Posts Tagged ‘Disinformation’

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More on Climate Denial and Defence

April 24, 2022

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

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

This is a standard position amongst the supposedly concerned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4) Climate change is a complete falsehood

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Survival means:

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

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

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The ecological death spiral

March 26, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This means every day is essential….

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

March 14, 2022

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

Westlake defines behavioural realism as:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Technologies and struggles over use

February 21, 2022

None of this is original.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Modes of Denial and Defense

January 30, 2022

People often indignantly say they do not deny climate change, but it sometimes seems they might as well.

There are a variety of ways of defending oneself and politics from the prospects of climate change.

  1. Climate change is unreal or is not happening.
  2. Climate change is unreal and it’s all just the result of a vast conspiracy of scientists from all over the world. This is somehow much more likely than that there is a conspiracy of fossil fuel companies, who would like us to continue fossil fuel burning. These two points are a little rarer than they used to be, and the people who used to take these positions now often take one of the following.
  3. Climate change is real, but its no big deal. People who think it might be a big deal, are to be dismissed as ‘alarmists’, ‘chicken littles’ etc.
  4. Climate change is real, but it’s not humanly generated and, as it’s not humanly generated, humans can do little about it. Clearly this denies the human cause of climate change, so it promotes continuing as normal, usually without even thinking about adaptation. Fossil Fuels Corporations and more fossil fuels are fine. This merges with…
  5. Climate change is real, but it happens all the time. While recognising the existence of climate change, the person defuses it, and implies that there is nothing special about this particular lot of Climate Change. This change is normal – even though it seems to be rapid and non-localised. Again the result is to protect the person and the social establishment from having to change, or even think about the problems. Climate change is something humans have faced locally before, but we haven’t experience as a planet for a long, long, while before recorded history.
  6. Climate change is real, but it is so economically costly to do anything about it, that we should not do anything about it. People need the forms of development we have developed over the last 120 years, and recognising the consequences of human action will keep people poor. Climate change is less threatening to our well being than the economy, which will destroy us if we change.
  7. Climate change is real, but the consequences of dealing with it are politically costly. Dealing with it might involve governments making requests of corporations, or imposing taxes on corporations, so we should do nothing, so as to avoid complete tyranny.
  8. Climate change could be real, or is real, but the models climatologists use are inherently implausible, so we will just use our common sense and abandon all these models and assert that everything will be ok. We will assert the world cannot change hugely, and ignorance is our great defense.
  9. Climate change is just one of many problems. So let’s do nothing about all of them.
  10. If climate change is real it will be fixed by the Free Market and magic. If people want to buy products that cause their death and the death of others, that is their fault, and they will evolve out.

I’m sure there are more, and I’ll add them when I remember them…

But real understandings of climate change make several points:

  1. Climate change is happening. It is happening quickly, and the speed of change seems to be increasing, as we go along. It gets more dangerous the longer we delay attempting to fix it.
  2. Climate change is caused by human industry producing greenhouse gases. Human production of greenhouse gasses usually comes from modes of energy consumption and production, agriculture, transport, building, mining for fossil fuels, leaks, deforestation and so on. We need to change the ways we do these things.
  3. Climate change already seems to be costly in terms of natural disasters, and the cost will likely increase.
  4. Climate change, along with other human activities, will increasingly disrupt the known patterns of the weather system, and disrupt necessary ecological processes for some while. This will almost certainly have detrimental effects on everyone’s lives and the international political process will likely become unstable.
  5. Surviving climate change involves curtailing greenhouse gas production, and adaptation to the changes in weather and ecology.
  6. How we decide to make, or not make, these changes will result in political struggles.

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Jordan Peterson: Poverty and climate change

January 29, 2022

There is a relationship between poverty and climate change. No question. However it might not be the one that Jordan Peterson is claiming.

The usual position is that poorer people are generally forced to live in areas nobody who can afford to get out of would live. Not always true, because poor areas can also be quite communal, supportive and looking out for each other – co-operation helps survival. The land they occupy tends to be less fertile or vulnerable to seizure if it suddenly proves useful as the laws are not written to protect or benefit them. They tend to be in areas subject to flood, subject to heat, subject to drought, subject to disease, subject to heavier pollution, poisoning and rubbish dumping. In the cliché, the rich live at the top of the hill and the poor get the sewerage run down – they literally get pissed on. Corporations come in, use up, or destroy, the land and move on, out of reach of recompense; their promises of local prosperity for the poor never being fulfilled.

The poor are vulnerable to climate change, generally because of the areas they live in. However, as I have said previously the ‘ecological footprint’ of poorer people tends to be small. The ecological footprint (or pollution and destruction total) of wealthier people tends to be huge. For example, the Center for Global Development states that the average Briton produces 200 times the climate emissions of the average Congolese person, the average people in the US producing 585 times as much. I’ve mentioned the idea of the ‘polluter elite‘ [1], as an essential part of capitalism, before.

So what is Jordan Peterson’s attitude towards this?

He argues that:

The fastest way to make the planet sustainably green and ecologically viable is to make poor people as rich as possible as fast as we possibly can… poor people [are] not resource-efficient. They use a lot of resources to produce very little outcome, so that’s a problem… when you’re insecure on a day-to-day basis, you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, you’re not paying attention to the broader environment around you

Taft. Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan Talking About Climate Change Will Make Your Brain Dissolve. Gizmodo

This more or less contradicts the data which suggests that rich people use huge amounts of resources. Naturally if they use huge amounts of resources they may well (by some measures) produce a big outcome, but it may not be all that efficient, but wasteful – and its easily possible to assume that when resources are easy to obtain, and produce no immediate suffering to the person obtaining them, that this person will not care how much they expend and waste, and pay little attention to the environmental consequences of that use. It is wealthy societies which are destructive. The logic works both ways, but let use assume that Peterson is right and people should be wealthier and this will produce green behaviour.

Peterson apparently says something to the effect that “Everything pollutes something – net-zero is nonsense“. This may be true (indeed I’ve argued that the mode of pollution is as socially important as the mode of production), but only a very wealthy person could assume that any amount of pollution somewhere else is ok.

My source is not clear on how Peterson wants to make people rich – indeed one source suggests Peterson criticises Corporate capitalism implying that companies “thrive at the disadvantage of the worker“. So he gives little hint of what we should do, as I presume he will not discuss the benefits of socialism or the mixed economy. My guess is that he is inconsistent and follows neoliberalism and handing everything over to the corporate market – this suspicion is boosted as he apparently argues that deregulation doesn’t create ecological disaster and that fracking is great. The problem here is that while we want to help people become as prosperous as possible, we don’t want everyone to have a huge ecological footprint. If the average Chinese or Congolese person gets to have the same ecological footprint as the average Australian does now, we are stuffed. We need prosperity with a smaller footprint. That means we need to learn to reduce Australia’s ecological footprint (or whatever your country’s footprint is, etc.). And we need to stop profiting from encouraging other countries to increase their footprints by buying our fossil fuels. We need to be able to generate wealth without pollution and destruction – partly because the costs of pollution and climate change are already high [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]. This again points to the difference between ‘wealth’ and ‘illth‘.

As poor people usually survive with a very low ecological footprint, they are often amazingly resource efficient, whatever Peterson says. This is one reason we send our garbage overseas. People reuse it. They extract minerals and valuable materials from it. They are generally not that wasteful. I’ve talked to people from some developing countries and they have been amazed at what Australians habitually throw out. You can’t afford to be wasteful if you are poor. Everything counts. That is certainly how my parents were brought up. They were not endlessly disposing of stuff – they reused, they repaired and so on. I would guess this could be true of Jordan Peterson’s parents as well. Thrift is usually considered a virtue, but modern machinery is often quite difficult and expensive to repair by design – hence the idea of a right to repair [9], [10], [11], and the request for biodegradable plastics and other materials.

Peterson continues:

You can’t even really worry about your children’s future in some real sense because ‘No, no, you don’t understand. Lunch is the future. We don’t have lunch, we’re hungry and that goes on for like a month we’re dead.’ That’s the future.

Taft. Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan Talking About Climate Change Will Make Your Brain Dissolve. Gizmodo

Yes extreme poverty may not be good for future thinking, but then you need to ask what causes this kind of poverty, and it is often brought about by other people getting extremely rich; taking the land or forest the poor people have occupied and looked after for centuries, displacing them into cities (or other places where they have no land they know) where they cannot grow anything or look after themselves easily. Or perhaps poorer people suffered from taking perfectly legal loans which turned out to have unpayable interest rates, and they fled or a parental member of the family suicided for shame. Or they were forced into buying GM seeds which were infertile, or the water dried up because it was used for local industry or industrial farming, or climate change…. Riches and illth creation can involve destruction for some.

The problem here, apart from the likelihood that all this will get worse with continuing climate change, is differential of power. And again there is going to be little difference if getting people prosperous does not weaken the power differential and the force of unequal law.

What Peterson says is true:

The attempt to make the environment habitable and sustainable — that comes up of its own accord at a grassroots level and spreads everywhere.

but this is usually prevented by the hierarchies that exist and seek for profit rather than sustainability. Corporations may have no tie to the land, and no care for it, at all. They are only a temporary resident exploiting resources, not planning to maintain things ecologically for all.

Now Peterson tries to get political saying:

“left-wing types” seem “willing to sacrifice the poor to their Utopian [visions]” by pushing green energy resources to make the world more sustainable.

Well that may be true, if you have seen the damage that massive coal mines, or fracking can do to the land to provide old unsustainable energy. The IEA has said since 2020 that

Solar PV and onshore wind are already the cheapest ways of adding new electricity-generating plants in most countries today….

Solar projects now offer some of the lowest-cost electricity in history.

IEA. Renewables 2020: Analysis and forecast to 2025. p12-13

Renewables are consistently cheaper than new coal or gas based electricity. Renewables not only have the potential to be cheaper, but they are modular – they can easily be expanded when locals have more money. Villagers can become self-reliant on renewables and control it. It may be awkward but is often better than what they have now. They don’t have to wait for power cables to be built to their village from some distant source, or serviced, and they don’t have to pay for the capital expense of that wiring. Once renewables are paid for, they are paid for, ongoing costs are minor.

Peterson develops his incorrect argument that renewable energy is more expensive, by saying:

What happens is that in any system that’s hierarchical—and left wingers know this because it drives their whole philosophy — when you stress the system, the disproportionate amount of that stress falls on the people who are in the lower rungs because they’re barely hanging on anyways.

This is true of hierarchies in general. The weird thing is that previously we have seen Peterson defending right wing established hierarchies and refusing to admit there was any problem at all. So he here may be changing his whole political opinion. Perhaps he objects to hierarchies he does not like and which may not exist, or perhaps he is opportunistic. This is why you need a whole transcript. Anyway, in this case, we might all be able to agree we should scrap the hierarchies, including the capitalist hierarchies, and hand choice back to the poor.

He continues:

There is the old saying, ‘When the aristocracy gets a cold, the working class dies of pneumonia.’ So fine, increase energy costs. Well, what happens? A bunch of poor people fall off the map and the more you increase the energy cost, the more that happens.

True again, so you want cheap locally controlled and owned energy, which will have to be renewable. You don’t get cheap locally supplied fossil fuel energy, which does not harm the land. To support the poor, you want to scrap fossil fuel mines that displace people, you want people not to be forced away from the land that supports them, and that they know how to look after. Let’s get rid of extreme poverty without increasing ecological footprints – and lets try and reduce our own footprint as much as possible. That way we will be providing an example, and investing in ways of doing things that are less destructive, so the innovation will occur and spread.

Neoliberalism is not the only way forward, indeed it is a method to make things worse.

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Jordan Peterson, Climate and Complexity

January 27, 2022

This blog is written at a disadvantage, because I don’t have a full, or even a partially full transcript of the extremely long discussion between Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. I’m relying on media articles which may be inaccurate or deficient. As soon as I can listen to enough or get a full transcript then I will update.

The main point of this blog is that Peterson is correct in some ways, but he is trivially correct and does not apply his criticisms to everyone, including himself. He also understands some aspects of complex systems, but does not understand enough… neither do I, but that is a different issue.

Complexity 1: Models are complex and probably inadequate for exact prediction

Peterson claims that climate is so complex, it can’t be accurately modelled.

This is partially true. The distinction I have emphasised repeatedly is that we can often model trends, but we cannot predict particular events accurately in the future. This seems to be correct. Saying we cannot model everything with 100% accuracy is not the same as saying we cannot model anything, including trends, for climate at all.

As Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler and senior adviser at Nasa, says:

Peterson has managed to absorb the first part of George Box’s famous dictum that ‘all models are wrong’ but appears to have not worked out the second part ‘but some are useful’

Readfern ‘Word salad of nonsense’: scientists denounce Jordan Peterson’s comments on climate models. The Guardian, 27 January 2022

Peterson apparently continues:

Another problem that bedevils climate modelling, too, which is that as you stretch out the models across time, the errors increase radically. And so maybe you can predict out a week or three weeks or a month or a year, but the farther out you predict, the more your model is in error.

And that’s a huge problem when you’re trying to model over 100 years because the errors compound just like interest.

Readfern ‘Word salad of nonsense’: scientists denounce Jordan Peterson’s comments on climate models. The Guardian, 27 January 2022

Another account says he said that errors “compound over time,” which means, apparently, the models are “all errors.” He argues that trying to predict what’s going to happen with the climate, is like trying to “predict how your life goes.”

Let’s be clear, that if you delete our ability to predict trends, then climate is unpredictable, just like your life. However, the fact that your life is unpredictable in specific, does not mean that you cannot predict useful things about your life, and plan to build a better life. Indeed Peterson writes books about this, so we can presume he believes this is possible.

If you spend your life shopping online rather than doing your work, you will not get better at work. If you keep moving from one article to another you probably won’t retain that much. If you eat too many foods full of sugar, all the time, you will probably put on weight. If you take cocaine frequently it will not help your health or your thinking. If you repeatedly step in front of speeding cars you will probably be injured. If you keep your room tidy you might eventually gain a tidier mind. These things may not happen with everyone, but we can see the trends and make predictions based on those trends. That is the basis of his psychological advice, and it is true with climate as well.

However, Peterson does not transfer his insights about human life into climate, or his insights into climate modelling into his own modelling.

Thus he does not say climate change is real, and we know what bad habits it is based upon and we can correct those habits. He does not say we don’t know exactly what speed climate change will come, or how bad it will be in 20 years, but it will probably be bad, and its worth trying to avoid.

He appears to assume that because climate modelling is not 100% accurate, the climate will stay stable, or not change too much. What is his modelling for that? Why should we assume that his modelling, which seems to be based on hope and the assumption that the future will match the past, is more accurate than the climate scientists models? I don’t know, and I suspect neither does he.

He is banking a lot on his ‘common sense,’ and his untested models, being accurate – which they won’t be as they face all the problems the scientists models face, and they are not being improved, or compared to the fullest data sets we have. His models are not even being compared to the results that say the hottest years and days ever recorded tend to accumulate in the last 20 or so years.

Errors can compound over time Peterson is correct. This is why scientists repeatedly reconfigure and improve their models, so that past data is better ‘predicted’ in retrospect and future data is more expected, and models checked when data isn’t as expected. If we were still using the climate models from the 1970s then they might be wrong, although some were pretty accurate. I quote the abstract of one article:

Models are compared to observations based on both the change in [global mean surface temperature] GMST over time and the change in GMST over the change in external forcing. The latter approach accounts for mismatches in model forcings, a potential source of error in model projections independent of the accuracy of model physics. We find that climate models published over the past five decades were skillful in predicting subsequent GMST changes, with most models examined showing warming consistent with observations, particularly when mismatches between model-projected and observationally estimated forcings were taken into account.

Zeke Hausfather,Henri F. Drake,Tristan Abbott,Gavin A. Schmidt Evaluating the Performance of Past Climate Model Projections. Geophysical Research Letters 47(1) e2019GL085378

Scientific models are being tested and improved, and made more complex, all the time.

Likewise, he should know that bad habits, such as continually polluting and destroying ecologies in search of bigger profits will probably not build better ecologies in the long term, that this destruction will almost certainly weaken human society, and that these habits will likely weaken human virtue and morality, and possibly personal functionality.

So Peterson is not consistent. He varies his implicit arguments when it suits his desire to support the status quo.

Complexity 2: Categories overlap

Peterson apparently claims that climate and environment do not exist, because they mean ‘everything’.

Peterson gets confused because he likes sharp distinct categories, and the world is not always like that. Human categories are not always 100% accurate and, in reality, systems often overlap with each other.

PETERSON: Well, that’s because there’s no such thing as climate. Right? “Climate” and “everything” are the same word, and that’s what bothers me about the climate change types. It’s like, this is something that bothers me about it, technically. It’s like, climate is about everything. Okay. But your models aren’t based on everything. Your models are based on a set number of variables. So that means you’ve reduced the variables, which are everything, to that set. Well how did you decide which set of variables to include in the equation, if it’s about everything? That’s not just a criticism, that’s like, if it’s about everything, your models aren’t right. Because your models do not and cannot model everything.

ROGAN: What do you mean by everything?

PETERSON: That’s what people who talk about the climate apocalypse claim, in some sense. We have to change everything! It’s like, everything, eh? The same with the word environment. That word means so much that it doesn’t mean anything. … What’s the difference between the environment and everything? There’s no difference….

Bachman Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson give their definition of Black and say “there’s no such thing as climate.” Salon, 26 January 2022

Let us be clear, a statement that implies the ideas of ‘climate’ connect to everything and the ideas of ‘environment’ connect to everything, is correct. However, none of his conclusions from this recognition are accurate, because he does not like that recognition, or shies away from it.

In reality, almost everything connects to everything. Jordon Peterson would not be online without the internet which involves the research of heaps of engineers and scientists, and continues because of maintenance people, and businesses, and people who build computers and cables, and the farmers who provide food for them, and the builders who provide buildings for them and their equipment, and the people who build roads the trucks can drive down, and drill the oil or build the electric engines. That all depends on the geological history of the planet, climate conditions and the weather that results, and that depends on the earth’s spin, densities of greenhouse gases, and cloud formations which depend on the sun and other things. The oxygen he breathes and the food he eats, depends on complex bio-systems and ecologies. His fame depends on a particular political patterning, which interacts with modes of celebrity and sales promotion and so on and so on. He presumably has learnt from books, and from other people. He shares an existing language with others. No one, and nothing, is an island of themselves. Everything depends on everything. It should be no surprise that from one point of view climate and environment involves everything. They are large scale contexts, and their background also forms a context – they are in two way interaction. For example, climate affects economic life, and economic life affects climate. Jordon may affect political life, and political life may affect his thought and popularity.

Models for anything are, as he states, based on a finite number of variables. They have to be. This is true of any understanding.

Absolutely accurate and all encompassing statements which are not definitional or trivial, are difficult and rare.

The intellectual models and understandings he promotes, by the same reasoning, are also incomplete. Does this mean they are worthless? Apparently not. They are apparently worth more than climate science. His skepticism is directed at statements he does not like, and is not directed to the statements he does like.

This also leads him to exaggeration. Most people don’t think we have to change everything to avoid ‘climate apocalypse’. Most people would insist that we need to stop changing the environment and the global ecology for one. Let us be clear these people may be wrong, but there is no evidence that people wanting to change everything are in the majority on the green side of politics. He is just panicking, because he appears to want nothing to change – and many things will change because of climate and ecological damage.

Conclusion to the first part

So. Peterson makes some valid statements, and uses them to come to invalid conclusions, probably brought about by his biases in favour of the current systems and its power domains.

Just in passing, Rogan appears to make a big fuss about how he wants to hear both sides. Climate denialism is pretty much the mainstream, as shown by lack of accurate reporting, lack of Government action and continuing support for fossil fuel companies. Has he ever had a climate scientist on his Show? Or is he part of the mainstream censorship apparatus?

The next blog will treat of Peterson’s reported comments on poverty, hierarchy and climate.

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Media messaging and information mess

January 3, 2022

I’m more or less copying this from a blog by Tom Murphy – Do the Math; the section called “Brainwashing Perfected.”

He is describing the “clever and effective” way that right-wing media outlets appear to manipulate their audience. They hammer the messages:

  1. The condescending elitists on the other side think you’re dumb. That they say you are dumb proves they are elitists who don’t live in the real world.
  2. [We all know these elitists who think you are stupid, are conspiring against you for their own elitist advantage. You are being held down and your real concerns dismissed.]
  3. However you are smart. You get through life. You know what’s what. We know that you’re smart and we trust that intelligence.
  4. We can trust you to understand the following insight ‘X’. The the elitists will dismiss and label this insight as stupid, or a lie, or as being conspiracy theory. However, being smart you will know it (in your bones, in your gut) to be true, because you understand how bad these people are. And it makes sense.
  5. [You know the intellectual elites hiding things by saying that what we are telling you is wrong, so it must be right to point out they are conspiring to deceive you].
  6. Only we can be trusted to be bold enough to tell you the real truth. Everyone else will deceive you deliberately. Don’t bother even looking at the pack of lies in “lamestream” media outlets, and warn your friends not to look either. These media are all oddly and independently consistent with each other, because they are conspiring to deceive you and leave you helpless against their conspiracy to strip you of rights and work.

The audience feels belonging, validation, purpose, and smart; they have the secret real knowledge that the morons on the other side do not have, or willfully ignore. 

Addenda

This works because of a prior creation of a sharp distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’. That helps people to not ask the obvious question of whether the elite on their own side is conspiring against them.

Creating the distinction is easy if you can get at least one side to spit on the other and abuse it continually. That will then eventually cause the other side to behave similarly. This causes continual tension and the two sides cannot talk to each other, and the division becomes even stronger.

If someone is made into a good exemplar of ‘us’ then they are trustworthy, or you can believe them. If someone can be made into an exemplar of ‘them’, then they are untrustworthy liars…. You don’t have to listen or understand – you can accept.

They must be evil, mislead and lying. They have nothing that is worth hearing.

If they think something that contradicts what we say and feel, they must be wrong, by virtue of that disagreement.

However, it is true there are lots of people on the left, who do spend a lot of time accusing the opposition of being deluded, stupid, redneck, idiotic, etc. This is simply falling into the right media’s trap 🙂

However difficult it might be to face abuse with politeness, being polite costs nothing, and might help break down the barriers, and get real conversations starting.

As I have said before, people on the right may be completely correct about their feeling that living standards have declined, that jobs are precarious, that futures are constrained, that government ignores them, that some billionaires are suppressing them or profiteering from them, that their culture is dismissed and threatened by others. They may be wrong about the causes, and those they support may be committed to making everything they fear worse…. but that is a different matter.

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Bane Shapiro: How to Destroy America

November 25, 2021

Shapiro has written a book which is supposedly diagnosing the problems with US, while actually promoting those problems.

Having read this book, I feel inspired to write another one – perhaps with the same title. It would be about the struggle between “unionists” and “woke” and would be just as unbiased and scholarly.

It would make points like:

Unionists believe that all real Americans are like them and agree with them; the rest are scum, not to be listened to, and possibly to be locked up, or shot in self-defense.

Woke believe there are lots of different groups in the US, that diversity is part of what makes people Americans.

Unionists believe that there is only one American history and everyone has experienced it the same way. There are no contemporary problems which arise from that history. History is a harmonious narrative of triumph over obstacles and in which slave owners cooperated with slaves and enobled them, and in which Native Americans knowingly surrendered to a superior culture.

Woke believe that history has been a different experience for different groups. Bosses and workers have not experienced history in the same way, white people not experienced it in the same way as black people, as Latino people, as native Americans and so on. This is normal. Histories of oppression still have effects on people, on where they live, on their general opportunities, on the way social institutions behave towards them and so on. Disharmonious history still has effects.

Unionists believe that talking about oppression, either recent or historic, just encourages fragmentation, and it should not be done. “I’m not racist therefore there is no racism”.

Woke people believe that not talking about oppression, either recent or historic, encourages and naturalises that oppression, and leads to fragmentation.

Unionists believe that the US “founding fathers” were men of extreme religious virtue, who followed a modern day protestant truth.

Woke people believe the US “founding fathers” had faults; many of them were slave owners, for example. These people were not modern day protestants, a lot of them were theists, deists and freemasons. They saw religions as potential sources of oppression of other religions, and were not keen on religious ‘irrationality’.

Unionists believe their religion is good and true and everyone should follow it. If they don’t they are probably satanic or communist.

Woke believe there are lots of different religions. Religions change and respond to similar and different challenges. Religions which encourage their followers to think they have the right to impose their virtues on others are dangerous to everyone.

Unionists believe religions should be able to discriminate against anyone they like, as long as it is not a fellow unionist.

Woke people are wary of giving people special permission to discriminate because those people say that is what God wants.

Unionists believe that the market always delivers the best results and governments always deliver the worst results – especially when governments try to curtail corporate power. In general, power based on wealth is not something they get concerned about at all – particularly if those wealthy people support or sponsor them.

Woke people believe the market does not always deliver the best result, and that people who are successful in the market tend to buy political power, so the country is ruled by the wealth elites for their own interest. On the other hand, the only thing which is remotely as powerful as the corporate sector is the government, so people should work to take back the government, and try to balance things out.

Unionists believe wealthy people deserve to pay less proportionate tax than poorer people.

Woke tend to believe that wealthy people can afford to pay more to benefit the society they use and benefit from.

Unionists believe that the only corporations and wealth elites who can be bad are recent: IT for example.

Woke people believe all corporations and wealth elites can be bad, some can be ok, and some can be mixed, but none of them should hold vast amounts more of power than anyone else.

Unionists claim the crimes of business leading to wealth stratification never happened or happened too long ago to matter.

Woke claim that crime matters whenever it happened, even if it did lead to current hierarchies.

Unionists seem to believe that any science which suggests some established corporate behaviour is harmful – such as the science of pollution, ecological destruction, climate change etc – must always be wrong.

Woke think the science is more likely to be right than assertions it can’t be correct because it would hurt the economy.

Unionists claim that any criticism of capitalism as it is, leads to tyrrany.

Woke believe that not criticising capitalism as it is, leads to tyrrany.

Unionists believe that America is a rights based society and that wealthy people on their side have more rights, because they are more talented and virtuous, and can afford to do things.

Woke people believe that America is a rights based society, but many people do not have equal rights, and we should aim to produce equal rights as best we can, even if that means that our own rights to discriminate against the currently less powerful are impaired.

Unionists say they want everyone to be able to succeed through hard work, while trying to make this impossible through reinforcing the wealth hierarchy.

Woke people want everyone to be able to suceed through hard work, and try to make this possible for everyone.

Unionists like authority. They want everyone to agree. They will lie to attain this. These are noble lies that keep everyone together. They don’t critisise the obvious lies on their own side, because those lies are useful to their power.

Woke people think diversity is normal and creative. Different views are likely to help problem solving. Getting as close to the truth as possible is the best aim, as policy is more likely to work.

Unionists will try to steal elections as a matter of course, because they are right and it is impossible that anyone could disagree with them without some kind of conspiratorial, or traitorous, bent. They claim the US is a republic (ie an ‘oligarchy’) and aim to use people to make this even more the case.

Woke people believe elections should be open and free, and that losing is part of democracy. They claim the US is an imperfect democracy and could be improved.

Unionists believe that union comes through everyone being the same, or having the same opinions.

Woke believe that union comes through learning to live with real diversity.

We are faced with the fact Unionists have an obligation to understand American history, rather than impose idology on it. They have an obligation to understand economics and social theory without imposing ideology on it. They have an obligation to understand American cultures. Finally, they have an obligation to learn to live with Americans who are not the same as them.

Given Shapiro’s book, this is not going to happen soon.

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Cipolla’s Laws of Stupidity

November 9, 2021

Cipolla’s “Laws of Stupidity” (The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity) are an interesting ‘useful joke’ for anyone who is concerned with information distortion, or the production of disorder. However, I think they can be easily be made more realistic, expanded and personal solutions proposed.

The axes

Cipolla first sets up two graph axes. The first axis ‘measures’ whether an action is harmful or beneficial to the person performing the action. The other axis ‘measures’ whether the action is harmful or beneficial for others. He then puts forward the suggestion that there are four ideal types of behaviour

  • If a person performs an act which is beneficial to themselves but harmful to others, he defines them as a ‘brigand’. I will use the word ‘criminal’ because of problems with English, which I hope will become clear as we progress.
  • If a person performs an act which benefits themselves and others, then they are defined as ‘intelligent’.
  • If a person performs an act that harms themselves and benefits others, he defines them as acting ‘helplessly’.
  • If a person performs an act that harms themselves and others then they are ‘stupid’.

The Problem with Nouns

The problem with nouns is that they tend to imply stability, and suggest a person can be classified in one of these categories forever in everything. Rather strangely he does use the idea that people can behave helplessly. So let us consider a slightly more realistic set of definitions.

  • If, in particular circumstances, a person performs an act which is beneficial to themselves but harmful to others, then they are behaving criminally.
  • If, in particular circumstances, a person performs an act which is beneficial to themselves and others they are acting intelligently.
  • If, in particular circumstances, a person performs an act which harms themselves and benefits others, they are acting helplessly
  • If, in particular circumstances, a person performs an act which harms themselves and others they are acting stupidly.

This makes it clear that otherwise intelligent people can in certain circumstances act stupidly. Which is something we can agree with and is also is part of Cipolla’s second law. The question now becomes in what kind of circumstances will people act in particular ways, psychologically and socially? We may never find a complete answer to that question, but at least we have the capacity to shift from either praise or condemnation, into something which might prove useful to ourselves.

“When do we behave stupidly” not “Damn, you are so stupid”.

The ‘laws of stupidity’ may change a bit as a result, and we may get a few more such ‘laws’ which add to our understanding.

Law 1

Always and inevitably, everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

The amount of stupid behaviour is huge.

We can change this to: “In any given circumstances the number of people who will behave stupidly is larger than we think.”

This implies the people who behave stupidly in different situations may be different people – those people may behave intelligently, helplessly or criminally in other situations. We cannot assume that stupid people remain consistently stupid – indeed if they behaved in a stupid manner all the time, they might be more noticeable and less dangerous.

Law 2

The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

We can change this to: People who behave stupidly in one set of circumstances may behave in many other ways in different circumstances. “There is no observable behaviour which eliminates the possibility of a person behaving stupidly in some circumstance or other.”

Law 3

A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

This is a definition not a law. But it is possibly wrong in implying that people are coherently stupid. Let us replace it with another definition.

Definition: “A person is behaving stupidly when they cause losses to another person or group of persons, while themselves deriving no gain or even incurring losses.“

Law4

Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places, and under any circumstances, to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

Let us rephrase this as well: “People always underestimate the damaging power of people behaving stupidly. Dealing with a person who consistently behaves stupidly, or who behaves stupidly in the particular circumstances you are operating under, always turns out to be a costly mistake.“

This again helps to remind you that many people are not always stupid, and that a person who does not behave stupidly in most set of circumstances, can behave stupidly in another. It takes art to find out who is stupid, when.

Law 5

A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

This is partially a rephrasing of the last ‘law’.

“People who often behave stupidly, or who behave stupidly in the circumstances you are in, are dangerous.”

Extra Laws

Given this approach we can also add some extra laws.

Law 6

“Even the wisest person is capable of behaving stupidly in the right circumstances.“

Non of us are, at all times, immune to behaving stupidly. This could be thought of as a basic ‘psychoanalytic’ statement, pointing towards the unconscious reality: stupidity is not just other people.

Law 7

“The more immune we think we are to behaving stupidly, the less chance we have of perceiving our stupid behaviour, or changing it.“

This seems almost obviously correct. I have never met a person who I thought was behaving stupidly (as defined by Cipolla), who could see they were behaving stupidly at the time. They tend to be vituperative in their defense, and condemn everyone else for stupidity (or malevolence) rather than themselves. They can usually point to areas of life in which they are not stupid, as evidence they cannot be behaving stupidly now.

‘Causes’

The Causes of people behaving stupidly could be both psychological and sociological. It could be a feedback situation, the more people who behave stupidly the more others are under pressure, and the more likely they are to behave stupidly as well.

It seems probable that people are more likely to behave stupidly, criminally, or helplessly, when they are exhausted, overworked, feel that superiors in the hierarchy are pressing them or not listening to them (bosses, politicians or other rulers), when they have little hope for the future, when they are flustered, neurotic, in fear and so on. Some of these kinds of circumstances will arise because of the interaction of individual response and social factors; we cannot expect everyone to behave the same, simply that more people are likely to behave non-intelligently under pressure.

It is, for example, likely that people, in the Western World, and elsewhere, are feeling exhausted and pressured by work or by the lack of work, they are likely (under neoliberalism) to feel that bosses and politicians are not listening to them but to ‘elites’ (however they define that), they may have little hope for the future due to economic decline, personal debt, job insecurity, or climate change, they may feel the world never leaves them alone, or they may build up anger by participating in polarising information groups online. All of which is likely to narrow their focus, and influence them to behave non-intelligently in some areas of their lives. They also may lack models of intelligent behaviour to emulate.

Solutions

  • Recognise the possibility that you may be behaving non-intelligently in some circumstances.
  • While this may be influenced by others, change starts with yourself.
  • Few ‘normal’ people want to behave stupidly, criminally or helplessly. They want to help and build for themselves and others. They want less pressure.
  • Pause and break the cycle – regularly.
  • Five minutes in every hour, take a break – with no stimulation (No reading, no watching tv or youtube, no gaming, no chatting, no brooding, no problem solving, no web browsing, etc. ).
  • Listen. Accept what is. What you are feeling. Accept your body. Pressing discomfort down can be useful in emergencies. It is not useful all the time. Listen. Look around. ‘Listen’ again. Let ‘images’ arise if they arise.
  • Be honest and kind to yourself. Self compassion is nearly always useful.
  • Relaxing demands, accepting feelings, can lead to solutions arising.
  • This is close to what has been called Dadiri – being open to the world and its patterns.

This may well not solve all your problems (we may need a change of system, which starts with you and your interaction with others), but it will almost certainly help you to behave intelligently in more circumstances – and that might help change the world, so that people are more likely to behave intelligently more often.

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