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Poll: What to do about climate change?

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What are the top priorities for climate change?

No action needed
3

11%
Cut Emissions
8

30%
Tax Carbon
3

11%
Remove Carbon Dioxide from Atmosphere
6

22%
Manage Solar Radiation
2

7%
Reduce Personal Carbon Footprint
5

19%
 
Total votes: 27
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Poll: What to do about climate change?

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A climate change expert commented to me today that “mitigation [ie emission reduction] alone is completely insufficient, even in the remotest fantasy of extremely rapid shifts to renewable energy, massive-scale CDR [carbon dioxide removal] is absolutely essential, and that we need to do enough research on SRM [solar radiation management] to inform decisions on it.”

An analogy to help ram home this essential moral point comes from Leonardo Da Vinci, who described his drawing of the ideal proportions of a human figure, the Vitruvian Man, with the famous remark that “man is a model of the world”. In considering the global problems of climate change, Leonardo’s perspective, linking human and global scales, can help us imagine the world on the model of a man.

Looking at climate change as like a planetary medical condition, the prognosis for the planet today is like a person with a serious heart condition. The current policies of mitigation can be compared to a prescription of diet and exercise, whereas the danger of global warming tipping points requires response like open heart surgery, with urgent CDR and SRM deployment at scale. A doctor who prescribes minimal response for a patient who goes home and dies of a heart attack is guilty of culpable negligence. That is the situation for the UN today, with the 1.5° report ignoring SRM and deferring action on CDR.

Further to this medical comparison, blood acidity need only increase by 0.05 pH to make a person very sick, while a lack of iron produces the serious fatigue and weakness of anaemia. The planet is suffering from conditions equivalent to acidosis and anaemia, and needs drug treatment for these conditions. These are medium term problems. The urgent SRM task is to pull back from the brink of risk like a heart attack, with surgical type intervention to remove the grave uncertain hair trigger points of polar warming, which have the planetary gun loaded and cocked to tip into a hothouse climate.

The irony in this analysis is that the barriers to such a medical-type emergency response to stop global warming come from the political left, not from the political right who are demonised as preventing effective climate action. The left say to trust that decarbonisation is enough, while the right have the resources, the skills and the contacts to deploy urgent climate response, if only they could be convinced that strategic security analysis supported such action. The tragedy is that the tribal nature of politics prevents the people who could fix the problem from doing so.
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Re: Poll: What to do about climate change?

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Robert Tulip wrote:. . . A friend of mine working on climate change argues that what humanity needs is a new 'great awakening', not as a religious movement like in the 1840s but rather as a way of understanding personal responsibility for our planetary survival, seeing the connection between our individual values and the fate of the biosphere. That echoes Thoreau's spiritual ideas about nature, and shows how our individual psychology can be decisive in bringing about social and environmental change. I think there is much merit in such a personal sense of connection, since many of the dominant consumerist values - envy, gossip, vanity, hedonism - are antithetical to humanity continuing to participate in evolution.
I was reading a blurb in the recent issue of Hedgehog Review about Mary Midgley, a British philosopher who recently died. Midgley apparently saw the Gaia "theory" as a useful myth for our times. I don't know exactly what she meant by this, but I can imagine she would have agreed with your above statement. I think I may read one of Midgley's books.
Robert Tulip wrote:. . . What I dislike about the 'personal footprint' idea is how it perversely reinforces an individualist mentality, by suggesting what we do as isolated individuals is more important than combining to work together on shared objectives. Climate change will only be fixed through global industrial systems that remove more carbon from the air than total emissions. And before that can be achieved, radical measures are needed to directly cool the air in order to prevent dangerous tipping points into a hothouse earth. Personal frugality only makes a spiritual difference toward those material goals, and can even harm those goals when people see them as too risky.
The reality is that not cooling the air is far far riskier than cooling the air.
If we are to find solutions to climate change, I agree we will need something like a Great Awakening. Being aware of our own personal footprint might help us see the larger context of climate change. It's interesting to see how recycling has become so widespread in the last ten years or so. Most of us who dutifully separate our garbage from our recycling might consider that our parents and grandparents probably produced vastly less garbage than we do today. Almost everything we buy today is encased in plastic. We are somewhat blind to how much consumerism has taken over our lives. I don't pretend to know the answers, but perhaps the bigger movement arises from a grass roots which arises from a sense of personal awareness and responsibility.
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DWill

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Re: Poll: What to do about climate change?

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geo wrote: If we are to find solutions to climate change, I agree we will need something like a Great Awakening. Being aware of our own personal footprint might help us see the larger context of climate change. It's interesting to see how recycling has become so widespread in the last ten years or so. Most of us who dutifully separate our garbage from our recycling might consider that our parents and grandparents probably produced vastly less garbage than we do today. Almost everything we buy today is encased in plastic. We are somewhat blind to how much consumerism has taken over our lives. I don't pretend to know the answers, but perhaps the bigger movement arises from a grass roots which arises from a sense of personal awareness and responsibility.
I might question whether the analogy with religious revivalism in the 19th Century really leads to any kind of action model for fighting climate change. What matters is only that we stop a certain behavior, i.e., using the atmosphere as a waste sink. It's hard for me to see how heightened consciousness can be a lever for accomplishing that task. Are there any historical instances we can cite of such psychological events making the kind of difference we need? Looking at my own situation, what would an awakening of consciousness look like? I can't picture it, but how would it change anything, anyway, unless as a result of it I renounced just about every advantage I have? Just by being a North American with a middle-class income, a house, two cars, traveling by air occasionally, etc., my footprint is at least twice the world average. Am I going to drop out of all of that? No, I don't think so. All the people in my life would be upset, for one thing, but I also would find it very difficult to do. And it would not feel virtuous, rather desperate instead.

So the radical restructuring of economic life that many people are talking about, some of it under the heading of circular economy, is about all I can see as a possibility, and even that faces long odds. It's likely that "people like me" will need to become the exception before very long, resist that reality though I will. There is some hope in the changing expectations of the youngest adults, who care less about owning things than my generation did, cars and houses, for example. Whether that lesser interest is enough to start to make a major difference, I don't know.

The Amish make an interesting case study, by the way. I can't find data on their carbon footprints, but it would be logical to assume that it's less than any other major grouping. However, they're extremely conservative and not generally environmentally-minded. I suspect they'd think climate change talk is from Satan. So consciousness doesn't seem to play a role in their lower impact on the planet.
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geo wrote:I was reading a blurb ... about Mary Midgley, a British philosopher who recently died. Midgley apparently saw the Gaia "theory" as a useful myth for our times.
I hope I can speculate a bit on this. If I understand the Gaia theory, it proposes that the biosphere and supporting geophysical systems have some capacity to adjust to change by tempering it in a way that makes it more supportive to life. A simple example would be the way trees react to a new pest by evolving defenses. A murkier example would be a claim that the environment “greens up” in response to more CO2 in a way that mitigates the damage. The problem there is an implicit claim that responses will be biased toward mitigating the drastic and the extreme, but in fact some responses, like methane release from the melting permafrost, add to the catastrophe.
So, like most mythos, it is not a description or an explanation but rather a motivational narrative. If people can see themselves as part of an adjustment process that all of nature shares, they may be influenced both to think less extractively toward nature and to feel more reflective and capable about formulating a conscious, deliberate response. I rather suspect most mythos narratives for our time will have to combine some element of scientific understanding with some way of helping us feel good about being part of larger mechanisms of causality. A simple example might be rejecting the use of genetic modification for purposes of enhancement of the powers of biologically normal people (which the college admissions scandal does not give a lot of hope for – but at least the value will be part of some mythic narrative).
geo wrote:If we are to find solutions to climate change, I agree we will need something like a Great Awakening. Being aware of our own personal footprint might help us see the larger context of climate change.
Nothing like a metric to focus the mind (unless it be the prospect of hanging from the gallows tomorrow morning). The most useful role of profit is that it focuses the mind of managers on a more-or-less helpful metric. A company might make a loss because it is doing something else helpful, but most likely if it is making a loss it is because it is doing something random or no longer plays a useful role for society.

If people get used to monitoring their own footprint, then it will be much more meaningful to them if their power company does something to substantially reduce that footprint.
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DWill wrote:
geo wrote: If we are to find solutions to climate change, I agree we will need something like a Great Awakening.
I might question whether the analogy with religious revivalism in the 19th Century really leads to any kind of action model for fighting climate change. What matters is only that we stop a certain behavior, i.e., using the atmosphere as a waste sink. It's hard for me to see how heightened consciousness can be a lever for accomplishing that task. Are there any historical instances we can cite of such psychological events making the kind of difference we need?
I tend to agree with you on this, seeing the matter much as Robert does that the necessary choices require such enormous investments in technology and infrastructure that corporate effort is required. A simple example is electric vehicles. We would not have hybrids without the auto companies having invested billions in making it possible, and it is not even a half-measure to reach the needed change in emissions. More like a fourth or a fifth. Plug-in hybrids are probably the next step, but if electric power generation doesn't shift away from fossil fuels and GHG emissions, plugging in your car will not make much difference. It's just that the infrastructure for recharging (or refueling with hydrogen) requires a critical mass of motivated consumers, and that would not have happened without Elon Musk, on one end, and Chevy Volt on the other, putting LEVs within the realm of practicality for those following a typical American lifestyle.

On the other hand there are measures, like farm-to-household locovore plans, that move things in a helpful direction. Even organic foods, while making nearly no difference to GHGs, give a useful example of customers shifting the system away from low level toxins.
DWill wrote:There is some hope in the changing expectations of the youngest adults, who care less about owning things than my generation did, cars and houses, for example. Whether that lesser interest is enough to start to make a major difference, I don't know.
This links to another interesting development. When technology puts people out of work, the savings is supposed to free up income for other demand. We know that technological lock-in is creating monopoly power that prevents some of the needed adjustment, since consumers may not see the savings. But even allowing for that, the tech change of the last 2 decades should be freeing up some new demand. What is it going to?

One answer is services. Rich countries are basically saturated with goods. Items that can be manufactured now take up less than 50 percent of a typical American household's income, and a fair portion of that is retail, which is a service. That includes food, clothing, housing and transportation machinery such as cars, as well as smaller appliances, etc. Where will the new demand go? Probably to more specialized services, whether it be travel combined with adventure or education, or tutoring lagging students, or coaching people to lose weight, or funkadelic hybrids of musical genres. There is good reason to suppose that digitalization has increased the satisfaction people get from services such as entertainment even while decreasing the spending on them.

And that's where the Millennial difference enters the picture. In my experience my sons' cohort gets much more of their pleasure from interacting in interesting ways with friends than my wife and I did. One son regularly hosts couch surfers, and loves it. Even Facebook is an example of people creating enjoyment for other people they know. There is a business now in the other son's town of hosting "escape parties" where the group has to solve puzzles and decode clues to figure out how to get out of a building. It doesn't take much imagination to see digital technology turning this trend into cash: I could become a skater-boy in my old age through virtual imaging, without ever scraping an elbow.

And of course the GHG footprint of a virtual visit to the Galapagos (not to mention the eco-footprint on the islands) is much smaller than for a physical travel visit to them.

The next question is how to make that life functional in a circular economy. It strikes me as answerable.
DWill wrote:The Amish make an interesting case study, by the way. I can't find data on their carbon footprints, but it would be logical to assume that it's less than any other major grouping. However, they're extremely conservative and not generally environmentally-minded. I suspect they'd think climate change talk is from Satan. So consciousness doesn't seem to play a role in their lower impact on the planet.
Well, except that their consciousness is based on being "plain". The idea is that warfare is based on people's envy and struggle for status (and Rene Girard has developed this with remarkable anthropological analysis), so if people resist the temptation to try to seem more cool, smarter, more accomplished, more tasteful, and generally higher status than their neighbors, it will make conflict unnecessary. They were doing organic farming before anybody explained that it is environmentally friendly. And my friends in Philly explain that most of the Amish are quite wealthy, since they make their money without spending a lot of it. (You could check that out, DWill, since your location is not far from Lancaster County PA.)
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DWill wrote:I voted for reduce emissions and remove carbon. It's hard to argue that Robert isn't right that without that we won't reach the goals of Paris.
Reducing emissions and removing carbon are necessary but not sufficient, as I explain in my analogy above drawn from Leonardo Da Vinci of Gaia as facing impending cardiac arrest.
DWill wrote: The problem with this combo, I suppose, is that it might confuse the public. If we're going to remove the carbon, then do we even need to reduce emissions? Of course, we do.
This is actually a very complex political and technical argument. Logically, with world emissions at 10 gigatonnes of carbon per year (GTC/Y), if we work out how to remove 20 GTC/Y then we can keep adding ten and still make progress toward climate restoration. I suspect that level of emissions will not continue though.

Bill McKibben argues in this superb new free access NYRB piece, A Future without Fossil Fuels technology is fast making fossil fuels obsolete. That makes me think the public investment focus should be on reflecting sunlight and removing carbon as a security agenda, leaving the rise of renewables to market forces.
DWill wrote: It's a two-pronged attack. Relying only on CR would be just as futile as relying only on reduction.
No, that is not right. CR could potentially scale up to removal of 80 GTC/Y, enabling return to Holocene stability, whereas at best emission reduction can scale up to about two or three GTC/Y in the next few years, given the inertia in the fossil system. They are orders of magnitude different in effect.
DWill wrote:The point I see as crucial but don't often see recognized, is that zero-emission energy is a necessary goal because it may be only for the next 80 years that we have anything to burn!
It might even emerge that fossil fuels are more valuable as petrochemicals than as fuel, which will make burning them uneconomic, even leaving aside the warming effect.
DWill wrote: Circular economy is getting to be a big deal. Maybe if Jay Inslee can get himself elected president, we'll all get a better idea of how we can help.
Inslee said "we have to have a candidate who will make climate change and building a clean energy economy a central focus, an organizing principle for the American people and we need a president who will do the same. I am excited about this because, as I have traveled the country, I hear people waiting for the bugle call from the White House. We heard it from Kennedy when he said we are going to go to the moon. We need a similar bugle call to the American people on this."

The 'bugle call' we need today is net zero by 2030, expanding global carbon removal to the same scale as total emissions. That will basically achieve a circular economy. In my view the most interesting circular economy idea is biochar, storing carbon in soil as fertilizer, and getting the carbon from algae.
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Robert Tulip wrote: Logically, with world emissions at 10 gigatonnes of carbon per year (GTC/Y), if we work out how to remove 20 GTC/Y then we can keep adding ten and still make progress toward climate restoration. I suspect that level of emissions will not continue though.
I have a question. You are relying on commercial profits to create a Carbon Removal industry. But in light of the way renewable technology has surged, and can now undersell fossil fuel plants (as explained in the McKibben essay) by a factor of 1/2, might we not see a repeat of the same phenomenon for biochar? In particular, if profits lead to 80 GTC/Y of removal, is there not a danger of excess decarbonization? There is no more reason for the biochar industry to worry about such a danger than for the Koch brothers to worry about global warming.

Of course there would be some negative feedback as CO2 got less common in the atmosphere. But it is hard to imagine such a deficit seriously impacting the profitability once the basic concept was proven and the technical issues solved. I imagine you can see where I am going with this question. Something you consider a blessing, and rightly so, if it can solve the problem of GHG overhang, could turn into a problem precisely because it was responding to profit without any reflection of the external costs it might create.
Robert Tulip wrote:Bill McKibben argues in this superb new free access NYRB piece, A Future without Fossil Fuels, technology is fast making fossil fuels obsolete.
It is indeed an impressive piece of reporting. The foreseeable effect on development of the poor countries is enormous, and the financial impacts are looming large already. His review of the way the financial effects work is deft and insightful, although he probably should have taken account of the financial overexposure of US banks to fracking speculation.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/arti ... l-tremors/
https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/04/18/f ... ing-bubble
https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/21/investin ... index.html
I would quibble with one point. He argues that assets which cannot pay for their investment cost will continue operating because of bank pressures. This misses the point. The company might write down the value of a coal plant made obsolescent by solar, right down to zero, but that doesn't mean that the operating costs of continuing to burn fossil fuels (whose prices have also been driven down by the same forces) is not worthwhile. Once the capital cost is sunk, it doesn't factor in the the calculation as to how to generate the electricity. The power company at that point is comparing operating costs alone for fossil fuel against capital plus operating costs of bringing solar online.
Robert Tulip wrote:
DWill wrote: It's a two-pronged attack. Relying only on CR would be just as futile as relying only on reduction.
No, that is not right. CR could potentially scale up to removal of 80 GTC/Y, enabling return to Holocene stability, whereas at best emission reduction can scale up to about two or three GTC/Y in the next few years, given the inertia in the fossil system. They are orders of magnitude different in effect.
Well, but to repeat a point I have made before, this premise assumes its conclusion. Both need to be pursued, with incentives to reflect true system costs and benefits, because what CR could potentially do is still a hope, without any basis for claiming all the uncertainty is under control.
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Robert Tulip wrote: Reducing emissions and removing carbon are necessary but not sufficient, as I explain in my analogy above drawn from Leonardo Da Vinci of Gaia as facing impending cardiac arrest.
Wait, I thought that carbon removal was pretty much your answer to the problem, with emission reduction being not even really necessary. What am I missing?
Robert Tulip wrote:
DWill wrote: The problem with this combo, I suppose, is that it might confuse the public. If we're going to remove the carbon, then do we even need to reduce emissions? Of course, we do.
This is actually a very complex political and technical argument. Logically, with world emissions at 10 gigatonnes of carbon per year (GTC/Y), if we work out how to remove 20 GTC/Y then we can keep adding ten and still make progress toward climate restoration. I suspect that level of emissions will not continue though.
Isn't there something about reducing emissions that makes it a more practical goal for local, state, even national governments? That quality doesn't speak to the effectiveness of ER in achieving the needing lower carbon concentrations in the atmosphere, but it does explain why it has been the go-to solution, as contrasted with public investment in carbon removal installations. Well, I know you say that CR can offset its costs by selling the carbon removed, but that has to be seen as speculative at this point. The collective "we" is a valuable element in the battle. It's there to some degree regarding emissions reduction campaigns, but it's absent when it comes to CR. Even after the technology to remove carbon at scale has arrived, what country is going to undertake the expense of erecting it, when the costs will be borne by that country but the rest of countries would be free riders?
Bill McKibben argues in this superb new free access NYRB piece, A Future without Fossil Fuels technology is fast making fossil fuels obsolete. That makes me think the public investment focus should be on reflecting sunlight and removing carbon as a security agenda, leaving the rise of renewables to market forces.
Again, the problem of the world acting together on the security issue. The treaty on chlorofluorocarbons would seem to be a possible model, but climate change action requires so much more than switching to different refrigerants did with regard to the ozone hole. But I agree that McKibben makes a good case that we won't need to actually face peak oil before oil peaks as the stuff we use to run the economy.
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DWill wrote: It's a two-pronged attack. Relying only on CR would be just as futile as relying only on reduction.
No, that is not right. CR could potentially scale up to removal of 80 GTC/Y, enabling return to Holocene stability, whereas at best emission reduction can scale up to about two or three GTC/Y in the next few years, given the inertia in the fossil system. They are orders of magnitude different in effect.
I mean that emissions reduction is what we get as we are switching to renewables, as in any scenario we must. Say we did shovel all our effort into CR. If we decarbonized the atmosphere, great, but we'd soon not have enough energy to have much of an economy (because then we'd face peak oil). So I think you are also assuming that we'd be massively investing in ocean algae farming as the big renewable that would also remove carbon. The possible barriers to that happening are many, but I don't mean to poo-poo it.
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DWill wrote:The point I see as crucial but don't often see recognized, is that zero-emission energy is a necessary goal because it may be only for the next 80 years that we have anything to burn!
It might even emerge that fossil fuels are more valuable as petrochemicals than as fuel, which will make burning them uneconomic, even leaving aside the warming effect.
No doubt fossil fuels will continue to be valuable for making plastic. It was interesting for me to learn that with a relatively small amount of hydrocarbons, we can make all the plastic we're likely to need, especially as we engineer plastics that can be infinitely recycled. We now divert about 8% of oil production to petrochemicals.
The 'bugle call' we need today is net zero by 2030, expanding global carbon removal to the same scale as total emissions. That will basically achieve a circular economy. In my view the most interesting circular economy idea is biochar, storing carbon in soil as fertilizer, and getting the carbon from algae.
Circular economy means all sorts of other things, of course, and perceived usefulness doesn't always translate to economic value. I hope that for biochar, it will. Before you started talking about it, I wasn't aware of biochar or its potential.
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geo wrote:If we are to find solutions to climate change, I agree we will need something like a Great Awakening.
The Gaian Great Awakening needed today is a reconciliation of science and religion, recognising that life is intimately connected to the emerging order of the cosmos, placing culture within nature. My view is that humanity is on a disorderly trajectory towards collapse, due to systemic errors in prevailing thought. We face a psychology of chaos, with supernatural religious belief creating mass delusion, enabling a path of fantasy, and yet modern science lacks the story to change direction.

Changing this trajectory requires a new paradigm. The fact that we do not have a coherent public conversation about climate change is evidence of the inability to overcome the extreme tribal polarisation of political worldviews. A new Great Awakening will need to draw in elements from the different sides, accepting the Christian mythos while entirely rebasing it in the modern ethical framework of evidence and logic.
geo wrote: Being aware of our own personal footprint might help us see the larger context of climate change.
The context of climate change is the problem of how to switch from disorderly chaos to a vision of scientific order as the basis of planetary civilization. My view on how Christianity can assist that process draws from the myth of the last judgement, the idea from Matthew 25:31-44 that providing food, drink, health, freedom, friendship, material conditions and solidarity is the entire basis of human salvation. This is a transformative vision of the purpose of religion that intimately links to personal climate footprint as the empirical measure of existential reality.

The connection to the larger context of climate change reflects the hierarchy of needs, that we need a sociology before we can construct a cosmology. In this way of seeing things, the sociology is the material basis of salvation, while the cosmology is about the planetary trajectory, seeing the earth in astronomical terms as a circular economy, grounded in the orbital systems that provide the long term basis for natural climate change.

This cohesive vision connects the personal to the cosmic through the alarming observation that we are all in this together and the current trends are very bad. In natural climate change seen in the geological record, feedback amplifiers far tinier than fossil fuel emissions have produced planetary effects vastly bigger than the warming we have seen to date, so we need to get real about practical geoengineering as the only basis to stabilise the planetary economy.
geo wrote: It's interesting to see how recycling has become so widespread in the last ten years or so. Most of us who dutifully separate our garbage from our recycling might consider that our parents and grandparents probably produced vastly less garbage than we do today.
Recycling is essentially a religious ethical habit, grounded in the sense that waste is evil, with the circular economy faith that we have a moral duty to convert all our waste to assets.
geo wrote: Almost everything we buy today is encased in plastic. We are somewhat blind to how much consumerism has taken over our lives. I don't pretend to know the answers, but perhaps the bigger movement arises from a grass roots which arises from a sense of personal awareness and responsibility.
There is a cascading perception of duty. Our sense of personal duty in reducing waste at home generates a psychology and politics and philosophy that asks why and how our society can have such a wasteful mentality as to treat the air as an open sewer, with heedless indifference to the good of the future. The best line in the Bible on this whole observation of planetary duty is from the Apocalypse, that the wrath of God is against those who destroy the earth. (Rev 11:18)
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DWill wrote:I might question whether the analogy with religious revivalism in the 19th Century really leads to any kind of action model for fighting climate change. What matters is only that we stop a certain behavior, i.e., using the atmosphere as a waste sink.
All intentional action is based on thought. Our conscious intentions are formed in language, creating a story about what is real and valuable. Only by changing this story can we change the actions that it causes. Philosophy is the basis of politics. A new enlightenment, a synthesis of faith and reason, is the only thing that will generate the public conversations on strategies for our common planetary future.
DWill wrote:It's hard for me to see how heightened consciousness can be a lever for accomplishing that task. Are there any historical instances we can cite of such psychological events making the kind of difference we need?
Well, Keynes did say ‘Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.’

That is a cynical cautionary economist view on the unconscious relation between thought and action, which also indicates the psychological basis of sound action in correct thought. My view is that the biggest challenge, while avoiding what Keynes called frenzy, is to distil an ethical theory of reality from systematic philosophy.

Speaking of historical instances of the influence of theory, the entire history of socialism is an effort to implement Marx’s theory of class war, while Adam Smith’s theory of market forces helped enable the immense prosperity generated by modern capitalism. My view is that placing both those ideas within the larger framework provided by Christian theology is essential to generate the needed reforms of climate policy. I am not suggesting the traditional form of Christian revival, but rather a complete transformation of the nature of faith to reconcile with reason.
DWill wrote:Looking at my own situation, what would an awakening of consciousness look like? I can't picture it, but how would it change anything, anyway, unless as a result of it I renounced just about every advantage I have? Just by being a North American with a middle-class income, a house, two cars, traveling by air occasionally, etc., my footprint is at least twice the world average. Am I going to drop out of all of that? No, I don't think so. All the people in my life would be upset, for one thing, but I also would find it very difficult to do. And it would not feel virtuous, rather desperate instead.
Middle class Americans are actually in the top 1% of world income. In 2013 the world median income was $8 per day. So “twice the world average” would still leave you rather desperate. But that is okay, if you can use your privileged situation to develop ideas about how to transform the earth, for example through industrial systems that transform waste into assets. Vows of poverty are self-indulgent against that planetary metric. New ideas can only come from people with the time and freedom and ability and resources to develop them.
DWill wrote:So the radical restructuring of economic life that many people are talking about, some of it under the heading of circular economy, is about all I can see as a possibility, and even that faces long odds. It's likely that "people like me" will need to become the exception before very long, resist that reality though I will. There is some hope in the changing expectations of the youngest adults, who care less about owning things than my generation did, cars and houses, for example. Whether that lesser interest is enough to start to make a major difference, I don't know.
A friend recently pointed out to me that annual economic growth of 3% would lift consumption by 18 times over a century. He argued that was unimaginable on a world scale. My view is that if we think of production in terms of energy, such a massive increase in wealth is ecologically possible, and could actually provide the basis to protect biodiversity and regulate planetary temperature, enabling total recycling of everything to maximise value.

Remember the sun pumps out two billion times as much energy as hits the earth, and the ocean has more than a billion cubic kilometres of water, so the potential scale of future energy use is huge.
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Mon Mar 18, 2019 12:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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