutions to climate change,” but he then goes back to discussing how bushfire is not really a problem, and cutting emissions is “not going to do a thing.”

However, as well as ignoring the consequences of emissions again, he is silent on one of the real problems with the fires, namely that the Federal government would not even listen to people telling them there were likely to be intense fires because of climate change, and that the NSW government cut back the staffing in parks and wildlife so it was harder than usual to prepare for the worst. There was no political will to make:

better building codes, mechanical thinning, safer powerlines, reducing the potential for spread of lightning-caused bushfires, campaigns to reduce deliberate ignitions, and fuel reduction around the perimeter of human settlements.

There is, as far as I know no attempt to research these processes, or other processes, such as returning carbon to the soil to help moisture retention, changing patterns of agriculture so that paddocks and fields don’t burn, providing tree shade in paddocks to shelter animals and retain some more moisture, not logging forests after burning and disrupting soil carbon intake and regrowth and so on.

All of these processes might need research to see if they are effective, but as its the Murdoch Empire we must attack the Greens, and these problems were not mentioned.

We can probably guess that those people who decide that climate change is pure politics, will not want to respond either by preparing for the worst, or doing research into green technologies. Consequently, we probably will not put money into green energy research, or danger abatement research, without a change in government at the Federal level, although the State coalitions in SA and Tas seem to be moderately sensible about this.

Then if we are looking at costs, as a supreme factor, we need to look at the costs of not reducing emissions, and not preparing to respond. I have no idea what these will be, but we can assume they be massive. For example the Australian Tourism Export Council estimates via a survey that its members will lose $4.5b this year cf [1], [2]. This effect will be exaggerated by the Coronavirus – that may have nothing to do with climate change, but it is an example of how crises can magnify each other, and that will happen under climate change.

With the runs of days over 40 centigrade, people will have to move out of the outback and we will start losing food supply as well as water. I’ve repeatedly heard farmers talk about this.

Antarctic temperatures seem to be rising in summer; they hit 20 degrees C this year, a few days after breaking previous records, and that will certainly lead to more ice melting and hence significant sea level rises, and this will probably form a feedback loop; more ice melts, warmer temps, more ice melts.

Torrents of meltwater pour from the Greenland ice cap, sweltering under a 15°C temperature anomaly. Daily ice losses on this scale are 50 years ahead of schedule: they were forecast by the climate models for 2070. A paper in Geophysical Research Letters reveals that the thawing of permafrost in the Canadian High Arctic now exceeds the depths of melting projected by scientists for 2090.
George Monbiot 12 August 2019

Another piece of research, reportedly states that the “polar ice caps are melting six times faster than in the 1990s” which matches the worst case scenario for climate change.

I have heard scientists suggest that we are probably locked into 2 m rises already within our lifetimes. If so, this will be devastating and extremely costly all over the world. Coastal cities will become non-functional. But I guess there will be people who say, if we are locked into it, then we shouldn’t bother doing anything about it, and there are others saying that futures are unpredictable and so we should hope for the best and still not do anything.

One of the reasons that “if Australia were dramatically to change its climate policy overnight, the impact on fires would be effectively zero” is because people, such as Mr Murdoch, Mr Lomborg and the neoliberal right, have been pretending for the last 30 years we can keep increasing emissions forever. And the world has increased its emissions dramatically over the last 20 years. So they have been succesful.

Whatever the article implies, few people on the ‘climate change is real’ side, are saying we should not prepare for the worst and be ready to adapt. As I’ve said, quite a number of people think we have already passed tipping points, which have locked in change to weather patterns and water levels already. However, if we don’t cut back emissions more or less now, and stop planning to increase emissions in the future, the situation will almost certainly get worse and worse, and they strangely object to that…..

Getting worse and worse will increase the expense of dealing with the problems, will destroy living standards, destroy wealth, destroy political stability, destroy national standing, provoke refugee movement and so on. All of which people on the right might be thought to find objectionable, but apparently do not.

Australia has to reduce emissions to help political action to slow emissions elsewhere, as we are one of the highest per capita emitters in the world (even without counting our fossil fuel exports), and who will reduce their emissions if wealthy countries like use will not?

If we pollute more than the planetary ecology can process, or take more from the earth than it can replenish, then we end up harming our country. This is simply reality, and Lomborg simply ignores it.

The next post looks at Lomborg’s rhetoric.

Tags:climate change, Disinformation, disorder, politics
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Baroness Thatcher and the Moment of Climate Retreat

February 28, 2020

All Baroness Thatcher’s realism had gone by the publication of the 2002 book Statescraft, which she reportedly recognised was her last book. She was, sadly, becoming increasingly fragile and unwell. However, there is little mark of this fragility on the writing style or the forcefulness of her arguments.

This section of my exposition, includes more comment on the Baroness’ arguments than previously. This is because they need to be challenged, and because they seem incompatible with the positions she took while PM.

The section, “Hot Air and Global Warming” comes in a chapter defending capitalism from its critics.

Her main focus in the surrounding section is on refuting prophecies of doom:

the better things are and the greater the reason for optimism, the louder the voices prophesying doom seem to become… taking the longer perspective, global gloom is out of place… Was there ever an age when children had better prospects, all things considered, than those born into the world today?
p.444

She argues capitalism and liberty are responsible for this success. We might wonder if capitalism and liberty are always, and indelibly, joined even by pointing at British History (certainly the path is not straightforward, and has a lot to do with the militancy of the working and middle classes, and their suspicion of capitalism), but she argues:

We should be very wary indeed of turning aside from the path that has made us rich and free, simply because some group of experts or a collection of NGOs advise it
p.445

She argues Malthus, who suggested that the direction of humanity was towards mass death because population always increased faster than food supply, was simply wrong. This is despite her earlier warnings about population increase as being a problem, and the obvious fact that certain levels of human population (200 billion??) may be unsupportable by the planet in nearly all circumstances. Indeed population increase in non-western countries seems to have become one method the contemporary right has developed to blame climate change on other people.

Thatcher argues that people like Malthus, underrate “mankind’s ability, given the right framework to invent and adapt” (p.447) Indeed, but it is still theoretically possible that there may be times in which the speed of the problem-increase overwhelms people’s invention and adaptation. TThere is no guarantee we have not reached, or will never reach, that point. We may not have, but that is a hope not a certainty. In her words the “right framework” may not be present or even possible.

She generalises her response to Malthus to the problem seers of today:

Today’s doomsters have broadened their attack. It is not just population growth by economic growth… that they dislike…. Many of the gloomiest warning were associated with a group of international experts calling themselves the Club of Rome
p.447

This pessimism was supposedly a dominant force in the years leading up to the 1980s. This may be something of an exaggeration: if it was dominant, surely people would have done more to face the problems?

Only when Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office did we hear an alternative, optimistic message – that our free-enterprise democratic system had the moral, intellectual and practical resources to overcome any challenge.
p.448

Again this is a hope, not a certainty. It is not proven for ever, and cannot be proven in advance. And why should our “moral, intellectual and practical resources” not include Government policy and direction? After all, neoliberals seem to recognise the rights of governments to direct people to keep the neoliberal system going, all the time.

She rightly emphasises that cutbacks, through policy, are not the only methods:

we are constantly assailed by warnings that we cannot go on consuming. But we hardly seem to reflect upon the extraordinary way in which we get more and more out of less and less…. Less farmland is producing more food. There has been a dramatic fall in the number of famines.
p.448

there are, of course, still natural disasters. But it is by scientific and technological advance that we predict them, plan for them and cope with them. That advance occurs in free-enterprise capitalist societies, not in sclerotic socialist ones
p.448

So government planning for disaster is not impossible, and we can use science to predict such possibilities.

Before opening her section on global warming she remarks:

We should, therefore:
Recall how wrong the doomsters have been and take comfort from the fact.
Learn the lesson that as long as a free political system, a free society and a free economy are maintained, the ingenuity of mankind is boundless
p.449

That human ingenuity has been very great, does not mean that it is “boundless”, can solve all problems through uncoordinated profit driven action, that such profit driven actions can solve the problems in the time available to avoid mass suffering, or that these actions will not have unintended consequences, which require more action to remedy.

The section on global warming opens with a long footnote refering to various books and articles which she has read on the matter and which have persuaded her. Non of these writings are by climate scientists, or from scientific publishers, or scientific journals. They are all from corporately sponsored neoliberal think tanks, such as the Reason Public Policy Institute, Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, Centre for the New Europe, and the Institute of Economic Affairs.

These are ‘research’ establishments, who’s results and opinions can be predicted in advance. They largely appear to say what their sponsors require. It could be suggested that these documents serve primarily propaganda purposes, and aim to oppose ‘action on climate change’ to ‘capitalism’, and suggest any planned climate action must represent dictatorial socialism. They do this to defend the established corporate profit of their sponsors. It is, perhaps surprising, that the Baroness decided to listen to them, rather than to scientists in the field. But, these neoliberal thinkers are her primary in-group, and if it was possible to stop her identifying with scientists and get her to completely identify with neoliberalism then that would make science less persuasive to her.

“The doomsters’ favourite subject today is climate change. This has a number of attractions for them. First, the science is extremely obscure so they cannot easily be proved wrong. Second, we all have ideas about the weather: traditionally, the English on first acquaintance talk of little else. Third, since clearly no plan to alter climate could be considered on anything but a global scale, it provides a marvelous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism.
p.449

There is no reason to assume that while global action might provide a “marvelous excuse” for socialism, it could not also provide an equally marvelous excuse for encouraging transnational capitalism to work its supposed magic – unless one of the prime directives of neoliberalism is liberty for the transnational corporation from any form of responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

She gives some examples of exaggeration.

President Clinton on a visit to China, which poses a serious strategic challenge to the US, confided to his host, President Jiang Zemin, that his greatest concern was the prospect that ‘your people may get rich like our people, and instead of riding bicycles, they will drive automobiles, and the increase in greenhouse gases will make the planet more dangerous for all.
p.450

While all Chinese driving petrol fueled cars does present a real problem, the actual remark seems unlikely and her source is an article in the American Spectator rather than any government record. But rather than dismiss recognition of the problem as foolish, we should wonder what the solution might be, or at least wonder how we might avoid the problem. Previous versions of Thatcher might have recognised this as a problem requiring governmental help to overcome.

She then refers to Al Gore saying:

‘I believe that our civilisation is, in effect, addicted to the consumption of the earth itself.’ And he warns: ‘Unless we find a way to dramatically change our civilisation and our way of thinking about the relationship between humankind and the earth, our children will inherit a wasteland.’
p.450

This is possibly true. It looks more likely to be true now, than might have done then, but the statements are not that incompatible with statements in Thatcher’s own speeches. She was, at one stage, able to wonder if all economic activity was compatible with survival.

The fact that seasoned politicians can say such ridiculous things – and get away with it – illustrates the degree to which the new dogma about climate change has swept through the left-of-centre governing classes.
p.450

These comments do not seem that ridiculous, or to be dismissed on the word of some pro-corporate think tank, without further evidence.

She remarks she was active in the anti-chloroflurocarbons debate, and successful. But the greenhouse gas effect “was a more difficult issue, because the science was much less certain.” As we have seen, she had always recognised this uncertainty worked both ways. By 2000 the climate science was far more certain, but perhaps she had not read it, becoming more interested in defending neoliberal capitalism than in the science?

I was more sceptical of the arguments about global warming, though I considered that they should be taken very seriously…. there was, in fact, rather little scientific advice available to political leaders from those experts who were doubtful of the global warming thesis…. By the end of my time as Prime Minister I was also becoming seriously concerned about the anti-capitalist arguments which the campaigners against global warming were deploying…
p.451-2

That some “other side” is facing a problem by advancing their own arguments in their normal fashion does not seem an excuse to argue the problem is not real. It should give people an opportunity to present better policies, and to defeat that other side yet again.

the choice might appear to be between preservation of the climate and preservation of prosperity. This is, of course, how left-of-centre opinion wished and still wishes to portray it
p.451

“Might appear” is not the same as “must appear.” Does she have to accept this supposed left-of-centre opinion as the only possible approach? Again why not recognise the problem and present better arguments?

Personally, I’m inclined to wonder if the issue was not politicised by the neoliberal think tanks, who wanted it to seem like the political action of defending capitalism and capitalist ‘liberty’ was incompatible with the political action of dealing with climate change. If so, then they succeeded, but there may be no necessary incompatibility; that would have been a possible approach, if you were not primarily interested in preserving fossil fuel corporation profits.

She moves on to illustrate the bias of anti-global warming arguments and their anti-capitalism.

When President Bush anounced the US would not sign the Kyoto Protocol.

“The French Environment Minister said, ‘Mr Bush’s unilateral attitude is entirely provocative and irresponsible’.
[While the EU Environment commissioner] issued dark if unspecified threats against US business [and] Britain’s own Environment Minister.. described the American decision as ‘exceptionally serious’ [but ruled out sanctions].
p.452

Whether you believe in the perfections of capitalism, or not, these comments seem pretty mild. They didn’t involve much more than an expression of disappointment that the President of the world’s biggest economy was going to put the possible future of the world on hold and thereby disrupt the pretty minor global action and promises required by the Kyoto Protocol. There is nothing necessarily anti-capitalist, or unreasonable, about objecting to this.

Kyoto was an anti-growth, anti-capitalist, anti-American project
p.453

This is an assertion and no evidence is presented. The US was then the world’s biggest economy and, both at that moment and historically, was the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Given this, it does have more responsibility than other relatively low emitters, and this means, that it has more actions to take and more wealth to take those actions. Kyoto is only anti-capitalist to the extent that neoliberalism supports capitalism without responsibility or honour.

in matters of public policy it is as important to recognise what we don’t know as what we do… The golden rule is: all government interventions are problematic, so intervene only when the case is fully proven
p.453

We do not know for sure, it is not fully proven, that Capitalism can solve this problem. The passage of events since Statescraft was published implies it cannot, yet we still do not act. Previously Thatcher recognised that the results of global warming could be worse than predicted; we are by its very nature, going into uncharted territory and do not know exactly what is going to happen.

She argues, referring to “some experts,” that the long term trend of warming is “not relevant to current concerns” (P.453). Presumably these are experts from the think tanks, not climate scientists. Again this case is not proven. However what Thatcher did not say is also significant, in terms of contemporary denial. She did not say that scientists were part of a conspiracy, that the science was being faked, or that the science itself was biased by leftist politics.

Secondly, CO2 is not the only greenhouse gase “so exclusive concentration on CO2… is bound to mislead.” (p.454)

This position is probably true. However, it means we should deal with all greenhouse gases, not just CO2. We should in fact return to Thatcher’s earlier position that there is a general systemic issue with ecological destruction and change. Climate change is not the only problem.

Third

There is now, as always, nothing that the liberal intelligentsia likes to believe more than that ‘we are all guilty’ But are we? The facts are unclear.
p.455

So what if this is true? And it is not proven. This does not change the problem. That the problem may harmonise with biases in some intelligensia (clearly she is not talking about the neoliberal think-tank intelligensia here) does not mean it is necessarily untrue. It does not mean we should stop research, stop looking at the latest research or try to mock research by real scientists, that you disagree with.

She remarks that the IPCC report “is a great deal more tentative than some alarmist assertions” (p.455). Previously she could admit that getting scientists to agree on a general proposition was difficult. The reports are likely to be tentative, by their nature.

Carbon dioxide levels have increase as a component of the atmosphere by nearly 30 per cent since the late eighteenth century, probably because of past deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels. But in any one year most CO2 production is not related to human beings
p.455

The question is whether this issue of the smallness of yearly human production of CO2 is relevant. Essentially, she mentions the importance of the cumulative effect of emissions since the late eighteenth century to dismiss it.

In fact, less than 5 per cent of the carbon moving through the atmosphere stems directly from human sources – again mainly: burning fossil fuels and deforestation….
p.455-6

She previously understood that small persistant changes can have complex consequences. Now she apparently does not. Things become simple and linear.

“The more closely one examines specific proposals to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere by emission controls alone, the more costly and economically damaging they become.
P.456

In that case, the sensible thing to do is to suggest better procedures. She has been prepared to engage in economic distortion and taxpayer subsidy when she considered it useful in the past, so why not now? Cost is never an excuse to do nothing. Surely we can rely on the ingenuity of capitalists to deal with the costs? Perhaps it will spur them into action?

The problem of acceptable costs, is acceptable to whom? Is people being driven from their homes by rising sea levels, drought or unbearable temperatures an acceptable cost of keeping profits high?

it will be be necessary to resolve many remaining uncertainties before risking action that makes the world poorer than it would otherwise be by restraining economic growth…
p.457

Apparently, for her, there is no imaginable paradigm in which capitalism could flourish without growth, and so we must be completely certain before acting against something which would likely cost economic growth. What would allow such certainty is not described.

Climate change doe not “mean the end of the world: and it must not either mean the end of free-enterprise capitalism”

There is no reason it should – if pro-capitalists are prepared to engage with the problem, or with other people.

Once her allies suggested to her that her beloved free-enterprise capitalism was being challenged by ‘socialists’ because of the problem of climate change, the Baroness appears to have suffered a major failing of confidence. She was previously famed for not backing down when she thought she was right. Here she did.

Her back down was so complete that she did not advance the case that free-enterprise should be encouraged to face up to the problem, and she did not propose non-socialist measures to deal with the problem. When faced with socialist opposition to many of her actions as PM, she continued; she did not say, “oh well we can’t do anything”.

However, faced with the apparent choice proposed by the think tanks of either pro-capitalism or action on climate change, she collapsed and allied with her mentors and supporters.

Therefore her path brings up the issue of whether it is possible for neoliberalism to actually deal with climate change or other problems, at all. At one stage she could, but the more she listened to neoliberal think-tanks the more this became impossible.

Tags:climate change, complexity, Disinformation, neoliberalism, politics
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Climate, technology and chaos Blog

Posts Tagged ‘climate change’

A denial diagram

COVID and CO2

Lomborg cannot be blamed for this

Spirit, soul, flesh and the climate crisis

A sketch of the Dynamics of Climate Argument

General factors affecting information in “information society”

Practical consequences of the above.

1) Winning Rhetoric.

2) The Process of Persuasion has several prongs:

3) Muddy the waters by:

4) Emphasise the costs and uncertainties of action.

5) Heroic individualism

6) Claims of persecution

7) Role of Wealth

8) Information hangs around

Climate change

On a Bjorn Lomborg Article 02: Rhetoric

On a Bjorn Lomborg Article 01: The Argument

Baroness Thatcher and the Moment of Climate Retreat

Pages

Archives

Categories