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Jane Jacobs and the Dark Age Ahead.

July 7, 2020

In her book Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs explores the likelihood of a coming dark age. Not all collapses lead to ‘dark ages’, Sometimes empires collapse and something new is born. This blog post is just about Dark Ages.

Jacobs starts off by pointing out that cultural dark ages are not rare.
Historically we tend to think of The Dark Age between as occurring between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance. As she says:

So much had been forgotten in the forgetful centuries: the Romans’ use of legumes in crop rotation to restore the soil; how to mine and smelt iron and make and transport picks for miners, and hammers and anvils for smiths; how to harvest honey from hollow-tile hives doubling as garden fences. In districts where even slaves had been well clothed, most people wore filthy rags.

Many historians have pointed out there were islands of civilisation and some technological advancement during this period, it was not all cultural loss, and quite possibly humans did not realise there was much decline while they were living through it. Nevertheless this was a time of wandering in ruins, loss of skills, loss of life span, plague and famine.

Similar events have occured all over the world, all through history. Many cultures have disappeared in the face of conquest, genocide and slavery, and enforced destruction of culture – we can easily think of indigenous cultures which have disappeared, or have had to be recreated and reborn. A dark age for one culture, does not have to be a dark age for another, even if the victors are barbarous to the losers. However, there are plenty of pre-historic civilisations which just appear to have more or less vanished over a short period of time: the cave painters of Lascaux, Norte Chico, Çatalhöyük, Easter Island, the Maya, and so on.

Mass amnesia, striking as it is and seemingly weird, is the least mysterious of Dark Age phenomena. We all understand the harsh principle Use it or lose it…. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes literally lost?

Discovering the causes of loss of ability to transmit culture is an important research topic, and we may be on the verge of facing this loss as a problem. As with the Library of Alexandria the problem may not just be fatal blows, but an ongoing decay which removes resilience and value. The causes of such decay have to be uncovered so that we may possibly avoid them.

She points out that people may be blase about this happening in our current world because information is everywhere. But there are problems.

The first is that information is irrelevant if people do not try to find it, do not value it, do not know how to use it, have too much information to detect what information is the best, get confused by conflicting information, destroy knowledge of the information through social loyalties, or have a dominant group which opposes looking after the knowledge.

The second is that use of culture depends precisely on active use and emulation. As she says

[C]ultures live through word of mouth and example. That is why we have cooking classes and cooking demonstrations, as well as cookbooks. That is why we have apprenticeships, internships, student tours, and on-the-job training as well as manuals and textbooks.

Culture also works through exemplars, and through imitation of exemplars and through ‘mentoring’. If our cultural exemplars feel no need for our cultural riches then neither will those who imitate them, or classify themselves as belonging together with them. Information, awareness, and even wisdom will decline.

Thirdly culture comes through experience. If you don’t experience the culture then you will not understand it. If you haven’t been through the initiation rituals you loose experience. If you have not had an experience of the divine in the right circumstances, then social religion will probably not make sense.

Fourthly, culture depends on context, or on other aspects of culture, and behaviour. Not having the right cultural background, will make reading Aquinas, Shakespeare, Plato, Hume, Burke, Newton, Einstein, Freud, Confucius, Lao Tzu, the Vedas, or even basic textbooks, too difficult. There will not be enough connection to other knowledges for the information to be decodeable, or even interesting. Imagine trying to read an engineering textbook with no knowledge of construction in the world, or attempting to learn computer programming without a computer.

If we do not have a society in which people habitually interact, and reinforce a togetherness which builds on the past, then we lose access to information in books.

Jacobs suggests that in the US, cars and roads build disconnection, as in many places it is impossible, or difficult, to walk and build ties or recognition with people in your neighbourhood. You are all, more or less, strangers, and strangers tend to be wary of each other.

Fifthly, culture always changes. In some situations it is possible to build a new culture which is destructive of connections with the past, or with elite knowledge, with exploration, or with ‘civility’. People may try and reconstruct past cultures but, as Jacobs argue, reconstruction is never the same as the original. Sometimes the divergence can be useful, sometimes not.

One point to be distinguished here is the forgetfulness of acute trauma, which tends to be gradually overcome as people move back into normal life, and the chronic forgetfulness, or loss, which gradually becomes permanent. The gradualness possibly leads to a sense that ‘greatness’ is still here, when it is being lost. We are not aware of what we are forgetting, or don’t care. Perhaps we feel we have more urgent concerns, like survival. Perhaps we are violently displaced, without connection to our past or to people with similar backgrounds.

We know that without the depths of culture and connection to the past and others, people can sink into meaninglessness. They ‘disappear’, they can sink into despair and hopelessness – the world makes no sense, their fragments of understanding make no sense. Life seems fragmented and pointless. People can try to move on and embrace another culture which does not accept them, and does not gel with their past. People don’t, or become unable to, support each other – perhaps they don’t know those who they are with?

In this kind of situation conservers of tradition, or makers of innovation get lost. The culture radically simplifies, gets stripped back, and all previously valued technical skills start to decline.

Authorities may try to fix this problem by decrees, by force, by taking administration away from the locals, compelling forms of behaviour – saying that the people are barbarous or uneducated, but all this makes the situation worse. The ‘natural’ culturally evolved controls and interactions of their previous functional society, get weakened further, the control, or education, is remote from their life. It is rare for top down organisation to work, unless it aims at eradication (it is much easier to destroy than to build), or the leaders have a direct connection with people’s lives, or the reform removes some true obstacle from people’s lives like crippling disease.

The historical stories people tell may devolve to them being losers, or sinners, or somehow deficient. Resentment or lack of care may become the governing culture, leading to more fragmentation.

Encounters with more militarily succesful cultures is not the only cause of decay. As Toynbee recognised years ago, all cultures face new challenges as the world changes, and the societies themselves change. Sometimes the societies fail these challenges internally. The dominant groups are unable to respond, or they are so ingrained in their response they cannot do something new as that could threaten their culture, their world view, or the power they exert, or the habits they have gained.

People can have the most favourable conditions for life and destroy them. Jacobs examples the ‘fertile crescent’ which was the fount of world civilisation, yet lost it’s lead completely, and is now no longer fertile. They appear to have cut down their forests faster than they could regenerate, domesticated goats which ate new growth, and soil was lost, salt accumulated, water flowed through too quickly, drought got worse. The problems compounded and the ecology changed for good. This has happened to many cultures. Not being in a relatively harmonious relationship with their ecology, is probably a primary cause of collapse.

Leaders of cultures can retreat from the world, to try and preserve themselves from challenge, rather than face the challenge, this only leads to deadening. China had vast fleets exploring the world, but gave it all up and destroyed or diminished the knowledge they had of the non-Chinese world, as they had the supreme culture. The culture retreated and ossified, and was forcibly incapable of dealing with problems, such as the Europeans, when they arrived. They deliberately knew little about what they were facing.

Losers are confronted with such radical jolts in circumstances that their institutions cannot adapt adequately, become irrelevant and are dropped.

This is what is happening today. We can see it throughout the world. Climate change and ecological destruction are ignored, or denied (maintaining the economy and corporate power is more important), or enmeshed in fantasy solutions. The serious problems are not faced, or are to be faced at some time in a relatively distant future. The Coronavirus is dismissed, people deny it is serious, people assert the economy is more important, and that all will be ok, quite magically. In the US, people on either side of politics cannot discuss things, they just abuse each other and fear each other. A growing Republican meme asserts that if Joe Biden wins he will kill them all. This meme is possibly reinforced by attempts to ignore the pandemic.

Education is often divorced from life and tradition, people cannot see the importance of the past or, if they do, refuse to accept that anything modern and critical of that past, can be of value. Education is nowadays about providing credentials for jobs and being ‘job relevant’, not about wisdom or meaning. Even at university people are pressured into teaching for work, not for discovery or life proficiency. Indeed, this is what many students seem to want. They have no time for ‘high culture.’ Culture and the learning of the past is jettisoned to continue corporate profit and wage labour. Sometimes this arises because the past of science and technology is seen as irrelevant to the current day. As one conservative blog, which is kind of reviewing Jacobs, remarks:

Many middle-class or wealthy people don’t consider themselves barbarians at all. But if they see the passing on of wisdom and knowledge of higher culture not as the heart of education, but rather as a useless appendage, then they are barbarians, no matter how nice their lawn looks.
American Conservative

Commercialisation of culture may also be a problem. This may encourage cultural production, but it also can lead to a loss of the past, because it is not referenced, or it is not successfully profit generating. Much of this new art is to be consumed and thrown away, rather than act as places of reflection. Or it may select the lives of the wealthy, the vulgar, or sports people, as being the lives to emulate – the supposedly ‘self made.’

We can also see organised politicisation of knowledge. ‘Science’ is identified with a particular politics and then dismissed, irrespective of the evidence. People can come to see knowledgeable people as part of their oppression, part of what holds them back from success, and thus to be overthrown – and sometimes they can be correct, as with neoliberal economics, but it is in the interests of the leaders to only encourage certain ‘ directed skepticisms‘ [1] which correspond with retreat from disruptive problems, and thus lowers the chance of solving them. Once a ruling elite gets separated from the people, say by massive divergence of wealth, they will have no hesitation in going for the ‘noble lie’ and attempting to dismiss and suppress the most knowledgeable people around. They may well declare them enemies of the state or enemies of the people. This way knowledge gets lost in fantasy, or in people attempting to avoid being denounced.

Politics itself is now an elite occupation with people largely not drawn from those who experience people’s daily lives. They seem largely committed to maintaining the destruction of their culture. Taxes tend to be used to subsidise the wealthy, or stripped away from productive areas. Infrastructure, important for daily life (such as roads, bridges, rail, sewage), is allowed to decay, increasing the expense of operating and leading to technical failures. Supervision of the powerful is stripped back, or allowed to decline, so they get away with fraud and deceit, and social trust decays. People may come to think there is nothing professionals can teach that is worth learning, or moral to learn. Neoliberal politicians tend to argue that wealth is the primary virtue and that if something cannot make a profit, it should die, unless it is a wealthy influential business which should be bailed out by taxpayers. Neoliberalism easily becomes rapacious and ready to sacrifice everything to money.

In the US, President Trump seems committed not just to maintaining the destruction, but to increasing it, putting tools of the dominant elites in all important positions, increasing elite power and wealth, increasing ecological destruction and poisoning, stacking or ignoring courts, decreasing supervision of the corporate sector, and increasing the fractures between his supporters and everyone else, even to the point of civil war, or furthering distrust of the whole US system. Trump is a personified vector of collapse.

There is possibly a sense that Trump could only be defended by people who fundamentally had lost touch with their guiding culture, or a sense of responsibility. In this world, interference with justice, suppression of evidence, corruption, pandering to enemies, and so on, are simply said to be something everyone does. Consequently, there are only immoral exemplars or extremely good liars.

There is often an easy optimism that the pendulum will swing the other way, but that only happens in a functional culture. In a dysfunctional culture this rebalance may not occur. This seems especially so, when the dominant groups seem to see their solutions in terms of preventing a rebalance, or engage in pretending that the pendulum is actually swinging the other way from which it is, so as to keep it swinging in their direction.

[P]owerful persons or groups… have many ways of thwarting self-organising stabilisers – through deliberately contrived subsidies and monopolies for example. Or circumstances may have allowed cultural destruction to drift to the point where the jolts of correction, seem more menacing than the downwards drift.

Different factions attempting to secure their own sense of wellbeing may sabotage the well being of others, or even themselves. They can prevent the ending of ecological destruction for example. In the Fertile Crescent, there would have been those who opposed tree conservation because of needs for fuel, others could have opposed limits on the use of goats. China quickly lost the knowledge of ship building, the ways of financing the fleet, and ceased to allow the expression of curiosity about the rest of the world.

So dark ages come about, in part, because:

The ruling groups fail the challenges the culture is faced with.
Powerful interest groups demand that destructive behaviour continues.
Rulers withdraw from interacting with the world into self-obsession, obsession with religious, or cultural, purity, or military expansion against their neighbours.
The culture and people are displaced by massively superior and indifferent force.
Continuing environmental destruction, no matter how good the reason
Change happens too quickly to adapt to in meaningful ways.
Local community interaction and integration declines, so there is no community resilience, bounceback or mutual support. People do not know their neighbours.
Education moves away from life, moving away from the contemporary to the past, or focuses too intently on a particular domain of life, excluding all others, including tradition.
Government’s cease to spend on the people, or protect the people, and only work for the power elites. Taxes are not spent on public goods, or keeping roads, bridges, sewers, cables, knowledge, etc functioning, but on protecting those dominant elites who are the supposed source of general wealth.
People who are models for emulation appear overtly corrupt, immoral or deceitful.
Acceptable knowledge becomes dependent on profit, or on sticking to the religious or party line.
People, previously of the same culture, are separated into mutually non-communicating, and likely warring, factions
Loss of knowledge and culture, and loss of the supports of knowledge and culture.
Increasing gaps between the elites and the people. In power, wealth, military proficiency, education etc. which in turn increases the power, wealth etc of a smaller and smaller number of people.

Tags:Disinformation, disorder, politics
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Hypothetical outline of the decline of the library of Alexandria, and the decay of knowledge.

July 6, 2020

The decline of the famous Library of Alexandria in the Ancient World, could tell us something about civilisational and cultural decline, and the loss of knowledge. Many contemporary scholars mourn the loss of the library, because so much of our knowledge of the Mediterranean world and its philosophy and literature has been lost. We have only a tiny fraction of what was supposedly stored in the Library, and much of that in fragments. It’s loss seems heavy.

However, even a cursory glance at the historical materials will show that dating the famous destruction of the Library of Alexandria is not easy…. There are multiple dates and much dispute as to what date it was finally over.

But then, most of what we ‘know’ about the library, seems to be informed guesswork. We don’t even know when the library was built. Most people guess somewhere between between 320 to 270 BC. Neither do we know how many texts it stored during its height – estimates vary wildly, and I mean wildly I’ve seen figures from 40,000 scrolls (not whole works) to 500,000 works!

Neither do we know how many rooms stored scrolls; if we did, then this might allow some kind of real limits to the scroll estimates. We do know that they liked to have different versions of the poems of Homer. So much of the content may have been duplications of famous texts, and perhaps not as varied, or complete, as we might hope.

From a rather cursory investigation, I suspect there was not final date for the library… I’m not a historian so what follows is all conjecture, but it’s possibly something like what happened. Its ‘plausible’.

Sociology and physics of decay

Importantly, libraries require money to preserve buildings, acquire new texts, salvage old texts and pay staff. Even with sealed buildings you get pests, and in places like Alexandria, with no possibility of sealing buildings, there would have been problems with rats, mice, cockroaches, insect larvae, fungus and so on. (I’ve been told that birds can be a problem once they get in, and start shitting on everything, which then brings more vermin). One source I read suggests that ventilation to reduce fungus probably helped fires spread. So scrolls decay, and we need constant financing of copying to keep the scrolls intact. That could well involve the gradual accumulation of error in texts.

I don’t know much about ancient libraries, but I’d imagine the cataloging system required the memory of librarians. (There is some evidence texts were grouped by first letter of the author’s name and, at some time, Callimachus compiled the Pinakes, a 120-book catalogue of various authors, using various subdivisions – this as usual is lost other than a few fragments. There is a story that Aristophanes of Byzantium managed to remember where some texts were stored and this was so impressive he was awarded the head librarian’s job). This arrangement might also mean that texts were moved around and did not have a permanent order.

Keeping everything together would require constant labour and finance.

The larger the library the more money is required to just keep it going, and the less likely they are to be able to support themselves through user fees, or selling scrolls – they have to support the copiers, and books would be truly expensive without printing – a small market at best.

So libraries require constant bequests or taxpayer subsidies. Given the irregularities of investment in the Ancient world, you are basically needing taxpayer subsidies – which means those who pay tax have to value what is being subsidised. I’d suggest that scholarship is amongst the least valued of occupations. Bread and circuses and military subsidy are far more necessary. I suspect that cuts in monies for the library were easily made, and the more decrepit the library became the easier it was to make cuts, not do roof repairs, not clear out the vermin, sack the staff, lose texts or even sell scrolls to raise monies.

This of course decreases the value of the library and its stock. So the library could easily have been reduced long before it ‘vanished’.

Reading and so on, is an easily lost social skill, especially if only relevant to a learned class, and if Alexandria decayed as a society, which seems likely, then the level of interest in preserving the library and out of date archaic literature may have declined rapidly.

History of Accident

On top of that we have such things as the purge of philosophers by Ptolemy VIII Physcon in 145 BCE, because he thought they supported the previous ruler. The head librarian, Aristarchus of Samothrace, fled to Cyprus. Other scholars fled elsewhere. That would probably leave the library to decay even faster. If few people use it, it apparently needs fewer staff to support it, and decay does not stop.

I don’t know if scholars returned, although there is some evidence they did not for a long while; there were other libraries in the Ancient world, and places temporarily more hospitable.

In a way, just focusing on the Library of Alexandria, distracts us from wondering what happened to all these other libraries. It was not as if “all our eggs where in one basket.” We are looking at a general set of events here – a sociology of decay, not a single catastrophic event.

Anyway, as time went on, the rulers of Alexandria became much more interested in suppressing unrest and dealing with other problems than with the libraries. At one time a palace guard was appointed head librarian.

One hundred years after Ptolemy VIII, Julius Caesar probably burnt the library down by accident, along with the docks, although it is hard to tell how damaged it was by the fires. Plutarch says it was destroyed, others (more dependent on the Caesars), play the damage down. Strabo visited the building which housed the library complex but did not mention the library. It is possible, given the way things work, that surviving stones from the library would have been used to help rebuild the docks.

Later on Alexandria become more of a provincial town of the Roman Empire, and membership of the library may have become ceremonial. The known later members did not show much interest in books, and we can guess more decay, more lack of interest.

Another battle in Alexandria in the 270sAD is also thought to have damaged the library, as Emperor Aurelian is said to have destroyed the quarter of the city in which it was housed. Diocletian also put the city to seige in 297, which may well have damaged the libraries still further.

The Library’s offshoot, the Serapeum, was destroyed or cleared out, along with many other pagan buildings, after a battle between Pagans and Christians in the time of Pope Theophilius of Alexandria. This Pope is also reptuted to have killed 10,000 monks who disagreed with him. We don’t know if the Serapeum had any books at this time, it probably had a few as pagan philosophers lived there, but they may well have been more interested in oral tradition and dialectic than texts. The nature of this Pope and the Christians at this time, does not lead us to expect they would respect any texts remaining in the Library proper.

There is also talk that Muslim conquerors burnt the books in the library again, but we don’t know how much extra damage this would have done, or what number of scrolls were stored there. The library may well have been largely lost long before this, or the whole thing maybe a story.

Conclusion

Cumulative decay, lack of interest, low funds, wear, accident and war probably reduced the library, much more than any single calamitous event. There were other libraries in the Ancient world, so if it were just a matter of us not having the texts because of the Destruction of Alexandria, we should still have books from the other Libraries. That we do not, suggest that the problems were more widespread than just a few acts of violence. It is a whole collection of social events that are likely responsible.

Remember this is conjecture…. but it suggests that knowledge can fade even without deliberate attempts to purge it. If people cannot read it, replicate it, or get hold of it, or be taught it as relevant to their lives, it will be lost.

Tags:Disinformation, disorder
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Solving the Black Elephant? Part 1

April 19, 2020

In the previous article I explored “Black Elephants” which are what arises when the ‘Elephant in the Room’ is mated with a ‘Black Swan’, and a politics gets built around not acknowledging an oncoming problem as a problem.

When the Black Elephant, that people have been avoiding, arrives people will announce “no one could have expected this!” and it now may be too late to solve the problem anyway, so the consequences are worse than if it had been recognised earlier. This process of avoidance is tied into power dynamics and what is acceptable to the group. We could call this process ‘the social construction of ignorance’, as opposed to ‘the social construction of knowledge’.

Obvious examples of Black Elephants include most of the world’s ecological problems, which we hope are not going to be that big, and the possibility of pandemics, which we should have been prepared for. Similarly, that we going through one pandemic at the moment, does not mean we cannot have another at the same time, or that this one will not return.

Can we engage with Black Elephants?

The main problem is that a Black Elephant is not just an officially unrecognised problem, but a denied problem. Dominant people don’t want to talk about it. There is a tacit agreement not to talk about it. Its a bit of random chaos or not that important. There may even be penalties for trying to find out about it, or talking about it. You may get snubbed, or abused, by your groups if you mention it, and everyone will be relieved when the subject is dropped. No one has any acceptable model for dealing with it. Social organisation and its values could even be built around this denial, just as there are no servants in Jane Austen novels, although ‘everyone important’ depends upon them and their subservience. The Black Elephant maybe something most people know something about, but they probably do not know that much, as there is no incentive to find out about it. Some people may go out of their way to explain there is no Black Elephant, or it is not as bad as the evil idiots have made it out to be.

Given that it is a socially denied problem and there is social reinforcement of that denial, then openly recognising the problem is difficult, and so solving the problem is difficult. Any solution-process that does not recognise the fundamentally social nature of the problem, its denial and the difficulty of acknowledging the Black Elephant, is probably going to fail.

This means we have to study the rather undeveloped field of the sociology of ignorance (which is sometimes known as agnotology) .

Some pointers to the sociology of ignorance

Problems of hierarchy: such as:

Celine’s Law- (“good communication is only possible between equals”), in which people get punished for being bearers of bad news, or the high-ups cannot admit mistakes or vulnerability for fear of loss of face, status, power or wealth.
The Peter Principle in which people get promoted to their level of incompetence, and destroy competence around them and beneath them, partly because of
Dunning-Kruger effects, they don’t recognise competence when they see it, or do not want to be challenged.
Internal focus in which ‘managers’ get more status, power or wealth focusing on gathering internal rewards (office furniture, windows, golf games with important people, funding, more staff etc) than from focusing on external problems.
Deniability when the leaders are not be aware of the dirty, illegal or stupid tactics that underlings deploy, in order to carry out the leader’s instructions, or the underlings’ idea of the leader’s instructions.

Sometimes we can hear the argument that flatter hierarchies negate some of these problems, but that is not always the case.

The fewer the steps between the centre and the periphery, the more a hyper-dominant centre can overwhelm the periphery, and render it unable to adapt. The hyper-dominance may lessen ‘unofficial’ information flow still further – even if they can record every key stroke made the periphery. Flat organisations may only work in the long term, if the power differential, or inequality, between the levels is not that great.

Other Oganisational factors

Siloing in which different groups in the same organisation are walled off from each other, cannot talk to each other, replicate similar work, or are overridden as of minor importance when they are central.
Parkinson’s Law “work expands to fill the time available” or, as a corollary, managers make work for others to show that they are important and in control. This extra work then distracts the organisation’s members from dealing with problems of reality. They don’t have time.
Haga’s Law or organisation reduces anxiety and increases the ease of doing things, but there comes a point when the payoffs become less and the organising takes more and more energy for less and less results, which produces anxiety which leads to further organising, and less time for thinking or doing useful work, or recognising future problems.
Standardised Lack of Responsibility. Quite frequently organisations and high-ups have standardised ways of avoiding responsibility for their actions and policies. It may be a form of ‘distributed governance’, in which there is always someone else to blame, or channels of authority are not clear. Or it may be forms of attack – there are identifiable “bad people” who can be blamed for any events. Habitual ambiguity of instructions, or contradictory commands can be another form. This latter technique can also function to give those lower-down more freedom to act appropriately, and for the higher-up to take credit for whatever works, and condemn whatever doesn’t.
Information structures which hide information from various people.
Data is collected because it can be. The more data can be collected, the more time is wasted collecting it and analysing it in the hope it will be useful. If there is too much data, important events can get lost.
Disinformation society. In information society there is so much information that almost any argument can be justified in the short term. So without a real desire to explore the Black Elephant, the Elephant can be recognised and downplayed. For example, Bjorn Lomborg can always find some reputable organisation which says, or which produces figures which show, that climate change, while a problem, is not a serious or urgent problem. As a result, all the figures which show it is likely to be truly serious can be ignored. If people don’t want to find out that there is a problem. then they don’t ever have to look for those figures and see what Mr Lomborg is doing. Now he may be acting like this, because if he didn’t then there are groups of people who would not see climate change at all. And it is possibly better that they see it, and think about doing something useful, in other ways, than not to see it at all.
Knowledge and Status in ‘knowledge societies’, people are supposedly graded by knowledge and ability. Those higher up can be expected to know everything, and thus refuse to listen to those below, when those below may know things not known by those above. For higher-ups admitting they were wrong can be impossible as it appears to admit their position is not legitimate, yet everyone is wrong occasionally, and failure is one of the ways we learn.
Organisational roles, which make the Black Elephants someone else’s problem or indeed create particular Black Elephants by not having a recognised position to deal with those kinds of problems.

Problems of Language and Culture

Language

This is a complicated factor, and much has been written about it, but we can reasonably uncontroversially say that language draws attention to particular features of the world. Different languages may classify the world in different ways – they have different colour terms for example. Languages do not translate exactly because they have different world models. By directing attention to particular features of the world language directs attention away from other features. Thus the language you use may help create Black Elephants, through this direction or through its categories.

Organisations sometimes develop specialist languages and models for work, which again show parts of the world and hide or ignore others. An organisation, for example, might see things entirely in terms of good and evil, where good, means agrees with them, and evil means disagrees with them, and so they become unable to see the ‘evil’ (as classified by them) they do themselves. A language arises as a culture makes a world and deals with a world.

One of the problems with any example of language is that meaning depends on interpretation, and the context of the ‘sentences’, writing or utterance, helps influence their meaning for the interpreter, and this happens in many different ways. We can never guarantee that what we have written will be interpreted in the way we intended. This is why great poems or novels can never be exhausted, they are seen in different contexts by different interpreters. This is also why scientists tend to use mathematics, and frames of objectivity to limit context variability. Culture is one way of trying to give similar contexts, shared contexts with other people. But it is not the only way, and when used to interpret sentences from another culture, or subculture, can frequently be misleading. Violence can be deployed to reduce apparent misunderstanding. This just suppresses obvious variation.

If you write, or announce, a programme, expect that people will read what it differently, or sometimes with difficulty. Communication involves misunderstanding as much as understanding.

Culture

I’m only going to mention one factor here, common in the English speaking world, and that is the positive thinking ‘bundle’ (a collection of destructive reinforcing patterns).

Positive Thinking

Many contemporary people and organisations praise positive thinking. This can become a unofficial but compulsory positivity bundle. These positivity people may say that someone who finds problems is negative or unmotivated, or bad in some other way, and deserves to be silenced or let go. That events are sure to get better. We are marvelous and will deal with the Black Elephants easily when they become prominent enough to cause passing trouble. Problems are unreal and so on. Such an organisation is probably avoiding many Black Elephants. It is also probably good at spreading disinformation, because it only allows the information which suggests it is doing very well, and dismisses all criticism. People may again, be frightened of saying anything negative, or pointing out anything negative, as they think that will make the negative event happen, or that others will judge them as weak.

This positivity bundle is harmful. It is not the same as being able to recognise problems and not let them get you down; recognise that you can either solve them easily or with effort, take advantage of them, need to call in an expert to fix them, or need to evacuate now.

The Elephant Paradoxes

There are many other factors in the dynamics of ignorance, but we do seem to have a specific set of paradoxes about Black Elephants.

First Black Elephant Paradox. People who are doing the problem solving, particularly those people who are dominant or high status, have to want to explore and recognise the Black Elephants – and if we had that, we probably would not have the Black Elephants to begin with.

Second Black Elephant Paradox. The organisations tools of knowledge, like language, culture and technology, may direct attention away from the things the organisation needs to know about.

Third Black Elephant Paradox. Facing Black Elephants takes effort and risks disturbance. It may mean organisational change, which then occupies people’s attention so much, that they go back to ignoring the Black Elephants.

Fourth Black Elephant Paradox The problem space must be open, yet the more open the problem space is to recognising Black Elephants, the more unending the process, and the easier it is to avoid Black Elephants because of finding other more acceptable, easier to deal with, problems – especially such problems the organisation, or certain factions of the organisation, already acknowledge.

Fifth Black Elephant Paradox. To survive in one system, we may need to act in a certain way which threatens survival in another system. To see the threat to our survival in one system may create a threat to our survival in the other system. This paradox creates Black Elephants, as well as providing an incentive to ignore them.

Sixth Black Elephant Paradox.This is not really a paradox, but its close. The organisation may be so busy avoiding the big Black Elephant that they get eaten by termites. Avoiding a Black Elephant may lead to more immediate and recognisable threats being ignored as well. A Black Elephant can be sheltered by other Black Elephants.

With this in mind let us look at some potential ways of solving for Black Elephants. No guarantee is provided that these will work. This is a blog post.

Methods

One fundamental feature of dealing with Black Elephants is that there must be as much equity and open communication as possible, with no penalties for pointing to an unpopular problem. It must be possible to challenge the hierarchy. If this is not allowed then Black Elephants will not be faced.

Open communication is polite and non-threatening. People can say that communication which allows threatening-communication is real open communication, but the point of threats is shut people down. So this demonstrates another paradox: open communication involves restraints, but restraints can curtail communication.

Perhaps the inquiry can be conducted at a particular level in the organisation, in order to free the upper levels from potential inclusion. However the upper levels have to consider and take seriously the results of the inquiries, which is unusual. Every year some organisations find out that workers are unhappy with upper level management, and every year these results can be ignored, downplayed, or seen as purely political. Management has to be able to take criticism as important and meaningful feedback. This is difficult, even if open communication is promised. Criticism can also be political.

Seeking blocks

The first step is to find the blocks to Black Elephant recognition. We firstly have to assume there are Black Elephants. Without that assumption we probably will not find them.

This process involves a negative set of questions, such as: What the processes of ignorance and unconsciousness in our organisation? How can these processes be lessened, or undermined? What will be effective? We can look at some of the factors listed above to start with.

If a Black Elephant is suggested, what would it mean? If it means the organisation should not exist, this is a major block to its recognition. Very few people will destroy an organisation which gives them power, status, and income, to save the world from a Black Elephant. Some will, but that might not be enough.

If such an elephant appears then what can be done to keep recognition of the Elephant and transform the organisation without it expanding the elephant, or attempting to deny the elephant?

Is it possible to change the organisation but keep some of its focus and purpose? Say a fossil fuel company decides to become an energy company. How is this to be done? What relevant expertise and material capital do they already have? For instance an oil company might know how to build floating platforms which can be used for wind power. They may know how to transmit power, or oil, via undersea cables etc….

Blocks need to be made conscious, in order to progress.

Seeking destruction

Another fundamental question for exploration is – what kind of processes does our organisation engage in, which are destructive of its aims?

As a general heuristic, we could propose that: “Most forms of order, create disorder as unintended consequences of their modes of ordering.” If the blocks to perception and information are removed then we might be more able to see what these unintended consequences are and avoid them or deal with them.

If the organisation has a strong authoritarian hierarchy or a culture of fear (which leaders will probably not be able to recognise, or the culture of fear would not exist), it may be possible to ask people to put in anonymous submissions. It may also be useful to explain that destructive ordering is normal, and then appoint a group to explore what kinds of destructive ordering exist in the organisations relations to its ‘ecology’ (business, social, political, technological, religious, environmental, resources, educational etc). As we shall suggest in part two, exploring different contexts in which Black Elephants and self-undermining behaviour, can appear is vital to finding these problems.

An Official Elephant Hunter

Create a high-level semi-tenured position that looks for Black Elephants and informs the organisation as a whole. The only way of removing the person is if they don’t find any Elephants. They have a place in all high level deliberations. They have the ability to produce a ‘committee,’ ‘workshop’ or whatever, that considers the issue of the Elephant and how the organisation deals with it.

Problem. If the other high-ups still don’t want to see it, or do anything about it, they won’t. They can also try to undermine the Elephant hunter. But that is always the case. By being able to communicate with all levels of the organisation, it is possible independent ways of dealing with the problem will emerge anyway, or that the Black Elephant will slip into organisational conversation.

Consultants are supposed to be Black Elephant Hunters, but they are often aware that they have been brought in to recommend particular procedures for which those hiring them do not want to take full responsibility, or who want evidence to justify what they want to do. They are sensitive to the wishes of those who pay the bills. If they get a reputation as unsatisfactory with the dominant management of this organisation, then they may lose work elsewhere, as these managers have ties across organisations. This is why the Black Elephant hunter is semi-tenured.

Expand consciousness

This step is relatively innocuous and does not involve drugs. It simply means, once the blocks are uncovered, how do we expand organisational awareness? The Elephant Hunter is an overt method, but to some extent identification of, and removal of as many blocks as possible will help the identification of what the organisation does not recognise in general, what the organisation does not want to know, and what we personally benefit from (in the short term) by not knowing? (how do we help build the fictive world of the organisation?).

Let us describe a simple management technique which can be employed by any new manager, but is almost never applied. Walk the floor. Talk to the staff you are responsible for, but without being critical or surveilling them (Really!). Catch people doing what seem to be good things and complement them. When there is some level of trust, ask people what could be improved? What procedures do not work? What are the blocks to them doing their job? Take them seriously, check with others, do something about it. Talk with people. Remove the blocks to performance before you do massive change or restructuring. Things may almost be working now. Indeed they probably do work to some extent, or the organisation would have already collapsed completely. Then ask people what the major problems are, especially the problems the organisation does not deal with well. These may be harder to fix. They may be Black Elephants. Try not to get captured by a particular faction, because your underlings will recognise this and information will be tailored to this, or politicised.

The workers, the people on the ‘coal face’ or in the ‘interface’ between organisations or between organisations and those they serve, are much more likely to see some sets of problems than people in management, who are insulated from daily practice, but who attempt to structure that practise. This is both a form of consciousness expansion and Black Elephant detection.

This is long enough…. Part II later…

Tags:Disinformation, disorder
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The Black Elephant

April 17, 2020

This is largely just a collection of quotes:

The Black Elephant is an unholy union of two boardroom clichés: the Elephant in the Room, the thing which everyone knows is important, but no one will talk about; and the Black Swan, the hard-to-predict event which is outside the realm of normal expectations, but has enormous impact. The Black Elephant is an event which was quite foreseeable, which was in fact an Elephant in the Room, but which after it happens, everyone will try to pass off as a Black Swan.
A: D ougald Hine | Black Elephants and Skull Jackets | A Conversation with Vinay Gupta

“There are a herd of environmental black elephants gathering out there” — global warming, deforestation, ocean acidification, mass extinction and massive fresh water pollution. “When they hit, we’ll claim they were black swans no one could have predicted, but, in fact, they are black elephants, very visible right now…. We’re just not dealing with them at the scale necessary. If they all stampede at once, watch out.”
B: N YT Herd of Stampeding Black Elephants

So to be clear: a black elephant is a known, or suspected, highly dangerous but not yet overtly current problem, which many people, especially powerful ones, do not want to see, or which they downplay hoping it is trivial, exaggerated, improbable or going to occur after it’s not their responsibility.

“In terms of sustainability, there are two questions. Sustain what? And then, can we sustain those things? Right now, more or less the whole of the debate focuses on whether we can sustain hyper-consumption – and the answer is no, of course not. Something is going to give: oil, climate,topsoil, some other factor we’re not even paying attention to. You can’t just burn the earth’s natural resources like a gasflare on an oil rig forever…. climate is just the first of a long list of things that can and eventually will go wrong.”
A:

These ecological, production and consumption problems make up a horde of black elephants, but powerful people appear to lose out if we do anything about them, and we are helped to be comfortable ourselves by ignoring them, or by pretending they are not looming. The powerful do not have to push us that hard to get us to pretend there is no problem or to act half-heartedly about all these problems.

“the power that financiers and corrupt politicians still hold in setting the limits on what we can and cannot destroy in nature — as opposed to the scientists and biologists — remains the bad news.”
B:

And again this is a black elephant. It is pretty obviously not sensible to have the world run by financiers or business, when what they finance destroys the land we are standing on.

Sometimes black elephants were possibly quite normal things or processes which have just grown up with us, and many people have not caught up to realise that the normal has become abnormal. Nearly everyone says, “oh Elephants are only 2 ft tall… and there is only one of them, and its really cute.”

Perhaps black elephants are created by human cognitive and social processes. One writer remarks that science is full of black elephants:

The scientific world is a sprawling and untidy place whose inhabitants practise their craft in myriad ways. Attempts are periodically made to bring order to this world by building model homes in it, so to speak, and declaring that what’s inside is what science is really like – all the activities outside being imperfect versions. That way, we can easily teach it and tell outsiders what it’s about.
Two such homes are particularly attention-grabbing. The first is orderly, its atmosphere logical, and its disputes calmly resolved by proposing theories and taking data. Experiments are good when they get the true result, wrong when they don’t. This house does not have normal people inside – the inhabitants are so exacting and rule-abiding that they live and act quite differently from the rest of us. Discoveries made inside this house are universal, reflecting truths about nature outside. This house was built by traditional philosophy of science.
Another house was erected in reaction to the first. Its inhabitants behave exactly as non-scientists do, motivated by the same social and psychological forces. Experiments are good when they get a result everyone accepts. What’s found in the room is not universal but local – arising from what’s happening in that room. Obtaining consensus about a result is a matter of swapping interests, like the work of diplomats. This home, built by “social constructivists”, has real people inside but no real nature.
The [models] differ in what they include and omit. The first, to oversimplify, gets rid of human beings, who disrupt the rationality inside the house. The second gets rid of nature, which would resist, define and frustrate the negotiations.
Physics World: Black Elephants

Either model diminishes ‘science’ by creating dangerous black elephants. The first by making science objective, inhuman, valueless or ‘unspiritual’ when we know it is human and made by humans and hence limited and slightly weird, and the second by disconnecting it from reality and making a matter of enforced consensus and desire, when we know the reactions of reality are vital to that consensus (or it cannot be called science) – and you will hear both positions taken by those attempting to discredit some science they don’t like….

Historically it has been quite difficult to speak of science as human and riddled with personal politics, and bias without appearing to discredit the ideals of science, its power, and relatively accurate truth. This inability now reinforces the arguments of those who would listen to nothing but their own short-term interests.

We also know that science is nearly always better when it is not played according to government or commercial policy. That is when people say “We would like this. Make it it so, for us.” Then you get a whole load of finance for projects like turning lead into gold, and pressure to push scientists to pronounce certainty when not enough research has been done, especially to get the product into consumption and make a profit.

This dynamic is another black elephant we hope our world can survive, when it comes to things like genetic modification, biotech and so on (which literally have a life and evolution of their own).

Science also sometimes generates black elephants in that there are non-solvable problems, weird occurrences, or theoretical incoherencies, which scientists ignore, in the hope that they are not significant problems, or that they will somehow turn out to be explicable by the current theory. And sometimes they realise things like an atom bomb could cause the world to ignite or that a hadron collider could produce black holes, but “hey let’s do it anyway!”

One writer points to the consequences of an obvious political Black Elephant that was pretty clearly present, but which it is probable hope got in the way of analysis…

Last year, many of us would have been astonished to learn that the Treasury in the United Kingdom had made no contingency plans for Brexit, despite the fact that the polls showed that the outcome of the referendum would be a close call. The British military – which I presume is like most armed forces and makes contingency plans at the drop of the hat – also reportedly did nothing.
The black elephant challenge for governments
Peter Ho

That author points to another “obvious problem”

governments often ignore the complexity of their operating environment. They typically deal with complexity as if it is amenable to simple and deterministic, even linear, policy prescriptions. In a sense, the crux of public policy has been to apply – if not impose – orderly solutions to the myriad of complex problems that afflict our societies, our politics and our lived everyday experiences, in largely vain attempts to make what is complex merely complicated.
We see this in legal systems that are based on uniform punishments for complex and varied crimes, in public health enterprises that treat patients as largely homogenous, and education systems and pedagogies that assume that all children develop uniformly, or ought to.

We also see the same problem in business, for a similar reason: standardisation makes things appear simple, and allows the illusion of command and control. For some reason people rarely seem to want to admit this problem in business. Perhaps business is now where we put the search for perfection? Anyhow, the idea that business (big business in particular) does not face similar problems to government, is another Black Elephant, and possibly an extremely dangerous one, given how much of government we hand over to business.

The author goes on to ask:

What can governments do to improve the way they manage complexity, and at the same time mitigate the effects of the various cognitive biases that afflict them?
We can start by accepting that complexity creates uncertainty. Prediction is not possible.The right approach is an orientation towards thinking about the future in a systematic way.

We have to be careful here, because we can use unpredictability to hide black elephants from ourselves and others. “The climate change elephant may not come, we cannot be certain about it, it might go away, we might find a technology that can chain it up, if it was a problem people would be doing something about it before us – if we act first then we will be taken advantage of… We can’t be sure, let’s just ignore it.”

Ultimately this author recommends scenario planning, but does not say why this should overcome the social bias of avoiding the elephant.

Just in case you think the idea of the Black Elephant is simple:

Black Elephants capture the postnormal dynamic of the Extended Present, and they are decidedly contextual and ought to be situated and/or articulated from more than one perspective, if only to capture the contradictions inherent to their emergence. Finally, Black Elephants indicate that PNL is present, and perhaps dominant, within a particular system.
https://postnormaltim.es/black-elephant

I have no idea what PNL is either.

You may remember the famous and quite common-sensical lines from Donald Rusmfeld

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

Black elephants are those knowns and probables we don’t want to know, don’t want to acknowledge, don’t want to acknowledge as important, or don’t know we know, and which will effect us. Zizek has a nice essay on this going back to the Bush Jr. Admin and the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in which the army knew what was going on, and decided to ignore the reports. [I wonder if this elephant has almost been forgotten, nowadays?]

In the past several months, the International Committee of the Red Cross regularly bombarded the Pentagon with reports about the abuses [of Iraqis by US troops] in Iraqi military prisons, and the reports were systematically ignored….
To anyone acquainted with the reality of the American way of life, the photos brought to mind the obscene underside of U.S. popular culture – say, the initiatory rituals of torture and humiliation one has to undergo to be accepted into a closed community. Similar photos appear at regular intervals in the U.S. press after some scandal explodes at an Army base or high school campus, when such rituals went overboard….
In being submitted to the humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture: They got a taste of the culture’s obscene underside that forms the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity, democracy and freedom. No wonder, then, the ritualistic humiliation of Iraqi prisoners was not an isolated case but part of a widespread practice….
What [Rumsfeld] forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” the things we don’t know that we know – which is precisely, the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say.
If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the “unknown unknowns,” that is, the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the “unknown knowns” – the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values.
What we get when we see the photos of humiliated Iraqi prisoners is precisely a direct insight into “American values,” into the core of an obscene enjoyment that sustains the American way of life.
What Rumsfeld Doesn’t Know That He Knows About Abu Ghraib

In this context, we might also think of this comment:

Republican Rep. Trey Hollingsworth asserted that, while he appreciated the science behind the [corona]virus’ spread, “it is always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life, of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.”
“It is policymakers’ decision to put on our big boy and big girl pants and say it is the lesser of these two evils. It is not zero evil, but it is the lesser of these two evils and we intend to move forward that direction. That is our responsibility and to abdicate that is to insult the Americans that voted us into office.”
CNN 15 April: GOP congressman says letting more Americans die of coronavirus is lesser of two evils

In other words, he is making a rare acknowledgement that the American way of life, both requires and demands the early death of Americans.

Sartre had a point about this kind of unconsciousness, that we have to know what it is we don’t want to know, in order to ignore it – so we are writing of actively unknown knowns. Or things that are made ignorable matters of chaos when they are actually part of the order of everyday life and acknowledging them would somehow undermine that life, or its (moral) validity.

This is not ignorance but effort. The more upsetting the black elephant the more effort is put into ignoring it, and the less we will be prepared.

Perhaps all cognitive and social life requires us to create a social unconscious, which includes Black Elephants. Things that everyone knows are likely to become a problem, or generate problems, but which they believe would cause them problems were they to mention it. And besides the future is uncertain, perhaps the elephant will wander off, or prove to be a mouse in disguise. “Why should I upset my life for this? Nobody will thank me, and they might even hurt me.”

The other problem is that people tend to think that if it really was a problem then other people (especially people they respect) would be dealing with it. The fact that no one worthwhile is dealing with it, shows it is not a problem. And if everyone worthwhile thinks it is not a problem, then it probably isn’t – it’s certainly not my business. Again this formulation adds to the “Why should I upset my life by screaming about Black Elephants? Couldn’t I be deluded? And it looks tame now. Its not yet trampled anything important underfoot. Other people are not going to thank me, for going on about it”.

This is how a social unconscious is constructed, and it can become personal. Because if something is not acknowledged by people a person respects and desires to emulate, then they to have to suppress awareness of it, to emulate the admired ones. If you are lucky, you may never have your attention drawn to the black elephant, before it kills you. So you can relax – up until that moment.

Tags:complexity, depth psychology, Disinformation, disorder
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US, Australia and pandemics again

April 11, 2020

The last post showed the figures for coronavirus in Australia and the US. It is clear that Australia is doing better than the US. They are both neoliberal governments, but the neoliberal government in the US is Donald Trump who appears incompetent. This demonstrates that there are different types of neoliberalisms and it is not accurate to say all neoliberalisms are the same. Some are actively harmful.

President Trump did close flights from China (announced 31st Jan, in place 2nd Feb), as he boasts, but originally this closure only referred to foreign nationals, and had so many exceptions that another 40,000 people entered the country from China after it was in place. Yes, that does not make sense at all. Two weeks after the flight ban he was saying the pandemic will be over by April. On the 27th Feb he was saying:

we have done an incredible job. We’re going to continue. It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear. And from our shores, we — you know, it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We’ll see what happens. Nobody really knows
Remarks by President Trump in Meeting with African American Leaders

and there appears to have been more or less no federal preparation before March. There are reports that hospital workers are still (April 11) massively under-equipped in the US, and still at risk, which will compound problems as medical support is removed by the virus.

For example, a week ago, the New York Governor was expressing gratitude for ventilators donated by the Chinese Government as New York was running out and there was no sign of availability from the US.

Louisiana, which has also been hit hard by the virus, has requested or ordered 14,000 ventilators from the federal government and the private sector. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards told NPR on Friday that the state had only received 553 so far.
Time Magazine 6 April Gov. Cuomo Says Chinese Government Delivering 1,000 Ventilators to New York

We now know that Trump’s medical advisers were asking him to issue physical distancing guidelines in the 3rd week of February, but apart from acting as a bad example, he delayed action until the 16th March.

By comparison, in Australia, on 21 Jan, Australia’s chief medical officer, Brendan Murphy, stated that “additional proportionate border measures” are in place. The same day health Minister Greg Hunt declared coronavirus a “disease of pandemic potential.” Biosecurity and border security staff were meeting passengers from Wuhan to Sydney. The next day flights from Wuhan stopped. On the 29th Jan, the Queensland government requested quarantine of everyone coming from China, and the federal government released its stockpile of facemasks so hospitals would be equipped in advance. 31st Jan the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency. On the 1st of Feb Australia’s air ‘borders’ with China were effectively closed. Peter Dutton suggested Australians about to leave for any overseas holiday should reconsider their travel. Australians evacuated from Wuhan were quarantined on Christmas Island. There were immediate efforts at quarantining all people travelling in from overseas, even if it was largely voluntary. On the 18th Feb the government released its Emergency Response Plan. On the 27th February, the Prime Minister announced that:

based on the expert medical advice we’ve received, there is every indication that the world will soon enter a pandemic phase of the coronavirus and as a result, we have agreed today and initiated the implementation of the Coronavirus Emergency Response Plan…
So while the WHO is yet to declare the nature of the coronavirus and it’s moved towards a pandemic phase, we believe that the risk of a global pandemic is very much upon us and as a result, as a government, we need to take the steps necessary to prepare for such a pandemic….
we need an even greater abundance of caution to ensure that should the coronavirus move to a very extreme level or there is any particular risk that is associated with children, particularly those attending school, that we have the preparedness and the arrangements in place with states and territories. And I want to thank all of the state and territories for their engagement, whether it’s on this issue on schools or the many other issues, the health issues, that are associated…
we’re effectively operating now on the basis that there is… a pandemic.
27th Feb: Press Conference – Australian Parliament House

The Australian government’s approach was nowhere near perfect, by any means, there are many criticisms which could be made. For example, after advising a ban on large crowd events on the 13th March, the Prime Minister announced he would be attending a football match on the day before the ban came in. However, they had a somewhat different and more constructive approach to Trump, which has continued. For example while Trump has been trying to suggest a back to normal date is soon, Morrison has been saying:

We have seen what’s happened in Singapore most recently, we’ve seen what happened in Sweden and other countries. If you take your eyes off of this thing, and it gets away from you, it writes its own rules, so we do need to understand what the prerequisites are, the things that we have to achieve before we can start to ease some of those restrictions…
I do want to caution Australians that we’re not in that phase yet we’re many weeks away I think from being in a phase like that.
Interview on Sunrise 14th April 2020

Right wingers often say, no doubt inspired by Trump, that there were howls of ‘racism’ from the left, about his blocking of flights from China. I did not hear those howls personally, and some reports seem exaggerated by those being criticised. I did hear people saying that banning flights was not enough, which is true, and perhaps Trump should have done more than think he could wall off trouble? People, such as the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine and others did make requests for politicians to stop encouraging people to avoid or scream at Chinese Australians, or not go to Chinese Restaurants. That kind of internal disunity and pointless conflict is not helpful in containing a pandemic, although it does allow deflection of blame, which is why Trump loves it. People have also criticised his use of the term ‘Chinese virus’ when the virus has a proper name, and is not the only virus originating in China, but again I guess using the term serves to imply that Trump’s bad performance can be blamed on the Chinese, and that the threat is insidious and cunning – and it also feeds into the laregely right wing narrative that the virus is a Chinese bioweapon, that they decided to test in their own country rather than just release in the US (imagine how much worse the US response would have been if they had no warning there was a problem).

Closing borders as much as possible is a standard response to pandemics, and, apart from when bringing people home from foreign shores, is exactly what you would expect. Queensland has tried to close its borders to the rest of Australia as has Western Australia. That is difficult but not unreasonable. It is normal. It is routine, but it needs other backing as well.

There have also been attempts to say that virus is so bad in the US, because ‘the left’ has sabotaged Trump’s attempts to make firm borders. However, Trump had two years with a friendly congress to do whatever he wanted like make stronger borders or fix Obamacare etc. If he didn’t do it then, he either was not capable, uninterested, or there were good reasons for not doing it, which he is ignoring to now try and build political capital by blaming other people (as usual) for his inabilities. I could suggest that the demand for cheap labor by US business was one reason the borders were not closed. Anyway, the virus seems to have come into Mexico from the US, rather than the other way around. So the issue is irrelevant, and nobody has attempted to prevent him from preparing for a pandemic.

Trump continually says no one could have expected this situation. This is clearly not true. The world has been preparing for a pandemic for years. The possibility is glaringly obvious, and many of us were fearing a much worse event than the current one. Mass globalised air traffic, is an invitation for pandemics and, if you don’t know that, then you should not be in politics.

I quote a comedian – because we are in that realm in which comedians have better political knowledge than presidents. I guess the fools have always known more than would be kings:

“First, Obama officials walk Trump aides through a global pandemic exercise in 2017. Then, in 2017 and 2018, threat assessment intelligence analysts even mentioned a close cousin of coronavirus by name, saying it had pandemic potential. Then in 2018, the director for medical and biodefense preparedness at the national security council told a symposium that the threat of pandemic flu is our number one health security concern. Then, top administration officials said last year that the threat of a pandemic kept them up at night. Then, White House economists warned in 2019 a pandemic could devastate America. Then, intelligence reports warned of a coronavirus crisis as early as November. And then, US intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic.”
The Guardian 10 April Colbert interviews Sanders

Then:

The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation hosted Event 201, a high-level pandemic exercise on October 18, 2019, in New York….
Experts agree that it is only a matter of time before one of these epidemics becomes global—a pandemic with potentially catastrophic consequences. A severe pandemic, which becomes “Event 201,” would require reliable cooperation among several industries, national governments, and key international institutions.
http://www.centerforhealthsecurity.org/event201/

Furthermore, on the 29th January Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro, circulated a memo warning the administration that a coronavirus pandemic that could wipe out hundreds of thousands of jobs, erase trillions of dollars in economic activity. “The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil,.. This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.” He also argued that “the clear dominant strategy is an immediate travel ban on China.”

Truly no one could possibly be prepared if they didn’t want to listen.

I have heard right wingers say that Event 201 is suspicious, and shows some deep state planning to run a pandemic to undermine Trump. But that just shows you that they can escape any reality. This was a public event, warning of the possibility of pandemics. If Trump had listened he might have been better prepared, no matter how Machiavellian the organisers were. But he did not listen, and it does help the US to be unprepared if you cut CDC funding by 80%, disband the National Security Council’s global pandemic team, opt to discontinue the “Predict” program which monitored the threat of animal-born diseases crossing over to humans, which is the probable origin point of the current coronavirus, or allow stockpiles of respirators to break down because you cut maintenance contracts. That’s life.

Donald Trump has not had good relations with many States in the US, so coordinating responses has not been wonderful. He has gone so far as to argue the Federal government should not take responsibility for action, and largely left it to the States to do it by themselves.

we had to go into the federal stockpile, but we’re not an ordering clerk. They have to have for themselves.
Rev: Donald Trump Coronavirus Briefing Transcript April 3

He also decided to end federal support for coronavirus testing sites, leaving the States with the responsibility for testing – although that move may be being reconsidered. He has also blamed the States for failures. So presumably his primary strategy is to end his responsibility and shift it, and the blame, elsewhere. He has helped create a toxic political environment, by this refusal to take responsibility, ‘forgetting’ what he said the day before, saying that he would not have contact with governors who were critical of him, and blaming everyone else for his own mistakes.

The context for Trump’s relationships with the US states is provided by the resentment of aid to Puerto Rico, and his blaming of California for its fires and his twitter threat to order Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to cease helping victims of those fires, despite the fires starting on Federal land. During the pandemic, on 27 March Trump declared when asked about his responses to the Governors,

I think we’ve done a great job for the State of Washington and I think the governor, who is a failed presidential candidate as you know, he leveled out at zero in the polls, he’s constantly chirping, and I guess complaining would be a nice way of saying it. We’re building hospitals. We’ve done a great job for the State of Washington. Michigan, she has no idea what’s going on. And all she does is say, “Oh, it’s the federal government’s fault.” And we’ve taken such great care of Michigan…..
All I want them to do, very simple, I want them to be appreciative. I don’t want them to say things that aren’t true. I want them to be appreciative. We’ve done a great job…
You know what I say? If they don’t treat you right, I don’t call.
Rev: Donald Trump Coronavirus Task Force Briefing Transcript March 27

According to some reports the friendly governor of Florida received 100% of its requested medical supplies including 430,000 surgical masks and 180,000 N95 respirators while Massachusetts, which is not so flattering, received a mere 17% of what it requested.

It appears that the only way, that Trump could see the toxic environment ending is if everyone keeps telling him that he is the best president ever.

Other accusations seem more serious:

the White House seizes goods from public officials and hospitals across the country while doling them out as favors to political allies and favorites, often to great fanfare to boost the popularity of those allies. The Denver Post today editorialized about one of the most egregious examples. Last week, as we reported, a shipment of 500 ventilators to the state of Colorado was intercepted and rerouted by the federal government. Gov. Jared Polis (D) sent a letter pleading for the return of the equipment. Then yesterday President Trump went on Twitter to announce that he was awarding 100 ventilators to Colorado at the behest of Republican Senator Cory Gardner, one of the most endangered Republicans on the ballot this year. As the Post put it, “President Donald Trump is treating life-saving medical equipment as emoluments he can dole out as favors to loyalists. It’s the worst imaginable form of corruption — playing political games with lives.”
Talking points: PPE and Ventilators Becomes Patronage in Trump’s Hands

Australia’s Prime Minister has been much better, despite similar political views, and despite the support of the Murdoch Empire. The Australian PM may have tried to model himself on Trump but he appears never to have been in that league and, he seems to have improved since the bushfire debacle, which is a good sign he can learn to be better.

Our main source of infection in Australia seems to have been people from the Ruby Princess cruise ship. There are questions as to why they were allowed to dock, including allegations that it could dock because it had Hillsong Church friends of the Prime Minister’s on board, and because home affairs intervened to let them dock. Whatever the results of the current police investigation, it should never have been allowed to dock once, never mind twice. But anyone can make a mistake. So it could be a mistake. A severe one, but a mistake.

We now know that unfortunately, many Qantas flights into the country had infected crews, because apparently crew have not had to quarantine if it turns out there were infected passengers on board. Another mistake, but its not sure whether that is the regulator or the business’ fault. Again another mistake.

Border force, or whoever is responsible, should also have been doing the kind of temperature checks in Australia that you get at overseas airports by distance, or forehead, thermometers. I’ve no idea what has been happening in the US. These thermometers have been available for years. The government has now finally started to take temperatures (I know people who came into the country two weeks ago, and they were checked everywhere other than at Sydney). Apparently the new temperature checks are being done manually – which does risk transmission without extraordinary care, and anecdotally this care is not happening. IF this is the case, and has been for more than a day or so, then it is monumentally stupid as well.

It also would have been good for the Government not to encourage queues of people at Centrelink offices, as that was not helpful, but again that was a mistake anyone could have made – initially. It helps you to make that mistake if you think Centrelink’s prime purpose is to punish people on welfare, but this could be changed. How long the mistake lasted or whether it is still happening, seems to be a subject of dispute and its not like the Republicans in Wisconsin forcing people to queue to vote, despite any rational person knowing at this stage this would be a problem and increase the seriousness of the epidemic. But then Republicans apparently ‘know‘ that mailing the votes in, which allows better checking for voter fraud, would mean no Republicans would be elected. I personally think that some Republicans would be elected, but the fear and the preference to sacrifice voters to power is extraordinary. Let us hope this event was just massive incompetence, instead.

It is probably a good idea to argue for random temp checks of the populace, as well as as much coronavirus testing as possible, although to excuse the PM we have not yet built up supplies of reliable checks (it’s not easy, and you need a decent sample size, and duration of testing to find if a test is working properly). Certainly this action is better than the current chorus of righteous demands for old people to die so the economy can get going. People over 60 have lived their lives don’t you know – but even Trump seems to realise that is probably not a vote winner – especially if older people are his main voters, and they all die off.

The Australian prime minister has been incredibly fortunate. If it had been a Labor person acting as he has done, we would be hearing nothing but screaming about how the party was sacrificing Australia’s economy and prosperity and how it was all financially irresponsible, a suppression of liberty, and an encouragement of dole bludging. But he isn’t, so thankfully he can be largely be left to get on with what is necessary. He has also been lucky that Peter Dutton has been sick with coronavirus and Tony Abbott is outside parliament and that Abbott has only been trying to take credit for it all, which is pretty mild for him.

I’d personally would have preferred it if Morrison had not tried to shut parliament so that there was no supervision or questioning of the government. There are many ways around the contagion problem, as nearly every office based workspace has discovered, and we could still function as some kind of participatory democracy.

So the US and Australia are different, and we are left with the proposition that all neoliberalisms are not equally deadly in every situation.

Tags:Disinformation, disorder, pandemic, politics
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On Pandemics

March 25, 2020

This is just what I’ve put together from various sources, to make some things clear, which do not seem clear in much public discourse about the coronavirus so far… It also represents a change of view for me. This is a general consideration of disease. If its wrong, or seriously inadequate then please let me know, so I can change it…. I’m not an expert.

Probably not good to think about, if you are truly scared in the first place.

1) The problem with disease is not just the death rate. If for instance a virus has 100% death rate but kills one person, then it’s probably no big deal.

2) An important factor/problem is the contagion rate. If the disease is communicated to 80% of the population, as opposed to 10% of the population then its death rate, even if smaller, may be more serious than that of a disease which is hard to catch. If for example it infects 80% of 24 million people that is 19.2 million people. If the death rate is 1% then that is 190,000 people dead and a hell of a lot of overfull hospitals and overworked medical staff. If the virus spreads quickly which it probably will with a high contagion rate then all of these cases happen in a relatively short period of time, further overwhelming the health system (and probably most other social systems). Another virus may have a 10% death rate but be harder to catch and only be communicated to less than 1% of the population… 1% of 24 million people is 240,000 people, 10% of that is 24,000 dead. The first virus is probably more significant, even with a lower death rate – everything else being equal.

This is the big difference between coronavirus and SARS. SARS is far more lethal, but it is much harder to catch. Coronavirus seems very easy to catch, and so will spread further and probably kill more people.

3) The third problem is what I’ll call the incapacity rating of the disease (there is almost certainly a proper medical term for this, but i’m not a doctor – as should be obvious). This is when, perhaps, few people die, but lots of people are really seriously ill, need care, or would die without treatment. Theoretically a disease could exist which may not kill or injure people if they had decent hospitalisation. So the hospitals fill up with people who would probably recover. In this factor we can include diseases which do not kill people, but leave them severely disabled, or incapacitated – this stresses social and medical mechanisms, again – especially if patients all turn up in a short period. Diseases can have both high death rates and high incapacity rates, there is no reason to assume its one or the other.

Many people and politicians seem to be only interested in the death rate, and ignore the serious problems that arise from points 2 and 3. Even if the death rate is low, there can be a case for physical isolation.

4) The fourth problem I know of is the mutation rate. Viruses are particularly prone to mutation. This one has apparently (and the apparently means i don’t know for sure, its just something i read) mutated from an animal virus, to an animal to human virus, to a human to human virus, and now to a multi-variety virus. It is much harder to develop immunity and vaccines against such viruses. This is one reason why we can be affected by flu year after year.

There is a possible good thing about a quickly mutating virus, if it can propagate without killing people, and killing or injuring people stops its spread, then it may well evolve to be less harmful in the long run, but more easily catching. However, this cannot be guaranteed, and a lot of people might be severely incapacitated in the process.

5) Pandemics may need to be treated seriously, even if they do not seem so bad at first, until we work out all these different factors.

Tags:Anthropocene, Disinformation, disorder, pandemic
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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
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More on Energy Policy: Consequences

February 11, 2020

The previous post discussed the incoherencies of Australian energy policy. This post discusses the consequences of that incoherence.

Two relatively straightforward consequences of this mess, are, that emissions reduction is failing, largely because of policy issues.

[I]ndustry emissions (excluding electricity) have risen to 60% cent above 2005 levels behind increases in the Oil & Gas (621% increase), Road Transport (122%), Aviation (54%) and Mining (41%) sectors….
Emissions from the industrial sector will surpass electricity as Australia’s largest emitting sector in 2023-24, with companies free to increase their ‘emissions baselines’ under the government’s Safeguard Mechanism scheme.
RenewEconomy 12th Feb 2020 a

And, it appears that, in NSW, more expensive gas production is displacing cheaper coal and solar, due to internal market factors. As the reporters remark:

While more remains to be done to understand this in detail, prima facie this is yet another instance of the exercise of market power by the coal generation oligopoly in New South Wales.
RenewEconomy 12th Feb b

The incoherence of policy is also starting to bite into investment in Renewables, and it is quite possible it was intended that way, but it could have been an unexpected consequence of incoherence. Who can tell?

The level of new investment commitments in large-scale renewable energy projects has collapsed by more than 50 per cent according to new analysis by the Clean Energy Council which reveals a fall from 51 projects worth $10.7 billion in 2018 down to 28 projects worth $4.5 billion in 2019.
Clean Energy Council Chief Executive Kane Thornton said mounting regulatory risks, under investment in transmission and policy uncertainty have contributed to increased risks for investors and resulted in a lowering in confidence and slow-down in investment commitment….
The top reasons for a decline in investor confidence was due to grid connection issues, a lack of strong national energy and climate policy and network congestions and constraints.
Clean Energy Council 30 Jan

As the Clean Energy Council suggests, one of the fundamental problems is lack of working electricity grid, which is certainly influenced by energy policy. As a consequence, The Australian Energy Market Operator has warned of long queues for connection. The gird in some parts of Australia is massively fragile. This may be resolved by the AEMO’s Integrated System Plan, but the earliest this is likely to be built is in 2026 or 2027. So it may take seven years before some new projects can connect to the grid. What this does for investment, should be clear to nearly everyone.

The CEO of AGL remarked that although battery technology was improving rapidly, was cheaper than pumped hydro and will compete with gas peaking plants, fewer renewable energy projects would go ahead because of the costs and economics of connection. “There is a struggle for new projects, there is a struggle to get on, and they are struggling to maintain forecast loss factors… A lot of renewable energy is getting choked.”

There are forces pushing renewable companies out of the market.

One of the biggest contractors and constructors of large-scale solar farms in Australia, the listed constructing giant Downer Group, has signaled a dramatic exit from the solar business, saying it is too hard.
[The CEO said:]
“Developers, contractors and bankers all struggle to come to terms with the risk of large power loss factors, grid stability problems, connection problems, and equipment performance issue”
RenewEconomy 12 Feb 2020

Other companies are also having problems with the complications of the rules around connection and moving out of the field.

“To say this is a significant blow to investors is a major understatement,” said David Shapero, managing director of the Australian arm of German renewable energy developer BayWa r.e., which has one solar farm in Victoria forced to operate at half capacity since September and a second that was due to come online in October but is lying idle. “In the end, we have invested around $300 million in two solar farms and we’re getting returns on half a solar farm.”
Australian Financial Review 24 Feb 2020

Mr Shapero continued, to indicate that inadequate and old regulations were the main problem:

“There is no doubt that AEMO understand the issues. They have very good leadership. But there’s also no doubt AEMO needs assistance from government, other regulators, and the industry to put in place immediate, small changes to the rules.
“These small changes will allow them to ensure such issues don’t occur in the first place, and give them much greater control to manage the transition.”
as above.

Senior economic journalist John Kehoe, who again is not left-wing, generalises the problem to almost the whole economy:

The uncertainty and unpredictable energy market regulatory interventions by the government are contributing to business investment falling to its weakest share of the economy since the early-1990s recession.
Australian Financial Review 22 Feb 2020

Meanwhile the NSW government and the Federal Government are planning to fast track evaluations of three projects under the federal Coalition’s Underwriting New Generation Investment program. This agreement includes:

extension of the Vales Point coal generator
ensuring sufficient coal supplies for the Mt Piper coal generator near Lithgow, to keep it going to 2042.
a gas plant in Port Kembla
pumped hydro scheme in the state’s North
work on the grid in exchange for more gas production.

They also are trying to keep the Liddell coal fired energy generator going beyond its planned 2023 closure date which would cost $300m for three years. It is now likely that it will cost more to keep the power station operating than can be recovered in operating profits. It is not clear who would be paying this money.

Vales point gives further information about how business works in NSW. In November 2015, the NSW Government sold Vales Point Power Station to Sunset Power International for $1 million – less than the price of many suburban houses. In 2017 the site was valued at $730 million. The company bought back the shareholdings and the investors received a great cash pay out.

The shareholders are companies associated with Trevor St Baker who controls more than 25 per cent of ERM Power Limited, which purchases power from Vales Point, and which has contracts to supply the NSW Government with electricity. So the NSW government sells a station, used to provide it with power, at a bargain price and then buys power from it, making a fortune for those who invested. That seems like a sensible energy policy.

To make the power station cheap, the NSW government said it would close in 2021, but still sold it massively under the normal commercial rates. And now, the supposed closure date is being ignored, and it may be (according to the Daily Telegraph 14 Feb 2020 “Coal’s $11m turbo charge”) that at least $11m dollars of taxpayers’ money is being used to provide a turbine upgrade and high pressure heaters. This is how the free market works in practice.

This may also be more than government stupidity and policy incoherence, if it was, then why keep supporting the problem?

Nevertheless, the trends are clear. Have policy to make life difficult for investors in renewable energy, and life easy for investors in coal.

Tags:Disinformation, disorder, politics
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Confusion in Australian Energy Policy….

February 10, 2020

This is a two part post. News from the last week helps capture the total confusion and incoherence of Australian energy policy. The first post discusses the incoherences and the second discusses the consequences of those incoherences.

Firstly, Australian electricity prices are falling. This is supposed to be of great concern to the Coalition government, which campaigns heavily on the idea of cheap electricity, and of blaming renewables, or a repealed carbon price, for any price increases…

However the reason the prices appear to be coming down is because of renewables…

In its Quarterly Energy Dynamics report for the fourth quarter of 2019, the Australian Energy Market Operator says spot wholesale electricity prices averaged $A72/megawatt hour (MWh), marking a 19 per cent fall from Q4 2018, and the lowest prices since Q4 2016….
The market operator said that a “key driver” of this fall in spot prices was increased supply from wind farms and solar farms, whose combined output increased by a massive 39 per cent compared to Q4 2018.

The largest fall in price occurred in the renewable rich state of South Australia, “where the average price for the quarter was $68/MWh”

The Energy Security Board, which reports to the Council of Australian Governments is expecting further price reductions:

Looking forward a downward trend in retail prices is noted. Over the period to 2021-22 a decrease in prices of 7.1% (about $97) is expected. A decrease in wholesale prices is the main driver and this decrease is in turn driven by new low-cost renewable generation entering the system.
ESB Health of the National Electricity Market Media Release

There were also a large number of coal outages in 2019 – we have old coal power stations which are unreliable in the heat – so much for the stability of coal power. The system used to collapse quite regularly when the generators where young as well, as many older people can tell you. What is worrying about the breakdowns is not the breakdowns of the old lignite fired power stations, but of the most recent and biggest power station, built in 2007, Kogan Creek. These collapses, and other factors, lead the AEMO to say:

black coal-fired generation around the country decreased by 1,061MW on average compared to Q4 2018, its lowest quarterly level since Q4 2016

So more black coal is not needed all the time, even now. Gas can also be problematic. RenewEconomy reports:

Origin [a major electricity provider] has been hit by a long-term outage at its Mortlake gas generator in Victoria, and at its Eraring coal generator in NSW. These outages alone slashed $44 million from its first half earnings, while a 7 per cent slump in volumes due to the growth of rooftop solar and expired business contracts cut profits by $46 million, and price controls in Victoria and federally cost another $55 million.
Renew Economy 20 Feb 2020

This apparently cost Origin $170 million in electricity earnings, an overall drop of 11% for second half of 2019.

There was so much renewable energy around, that not only did it reduce profits for some corporations, but prices were occasionally negative and some renewable sources were told to curtail production.

[R]enewable energy curtailment across the National Electricity Market – the main grid covering the eastern states – increased to 6 per cent of total output in Q4 2019, the highest amount on record.

With typical realism, former minister Matt Canavan (who left the ministry to support Barnaby Joyce’s leadership bid) declared that “Renewables are the dole bludgers of the energy system, they only turn up to work when they want to“. The reality is that they have to sometimes be laid off to keep the coal energy industry in business. He continued to argue that Australia apparently needs coal for our remaining manufacturing. Supporting manufacturing has not been something the Coalition has been that interested in for a while.

As the article quoted above states, it is close to “impossible to name a single federal Coalition MP that recognises the potential of wind and solar”, even with the latest research from the CSIRO and AEMO stating that renewables with storage are cheaper than coal, and far cheaper than nuclear. Some other research suggests storage and “dispatchability” could potentially no longer be a problem; a report from the ANU states that there are around 22,000 potential pumped hydro storage sites in Australia, and Professor Blakers from the ANU Research School of Engineering says:

“Australia needs only a tiny fraction of these sites for pumped hydro storage – about 450 GWh of storage – to support a 100 per cent renewable electricity system…”

There are large scale plans to sell renewable energy generated in Australia to Singapore, or to generate hydrogen gas and export it instead of methane (especially in South Australia), but the Federal government appears to ignore these ideas, or realities. Coal is still its god, and needs taxpayer support. So it is not surprising that:

The Australian Coalition government has announced a new $4 million grant to pursue a new 1GW coal fired generator in north Queensland in one of the first acts of the new pro-coal resources minister Keith Pitt.

Taxpayers’ money is being given to Shine Energy to conduct a feasibility study for a proposed 1GW HELE coal plant at Collinsville in Queensland.

Let’s ignore the probability that Northern Queensland already has more energy than it needs.

“The problem is it makes little commercial sense to build more generation in Queensland at the moment. The state is in oversupply. Queensland’s 13GW of conventional generation has been augmented over the last decade by more than 5GW of new rooftop solar and large-scale renewables. There’s more on the way”.
Australian Financial Review

Richard Denniss of the Australia Institute commented:

there is absolutely no evidence suggesting that marginal electorates are the cheapest or best places to build new power stations. …
The former resources minister Matt Canavan even pulled out the schoolyard defence of ‘they started it’, arguing on Twitter that: “I see some are saying that we should not help coal-fired power stations provide jobs because we should leave it to the market. Well if that’s the view be consistent and argue against the billions we give to renewables every year!”….
First, no federal government has spent billions per year on subsidies for renewables. None. While it’s true that the government mandates that minimum amounts of renewable energy are supplied to the grid, such obligations don’t cost the budget a cent.
Australian Financial Review 24 Feb 2020

Denniss also points out that:

Only one coal-fired power station is being built anywhere in Western Europe, North America or Australia; a German plant that is nine years overdue. Even in Trump’s America, no coal-fired power stations are under construction.
as above

What this grant to Shine shows is that nobody is prepared to even look at building coal power in Australia without subsidy. Just as Adani is constantly demanding subsidy for its coal mine (free water, royalty holidays, train lines, apart from straight money gifts), and this mine is unlikely to benefit any Australians at all, and likely to damage a few.

We now know:

The only physical trace of Shine Energy, which wants to build a $2bn coal-fired power station in north Queensland, is a small post office box next to an Asian grocer at a suburban Brisbane shopping complex….
Company documents show Shine Energy is worth a nominal $1,000 on paper. It has no registered financial obligations, and no physical office at its listed address.
On its website, Shine describes its business as providing “renewable energy solutions”, but the company could offer no evidence that it or its directors…. has ever previously worked on an energy generation project.
The Guardian 29 Feb 2020

Superficially, this looks like a strange company to entrust with the task.

The PM justified all of this by saying “We listen to all Australians and we listen to Australians right across the country, not just those in the inner city.” I suspect they only listen to Australians who sponsor them, or agree with them, after all “60% of a sample of 1,083 voters believes Australia should be doing more” and 64% of another poll see climate change as the prime critical threat to Australia, and most of them think we should act even if it involves significant costs. Quite a few people, including Coalition voters, think their lack of climate policy is problematic.

And of course this spending on coal is being justified as it will “help drive down prices for businesses and their customers.” The Prime Minister apparently said: “we won’t be bullied into higher taxes and higher electricity prices.” Barnaby Joyce argued that the government needs to ensure that “the poor people can get affordable power, and that we can get dignity in people’s lives.”

However, prices are already going down without coal, and coal emissions will have disastrous effects on poorer people in fire and flood zones – they won’t be able to afford the insurance hikes. No one in the Coalition seems at all concerned about the cost to the ecology in terms of climate change. The future costs of the loss of agriculture, loss of water and through storm, flood and fire damage appears completely opaque to them. It does not count. Effectively fossil fuels are being subsidised by ignoring the costs that will fall on ordinary people and the economy in general.

We already have problems of too much energy for the market, subsidised coal will not solve that problem, and if it is more costly to build, then without even more taxpayer subsidy, it will cost more and pollute more, and take more water and damage climate even more. Coal is a loose/loose situation.

And then we learn that:

Renewable Energy Partners has been given $2 million in funds from the Coalition government to advance a feasibility study into a project that would combine 1.5GW of pumped hydro, with seven hours storage, along with up to 1.3GW of solar PV, 800MW of wind energy and a 200MW hydrogen electrolyser, fuelled by the green energy sources.

The CEO states:

“Our initial studies have already shown that our site is well suited for solar generation, the topography is ideal for the construction of a large-scale wind farm and a recent study by the Australian Energy Market Operator has confirmed the need for a large pumped hydro facilities in North Queensland, the Urannah Renewable Hub is the battery of the north,”

There is no evidence of coherency in this policy. The government could strongly point out that they are trying to find the best system, by linking or comparing the projects, but they don’t and probably can’t.

The government has also apparently started leaking that it would prefer to “favour technology over taxation” because, according to the PM:

“currently no one can tell me that going down that path won’t cost jobs, won’t put up your electricity prices, and won’t impact negatively on jobs in the economies of rural and regional Australia.”
PM Transcript 18 Feb 2020

We have seen electricity prices seem to be coming down and the CSIRO working with other people such as the National Bank and other businesses (so this is not some ‘crazy’ left wing report) have argued:

Australia faces a Slow Decline if it takes no action on the most significant economic, social and environmental challenges. But, if these challenges are tackled head on, Australia can look forward to a positive Outlook Vision. This could mean higher GDP per capita, ‘net zero’ greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, strong economic growth and energy affordability, and more liveable major cities
CSIRO Australian National Outlook 2019

They go on to suggest that this could lead to 2.75–2.8% annual growth in GDP (ok there are possible problems with this, but from the Coalition’s point of view this is good), 90% wages growth by 2060, and $42–84 billion increase in returns to landholders (Executive Summary p.9). This is much better than the option of failing to “adequately address the global and domestic issues, resulting in declining economic, social and environmental outcomes.” So the Prime Minister can’t really say that nobody has told him that going renewable would be good for the economy and the country.

The PM continues his argument by suggesting that:

There’s a lot of people at the moment wanting us to put more taxes on people to solve problems. I don’t believe higher taxes are the solution to our problems.
PM Transcript 18 Feb 2020

He does not say who these people are, but another commentator in the not leftwing Australian Financial Review remarks:

far from being mutually exclusive, technology and a carbon price can be complementary in driving down emissions. …
without a market-based carbon price to incentivise lower emissions technology and private sector research and development, the government will resort to heavy-handed interventions to try to spur new emissions-reduction technology. It’s remarkable that on climate and energy policies, a Liberal government favours big government picking winners instead of market principles.
Australian Financial Review 22 Feb 2020

In a later speech the Prime Minister seems to assume that:

“hazard reduction for keeping people safe as, frankly, as important as emissions reduction when it comes to addressing these climate issues…. And, you know, rural and regional Australia is tough. They’re resilient. And it’s a great place to be.”
PM Transcript 17 Feb 2020

You almost certainly cannot reduce the hazard from 3-4 degree temperature rises and and sea level rises, enough to keep people safe.

Then we hear there are:

Record levels of investment in renewable technologies, beating our Kyoto emissions reduction target by 411 million tonnes.
PM Transcript 17 Feb 2020 b

Ignoring the Kyoto accounting trick [2] [3] [4] [5] and its effects, in this statement, the government, with Labor support, are running down the finances of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, which helps fund the establishment of renewable energy systems and research into renewable energy. ARENA expects to exhaust its funds by the end of the year. This is simultaneous boasting of spending on renewables and inhibiting that spending. It is not coherent. Unless of course, by technology, they do not mean renewables, or greenhouse gas free technologies.

Indeed we have to assume that incoherency is the standard response of Australian politicians when faced with climate change. The Labor deputy leader responded to all this, by saying:

“I absolutely support coal mining jobs and coal miners, and the role that that plays within our economy, and it will continue to play a role for a long time to come,… [we should] acknowledge the significant role that coal miners play and the communities play within our economy” [but] “A Labor government is not going to put a cent into subsidising coal-fired power. And that is the practical question as to whether or not it happens”

Yes look after the workers, but don’t poison the planet. This is not a difficult idea; the climate movement has been talking about “just transitions” for a long time. A few days after this, Labor leader Anthony Albanese said, in response to questions about coal fired energy plants:

You may as well ask me if I support unicorns…. I don’t think there’s a place for coal-fired power plants in Australia, full stop… The truth is no private sector operation will touch a new coal-fired power plant with a barge pole
Canberra Times

However,

Business and industry groups are urging the government to commit to zero carbon emissions by 2050…. Mr Albanese refused to give a clear answer when pressed on whether Labor supported their calls, saying his party would cement their climate policies closer to the next federal election in 2022.
same as above

Later Mr Albanese objected to the proposal to give Shine Energy taxpayer’s money, saying:

“they are using $4m of taxpayers funds to give to a private operation that has no record of building a new power station anywhere”

However, he went on to support the Adani mine saying:

“It’s a good thing those jobs have been created. I support jobs regardless of where they are [and, he supports] and the economic activity that will arise from them…..Our priority is jobs and jobs here in Queensland, and we make no apologies for that.”
The Guardian

As I have argued on several occasions there are not that many jobs in the Adani mine, and there are severe disputes about the economic flow on benefits, especially granted the royalty holidays, taxpayer subsidies and risk of destroying water flows. It might be cheaper just to use the subsidies to start new local industries in Queensland to provide real jobs.

Late last year Albanese also said:

“the proposal that we immediately stop exporting coal would damage our economy and would not have any environmental benefit”.
Brisbane Times

Nobody I am aware of, is arguing that we “immediately stop exporting coal,” so this is not a real point, but lots of people are arguing that we should not open new coal mines or expand the coal exports. This is because, climate change is a global systemic problem. It does not matter where the fossil fuels are burnt, they affect, and worsen, Australia’s climate, causing job losses in other parts of the country.

In an interview on the ABC’s Insiders, after the policy speech, Albanese agreed there was still likely to be coal mining and export in Australia after 2050. “[The target is] net, that’s the point.” He said that exported coal was not counted in Australia’s greenhouse gas budget. “You don’t measure the emissions where the original product comes from.” This avoidance of responsibility is despite him recognising the targets are economy wide, and not cutting back emissions affects the world.

If Labor supports the mining and burning of coal, they do not have an effective climate policy, they (at best) only have a ‘get Australia out of coal fired energy policy’.

Conservative Independent Zali Steggall has proposed legislation which would enforced zero net emissions by 2050, and give a series of targets on the way, but Albanese appears not to be keen to support her move, giving the excuse that the Government would not allow debate, leaving his climate change spokesman Mark Butler to try and say they would engage with the possibility of supporting the proposed legislation. Later Albanese said:

the world must achieve net zero carbon emissions by the year 2050…. [so that] the amount of pollution released into the atmosphere is no greater than the amount we absorb which can occur through agriculture, forestry and other means.
Speech: Leadership in a New Climate 21 Feb 2020

Nothing in this speech, or in what he has said elsewhere, gives any interim targets to get to “net zero carbon emissions by the year 2050”. This indicates little planning, or expectation of planning, and the apparent refusal to take on Steggall’s interim targets suggest this lack, is part of the policy.

He continued:

We pride ourselves on always pulling our weight. And we have seen climate change be a factor in our devastating bushfires. We could see it, smell it, even touch it. Our amazing continent is particularly vulnerable. So we have a lot to lose. But the good news is we also have a lot to gain. Action on climate change will mean more jobs, lower emissions and lower energy prices….in recent months we had some foreshadowing of the costs of inaction.
Speech: Leadership in a New Climate 21 Feb 2020

So, we are told both that action on climate must be sacrificed for jobs and produces jobs. And that we can sell climate change elsewhere and suffer here, and not suffer here. Labor is not coherent either.

One problem with neoliberalism, and Australian politics is primarily neoliberal, is that because it only recognises the virtues of profit, and preferably profit by established companies, it looks like corruption. Neoliberals will always support established corporate power and give it handouts, but they don’t have to be bought, they just do it anyway.

Then I guess there is the problem of existential crisis, and the difficulty of recognising that we cannot do what we have previously done, as it will harm us. This may well be affecting politicians and many high level business people, and if so then that leaves us in a storm without a rudder, clinging to what worked in the past and destroys us now.

The next post discusses the consequences of this confusion

Tags:disorder, Energy, neoliberalism, politics
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Problems with Shale Oil in the US

February 9, 2020

This is a summary of a series of blog posts by another writer. He is trying to sell you ‘precious metals’ as a hedge against economic collapse, but his analysis of a coming crisis in US shale oil production seems highly plausible…

He suggests that activity in the world’s economy has been driven by cheap energy availability, and this has largely been provided by cheap US shale oil.

Nowadays, it appears that Peak Mainstream oil is already here. Each year the world needs to replace 3 million barrels per day of supply no longer provided from mature and declining oil fields at the same time as meeting growth in demand for oil. Any growth in contemporary world oil consumption was allowed by the US shale.

However, the decline in US shale oil production is even more dramatic than that for mature mainstream oil wells. The top 4 U.S. shale oil fields have suffered a 44% decline in their rate of production in less than a year, between Dec 2018 to Oct 2019.

It will take a massive amount of investment spending and thousands of new wells to offset these losses in production from shale oil, and keep the output stable. As the easily available shale oil has by now been taken (as businesses generally go for the easy targets first), it is probable that new shale oil will also require a lot more energy to retrieve. The ratio of Energy Return to Energy Input (EREI) will be much lower, so overall energy availability will be lower.

The spending and oil output is almost certainly ungeneratable, and unsustainable, in any kind of financial system. This situation is made worse as the author has argued elsewhere, because shale oil has largely survived on borrowed money, with investors hoping for long term stable production which has not eventuated. There will likely be large scale losses of this borrowed money, which could start a general financial collapse.

Lack of production also means that oil based energy collapse is extremely likely, and this will probably reinforce the financial collapse.

It is also likely to make the necessary transition into renewables harder, although it might ‘help’ through unplanned and catastrophic degrowth.

Tags:degrowth, disorder, economics, Energy, politics
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