DWill wrote:carrying capacity has to be viewed not in terms of how many people can be born--who really cares about that?--but in terms of the quality of life they can have.

Very true, but this illustrates the debate over Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, as to whether material or spiritual needs are primary. The dilemma is that self-actualisation requires reliable physiological sufficiency, but the whole process is not really a hierarchy, since we must construct a spiritual civilization for our material systems to be sustained. Population can only grow sustainably when both material and cultural needs are met. The interplay between sufficiency and identity is essential, with wizards delivering sufficiency and prophets enabling identity.

DWill wrote: Since under current conditions we aren't doing well enough by our fellow humans, let's show first that we can do better--let's evolve socially--before looking forward to quadrupling our numbers.

I don’t advocate higher population as a goal, it is rather that I react against the prophets of doom who say family planning is a key to ecological sustainability. Too often the people who choose not to have children would be great parents, but are tricked by the ideology that sees humanity as a plague upon the planet. It is about what is key – recognising that with enough focus, technological innovation is the essential priority to solve planetary problems.

Chapter Four of The Wizard and the Prophet has an excellent analysis of a comparable dilemma, around genetic engineering, with the prophetic view that somehow we must curtail growth of technology, rather than apply cost benefit analysis to assess rival strategies. I will return to that in a later post.

DWill wrote:That sounds to me like advising slowing the car by stepping on the gas.

I see how you get this paradox, but that is not what I am saying. A better analogy might be that the climate action movement wants to install devices to limit driving speed to 15 mph, well below what is needed to ensure driving is safe, presenting solutions that don’t solve the real problem.

DWill wrote:I sense that you see opportunity, not obstacle, in having much greater numbers--something to do with greater complexity, perhaps?

Higher population is only bad if we do not have the technology to deliver universal material abundance and biodiversity. I believe that such technology is entirely possible, and that as a result, humanity will be able to focus on higher order needs.

DWill wrote: Collapse has more dimensions than just that of the planet's rising temperature. Mann has done a service by reminding us of this.

In causal analysis, the logical task is to isolate the critical drivers of change, the elements of the system that can most feasibly be changed in order to deliver desired results, and their hierarchical relationships. With Earth Systems Analysis, warming is fundamental. If we work out how to fix warming through new technology, we can also have a path to fix all the other drivers of conflict. Without a solution to stabilise the temperature, everything else will just get worse, so wars and recessions will become inevitably more severe.

DWill wrote:Your statement implies that science will find a way to bail us out again and again, so that we can do whatever we want.

Well no, it is not ‘whatever we want’, it is that wizard technology will find a path to a sustainable planetary civilization, but staying on that straight and narrow way requires the insight of prophets. You are describing the classic moral hazard problem, seen especially in medicine, where promises of cure are wrongly seen as a licence to unhealthy lifestyles, the wide and easy road to destruction. Climate change is a chastening challenge, with the present risk of mass extinction and societal collapse requiring a priority focus on urgent development of new technology, while recognising that a sustainable culture will have to systematically overcome the pervasive comfort of deluded false belief.

DWill wrote: I'm a bit puzzled by your statements about spiritual or religious transformation, in relation to this attitude. There seem to be no changes in behavior that accompany such a revolution. Science will do it all, so why bother with doing anything different from business as usual in our daily lives?

It is about timeframes. The science task is one of immediate material planetary security, requiring elite technocratic solutions. The cultural problem of personal behaviour is much more longstanding and entrenched and slow to fix, with limited direct impact on the warming problem, but essential to construct a sustainable global civilization. My view is that climate activists too often have this causal problem upside down, imagining that cultural shift at the individual level can somehow aggregate to affect global systems.

DWill wrote: will you allege such corruption or short-sightedness whenever the ruling goes against you? It seems facile to make such a charge without more than conviction to back it up. Couldn't the idea really have been not such a good one?

The scale of cynicism and vested interest means the resources to test new ideas are simply not available. There are some hopeful signs this syndrome is changing, with big corporate climate investments, but I still see a serious lack of public conversation about a workable logical framework for climate stability. It is also the case that new ideas may be lacking a key element that will make them feasible, in which case the proper reaction should be to encourage research, not to cynically dismiss the whole idea, as seems to have happened both with Spragg’s Waterbags and NASA’s OMEGA algae system.

DWill wrote: You have "a range of paradigm shifts" as the bridge to a fantastic future. I've got too much Missouri in me.

Fair enough. Starting from Missouri, I would like to see run of river algae farms developed to return nutrient and carbon to the soil as biochar, instead of polluting the Gulf. Development of algae bag technology in rivers will provide a profitable base to assess possible larger scale deployment at sea, aiming eventually to remove more carbon from the air than we add. That is one immense paradigm shift that fits in with the argument in Chapter Four of the organic farmers against the NPK wizards who see more fertilizer as the solution to every agricultural problem.

I set out some of my view on paradigm shifts in an essay two years ago, titled The Precessional Structure of Time, explaining a new philosophy that seeks to ground cultural analysis in empirical cosmology. My view is that a new paradigm will have to combine radical transformative insights from a range of fields, including cosmology, religion, economics and ecology, to plot an evolutionary path to metamorphose our culture into a vision of long term planetary growth. Bringing all those elements together is a great and complex challenge, but feasible and necessary.

DWill wrote: at every turn you reject as insignificant changes on the individual level, such as eating much less meat, traveling less, and consuming less in general.

The problem is that people view the shift to a simpler and fairer lifestyle, together with using renewable energy, as a potentially sufficient response to the climate emergency. Those changes are necessary in the medium term, but the immediate climate problem is one of technocratic security, requiring deployment of carbon removal and albedo enhancement technology on a Manhattan Project style and scale.

DWill wrote:These are actions that would be the outward manifestations of inner change. I realize you do this in order to prevent us from thinking that such changes are enough to make a good dent in warming. But again, more than warming is at stake, and, we need to be frank about the situation with warming. Under no likely scenario will we escape the need for lifestyle change.

Indeed you are correct that inner change is necessary to drive outer change. My concern is that these are in dialectical relation, with inner change among a small group inspiring outer change, which then serves to mobilise inner change at the mass popular level. But cultural change at the population level can only occur as a result of mobilising the leverage and resources and impetus of outer change. With climate change, that means a global focus on technology has to be developed in conjunction with a philosophy of personal transformation, aiming for the technology implementation to help lead and inspire the conversation about philosophy.

DWill wrote:on the prophet side a similar dynamic occurs: prophets believe that giving ground on climate engineering will suck the life out of their movement to effect change at the grass roots. Why get rid of the car if we can just bring our carbon back to earth?

Robert Tulip wrote:Yes, this moral hazard fallacy, the false belief that geoengineering undermines decarbonisation, is in my view a primary ethical blockage to public discussion of realistic measures to address climate change. The ethical mistake here is the belief that grass roots social change is more important than stopping the planet from cooking.

Building a progressive social movement is the tail wagging the dog, unable to see that elite technology investment will do far more than popular mobilisation. People wrongly think that grass roots action to shut down the fossil fuel industry is the key to climate stability, perhaps because such action creates the illusion of personal involvement in the solution. As I have said before, physical and political limits make efforts to decarbonise too small, slow, risky, costly and divisive to be a primary factor in mitigating climate change, so ramping those efforts up is not a viable solution.

Cutting emissions is likely able to deliver only about one four hundredth of what is needed each year to stabilise the climate, if that. Despite this weakness, the UN has the effrontery to define mitigation as cutting emissions. This toxic arrogant mythology among progressives contributes to the extreme social polarisation we see with the election of Trump. It would be far better to conciliate a negotiated solution, recognising that we should aim to avoid a highly risky accelerated decarbonisation of the economy through investment in technology for carbon removal. Minimising rapid economic upheaval is a good thing, not a coal sellout.

DWill wrote: The problem on my end is simply the complete strangeness of the whole idea [of ocean cities]. You've lived with the idea for a while now, and maybe you're not in touch with how impossible this sounds to others. I'm unable to conceive of the rationale for it, which is why I had to speculate that you saw this ocean migration as part of human destiny, in the same way that others conceive of inhabiting other planets as destiny.

It is really about seeing providence in practical terms. Just as the New World of the Americas enabled transformation of the culture of Europe, so too the New World of the planetary ocean, more than double the area of all the continents, will transform our future. In the future, ‘designer cities’ floating around the great currents or moored in stable gyres will be able to provide far higher quality of life than naturally evolved cities. Plastic carbon technology will enable construction to miles deep and high, enabling abundant living space at low cost.

DWill wrote: I might be getting the message more clearly now, though I disagree with it. The mental revolution or paradigm shift you call for is identical to seeing that moving to the ocean is the only way forward for humanity. But I do agree that making it desirable would need to be the initial step. I do not see how anyone could be so persuaded, though.

Moving to the ocean is just part of the required paradigm shift. A new scientific attitude to religion is one part, recognising that worship is psychologically and culturally necessary but religious language is entirely metaphorical. A second part is a cosmology that focuses on how our planet connects to the cosmos. This is something I have done a lot of work on, but it falls between the cracks of various disciplines and traditions so I have not been able to generate interest. The third part relates to the ocean, with the recognition that addressing climate change will need to focus on transforming CO2 from waste to asset at vast scale, providing the resources to build oceanic cities.

For example, a friend recently asked me how much carbon would be needed to build an ocean road to travel the 1000 km from Australia to New Zealand. At a guessing rate of 200 tonnes per linear metre, such an undersea floating tunnel would require 200 million tonnes of carbon, the amount the world emits in about five days.

DWill wrote: I can't see that perspective as being derived empirically at all, Robert.

The Biblical moral prophecy of the Last Judgement, defining performance of works of mercy as the criterion of salvation, treating the least as first, is entirely commensurable with a scientific outlook, recognising for example that ecosystems are among the least, lacking protection in the kingdom of the world, but are of the first order of importance in the Kingdom of God.

It is tragic that the conventional theology of Christendom has fatally confused the values of the world and of God, again illustrating how a paradigm shift in religion is essential to planetary salvation. The Bible is our help here, for example with the paradigm-shifting line in Rev 11:18 that the wrath of God is against those who destroy the earth, suggesting a path for transition from the paradigm of corruption to the paradigm of grace.

DWill wrote:Perhaps there isn't a better encapsulation of the Wizard agenda than you've given above. Do not adjust human life to the world; adjust the world to human life.

No, that is a misunderstanding. What I described integrated a prophetic need to transform human life in order to achieve the wizard goal of transforming nature. We are now in the situation of blithe planetary turkeys waddling toward the Thanksgiving dinner table, and need to transform our thinking to reconfigure the trajectory of the planetary system in time to ensure humanity remains part of it.

DWill wrote: Prophets predict impacts in order to select those that will be the least harmful.

Sorry, I don’t understand this point. Prophets predict impacts in order to open a conversation about how to respond to expected events. It is all about pure realism based on deep understanding of the logical implications of evidence.

DWill wrote:It's more a matter of optimizing continually than of avoiding collapse, as that standard sets the bar very low.

Avoiding collapse is a low bar that the current complacency about climate tipping points shows every sign of failing to clear.

DWill wrote:But I agree that at a certain level, it's all wizardry, largely dependent on further technological gains. It's ambitions on the scale of "system reconfigurations" that reveal the difference between wizards and Prophets, not technology per se.

The problem is that many prophets of doom see no way to reconfigure earth systems in order to avoid catastrophe, and put all the focus on reducing our impacts. One of my favourite Biblical prophets is Jonah, who expected that his prophecy would be the harbinger of collapse for Nineveh, but to his surprise and annoyance, he was successful in his preaching and the Ninevans changed their behaviour and avoided the foretold destruction. Today the world needs a combination of wizardry and prophecy to change both human thinking and planetary systems.

DWill wrote: humility is one thing I see lacking in some of the wizards' enterprises. Certainly proposing to readjust the planet's parameters bespeaks an overweening confidence and an unearned sense of mastery. We are but a single evolved creature fully enmeshed in the web of life, not equipped to unweave and weave it again. The very real possibility is ending up in an even worse place through our tampering.

The problem noted by prophets is that we are adding too much carbon to the air, and slowing the rate of addition looks politically impossible. So the wizard task is to work out how to transform carbon on vast scale from dangerous waste to productive asset. I argue that ocean technology looks to be the only solution with the available area, energy and resources to achieve that essential security goal. That is not a matter of unweaving the rainbow of the web of life, but rather unweaving the constructed linear trajectory that the world is hurtling down, in order to reweave a path of stability, repair and restoration. Failure to consider such a task is not an option, as continuing without effort to remove carbon at system scale is a recipe for what Marvin the Martian called an earth-shattering kaboom.

DWill wrote: climate effects of raising animals, especially beef cattle, are greater than you're allowing, and in any case, the total environmental impact has to be considered. That leaving meat behind won't do any good is what you say about every action that applies to individuals. Individuals don't need to do anything or to change any of their ways, according to you. All of that is just distraction.

http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/197623/icode/ calculates total emissions from global livestock at 7.1 gigatonnes of CO2-equiv per year, representing 14.5 percent of all anthropogenic GHG emissions. Realistically, perhaps say we could cut that by 10% against intense political opposition, slowing growth by 0.7 GT. My argument is that the necessary scale of CO2e removal will have to be about 100 GT, against which such a result from dietary change would be small change. So yes, vegetarianism is a distraction from the industrial scale of the climate menace. Same with all other personal footprint efforts.

DWill wrote: Taxing carbon would incentivize producers to develop technology to remove carbon from emissions. A part of proceeds could be used to compensate and retrain fossil energy workers and aid whole communities whose economies were based on fossil fuels. Why talk about geoengineering before such a practical method has even been tried?

Taxing carbon is a great idea, but what is needed is for the next US President to follow in the leadership steps of President Kennedy’s visionary moonshot announcement of 1961 by setting a goal of net zero global emissions by 2030, based on carbon removal rather than emission reduction. The real agenda of carbon tax should be to encourage major industries to lift their R&D contribution to climate repair. Just making energy more expensive is a piffling factor, but with high irritation, as sand in the gears of the world economy.

DWill wrote:You may reply, "It won't be enough," but let's do it first (here in the U.S.) so that we can finally get off the dime.

Geoengineering is akin to the lockdown policy in response to the corona pandemic, with every day of delay making the resulting later situation far worse.

DWill wrote:Geoengineering remains a very dicey prospect that faces enormous resistance geopolitically, which makes advocating for it akin to contributing to delay.

This popular resistance rests upon the false belief in the deluded narrative that emission reduction could deliver a stable climate. We need to cut about 100 GT of CO2e out of the air each year to step back from the precipice of dangerous tipping points. Emission reduction even with best case scenarios offers the dismal prospect of still adding a net 50 GT in net terms by 2040, according to realistic projections such as the BP Energy Outlook. The task is to confront the popular myth of a low carbon economy as the solution to climate change, opening a public debate about the need for a new Manhattan Project to reflect heat to space and convert CO2 into useful products at global scale.

The popular myth in the climate movement is that we can undo the gift of Prometheus, that humanity can somehow dispense with the use of fire as a source of security and wealth. It is no wonder that the deluded advocates of this myth of a world without burning present Prometheus as a demon, with their siren song of a retreat from technology into some simpler life, and their cruel hoax that a shift to non-combustible sources of energy could somehow stabilise the planetary climate.

Robert, blame my faulty internet for the the bulk of my reply being dropped and lost. Time and energy don't permit the re-creation of it.

Robert Tulip wrote:

DWill wrote:carrying capacity has to be viewed not in terms of how many people can be born--who really cares about that?--but in terms of the quality of life they can have.

Very true, but this illustrates the debate over Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, as to whether material or spiritual needs are primary. The dilemma is that self-actualisation requires reliable physiological sufficiency, but the whole process is not really a hierarchy, since we must construct a spiritual civilization for our material systems to be sustained. Population can only grow sustainably when both material and cultural needs are met. The interplay between sufficiency and identity is essential, with wizards delivering sufficiency and prophets enabling identity.

I'm afraid you've lost me here, Robert, right off the bat. I will say that you must be unique as a Wizard. The wizard-types Mann tells of solve problems; they don't envision entirely new ways of being, as those aren't technical solutions. But neither is such language similar to that of Mann's Prophets, who have a rather homely, down-to-earth message

DWill wrote: Since under current conditions we aren't doing well enough by our fellow humans, let's show first that we can do better--let's evolve socially--before looking forward to quadrupling our numbers.

I don’t advocate higher population as a goal, it is rather that I react against the prophets of doom who say family planning is a key to ecological sustainability. Too often the people who choose not to have children would be great parents, but are tricked by the ideology that sees humanity as a plague upon the planet. It is about what is key – recognising that with enough focus, technological innovation is the essential priority to solve planetary problems.[/quote]
We will have a higher population; there isn't any doubt about that. Twelve billion is the figure I hear about, 80% higher than today. Then, the population levels off, at least in theory. That is enormous growth, and we will be challenged to accommodate it. Therefore I don't see an epidemic of voluntary childlessness occurring any time soon. I hope that humans will turn out to be the one animal that through reason can limit their numbers, in order to avoid the end that Lynn Margulis alluded to at the beginning of the book: a disastrous crash of the species as it confronts the limit of the petri dish.

Robert Tulip wrote:

DWill wrote:I sense that you see opportunity, not obstacle, in having much greater numbers--something to do with greater complexity, perhaps?

Higher population is only bad if we do not have the technology to deliver universal material abundance and biodiversity. I believe that such technology is entirely possible, and that as a result, humanity will be able to focus on higher order needs.

My advice is that your presentation should lead with the abandonment of land, since that is the means you think will preserve biodiversity and create this material abundance. Otherwise, this comes as a great surprise to hear.

Robert Tulip wrote:

DWill wrote:Collapse has more dimensions than just that of the planet's rising temperature. Mann has done a service by reminding us of this.

In causal analysis, the logical task is to isolate the critical drivers of change, the elements of the system that can most feasibly be changed in order to deliver desired results, and their hierarchical relationships. With Earth Systems Analysis, warming is fundamental. If we work out how to fix warming through new technology, we can also have a path to fix all the other drivers of conflict. Without a solution to stabilise the temperature, everything else will just get worse, so wars and recessions will become inevitably more severe.

The problems of water supply, food production, and extinctions cannot wait until the temperature is stabilized. They are immediate and will need attention continuously. If this is like having multiple Manhattan Projects going on at once, well, that is the future we're being dealt.

DWill wrote:Robert, blame my faulty internet for the bulk of my reply being dropped and lost. Time and energy don't permit the re-creation of it.

That is a shame. I make it a policy to only write in Microsoft Word, because of the vagaries of typing direct on internet platforms. Sometimes my computer gets unstable and instantly selects a whole paragraph of text, and then I press a key and it is all lost, with no option to undo if I am writing direct to a website such as Booktalk.

DWill wrote: you must be unique as a Wizard. The wizard-types Mann tells of solve problems; they don't envision entirely new ways of being, as those aren't technical solutions. But neither is such language similar to that of Mann's Prophets, who have a rather homely, down-to-earth message

Yes, my view is that we will need to combine technical solutions with a new vision of existence, imagining life within nature in ways that recognise the orderly patterns of the cosmos as the framework. That is a more mystical religious outlook than the scientific prophecy of Vogt, which in my reading of Mann’s account does not really seek to integrate spiritual philosophy beyond a general reverence for nature. Vogt is progenitor of the modern environmental movement which has a very uneasy attitude towards religion due to the alienated supernatural fantasy mythology that is the dominant force in institutional religion. So again I point out the Bible line from Revelation 15:18 that the wrath of God is against those who destroy the earth, and say this points to a vision of God that rejects the traditional theories of dominion and providence in favour of an ecological spirituality. But ecological spirituality requires industrial technology to address the climate crisis in view of the urgency. It amazes me that we can have such scientific alacrity to respond to the covid epidemic when the same logic should generate understanding of the immediate need for geoengineering.

DWill wrote: I don't see an epidemic of voluntary childlessness occurring any time soon.

The trends show an inverse correlation between wealth and family size, so that all the population growth is among the poor, while the rich have ‘an epidemic of voluntary childlessness’. http://bit.ly/1Kk6z4c says "Educated women face a higher opportunity cost of raising children and are more likely to be childless. The move towards more gender equality therefore contributes to the overall transformation of childlessness from involuntary to voluntary."

DWill wrote:I hope that humans will turn out to be the one animal that through reason can limit their numbers, in order to avoid the end that Lynn Margulis alluded to at the beginning of the book: a disastrous crash of the species as it confronts the limit of the petri dish.

We can work out how to multiply the size of the ‘petri dish’ by many times, enough to protect biodiversity, by using technology to develop industrial productivity in the oceans. Without such a ride the tiger attitude, refusing to cross the frontier, we face the peril of the Margulis prophecy.

DWill wrote: My advice is that your presentation should lead with the abandonment of land, since that is the means you think will preserve biodiversity and create this material abundance.

Rewilding the land will be a slow and gradual process, as humanity develops the spiritual awareness needed to recognise life on the oceans as an inevitable moral destiny. The release of land back to nature is an end of the process not a means as you say.

DWill wrote: The problems of water supply, food production, and extinctions cannot wait until the temperature is stabilized. They are immediate and will need attention continuously. If this is like having multiple Manhattan Projects going on at once, well, that is the future we're being dealt.

And yet, without a realistic scientific plan to stabilise the temperature, it is physically impossible to stop the inter-related crises you mention. The problem is not to have multiple Manhattan Projects, but rather to develop an ecological vision so that strategies to address all the problems can be integrated. I see finding ways to transform CO2 into useful products at scale as the key critical factor, alongside an urgent need to send heat to space, as we are very close to some dangerous tipping points that will be far worse than the corona virus, sending planetary weather haywire.

Further on the supposed ethical choice to be barren, https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... r-children provides a false moral argument supporting this claim, explaining the popular view that children are a plague upon the planet.

There are a series of massive fails in this research, beginning with the false claim that ongoing net emissions of two tonnes of CO2 per person is compatible with climate stability. In fact we have to cut emissions to well below zero by converting CO2 into useful products at global scale. That is not something for individuals but requires combined collective action to create public policy for capital investment in promising technologies.

The entire paradigm of individual response is wrong. It is a bit like the theological debate over salvation by faith or works. Faith brings the community together in a shared recognition of deep truths about existence, whereas works enable us to divert attention from profound ideas by pretending that fidgety personal actions that are not guided by shared ideas amount to more than a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Looking at the history of agricultural chemistry, Mann explains that Aristotle wrongly believed that plants eat compost, living by a mystical vital force or anima mundi, something accepted until the modern scientific revolution, when Carl Sprengel discovered the action of nutrients in the 1830s. Justus von Liebig got the credit for explaining this to the public, especially on the role of nitrogen, leading to the invention of synthetic fertilizer in 1909 with the Haber Bosch method to produce ammonia with high pressure apparatus and effective catalysts. The German chemical company BASF scaled up Haber’s Nobel Prize winning discovery, using iron with calcium, aluminium and magnesium as the catalytic alloy, beginning commercial production in 1913, leading to a chemistry Nobel for Bosch in 1931, for the wizardly triumph of winning bread from air.

Today this HB process consumes more than 1% of the world’s industrial energy to double food production, illustrating how central fertilizer is to feeding the world with wheat, rice and corn, while also poisoning the seas with agricultural runoff, such as the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico about 7000 square miles in area.

The counter came from the Prophets, seeking to bring back the living spirit of soil. Organic farmers saw natural diets as the counter to diseases of civilization. Vitamins were the answer to tinned meat, sugary tea and poofy white bread. The next discovery was that animals fed on crops grown in manure were vigorous while those fed from fertilizer were weak. Dust to dust, soil quality requires abundant carbon, bacteria and fungi to convert waste to asset. This cyclic model remains subject to industrial scepticism, and yet production of biochar is likely to be a major factor in feeding humanity and cooling the planet. Think holistically and see the connections between different disciplines.

Hence the exuberant climax of Les Miserables by Victor Hugo is a tirade about the need for shit on fields, instead of allowing sewers to pollute the seas with golden filth. The Law of Return is the basis of natural farming, forgotten by allegedly civilized humanity.

Albert Howard, father of the organic movement with his Agricultural Testament of 1943, attacked the NPK mentality of synthetic fertilizer, run by laboratory hermits intent on the calamity of slow poisoning of the soil. Supported by aristocratic Christians, Howard decried the threat of industrial agriculture to the social and divine orders. A heady mix of money, power and mysticism (think the Balfour Declaration) saw the Kingdom of God in service to the soil.

A different mass demographic took up the cause in the USA, with Jerome Rodale founding the magazines Organic Farming and Gardening and Prevention, building what Mann calls an empire of belief.

Robert Tulip wrote: It amazes me that we can have such scientific alacrity to respond to the covid epidemic when the same logic should generate understanding of the immediate need for geoengineering.

Mann's brief discussion of discount theory explains that unfortunate disconnect. As urgent as the need to act is, the threat of climate change still does not penetrate into psyches the way that an epidemic does. It is too abstract and relatively distant. At such time as the climate threat does assume a comparable immediate urgency, then of course it will be much too late to do anything about it. Preparing to combat Covid-19 is nothing compared to readiness for climate change.

Robert Tulip wrote:

DWill wrote: I don't see an epidemic of voluntary childlessness occurring any time soon.

The trends show an inverse correlation between wealth and family size, so that all the population growth is among the poor, while the rich have ‘an epidemic of voluntary childlessness’. http://bit.ly/1Kk6z4c says "Educated women face a higher opportunity cost of raising children and are more likely to be childless. The move towards more gender equality therefore contributes to the overall transformation of childlessness from involuntary to voluntary."

The projections of flattened population growth probably depend on large reductions in poverty. That makes sense, though it's hard to understand the relationship between having fewer kids when you have more money to support them. It happens that way. And that is what makes our situation more frightening (although not for you). We need economic growth to further reduce poverty. That puts more carbon in the atmosphere. It would be less bad if the growth went to raising the poor, but a lot of it will go toward making the affluent more so.

Robert Tulip wrote:

DWill wrote:I hope that humans will turn out to be the one animal that through reason can limit their numbers, in order to avoid the end that Lynn Margulis alluded to at the beginning of the book: a disastrous crash of the species as it confronts the limit of the petri dish.

We can work out how to multiply the size of the ‘petri dish’ by many times, enough to protect biodiversity, by using technology to develop industrial productivity in the oceans. Without such a ride the tiger attitude, refusing to cross the frontier, we face the peril of the Margulis prophecy.

That is another of the many examples of the Wizard/Prophet divide, which on certain points does appear to be unbridgeable. Another BT book, The Righteous Mind analyzes moral foundations and can be applied to Wizards and Prophets especially on the Sanctity foundation. When you talk about re-engineering the planet or reinventing nature, I feel a strong aversion, as from a threat of degradation (the other pole of the Sanctity/Degradation foundation). This is not a rational reaction, but neither, I would contend, is the faith that Wizards have in technology. As Mann says, it is a difference of the heart.

Robert Tulip wrote:

DWill wrote:The problems of water supply, food production, and extinctions cannot wait until the temperature is stabilized. They are immediate and will need attention continuously. If this is like having multiple Manhattan Projects going on at once, well, that is the future we're being dealt.

And yet, without a realistic scientific plan to stabilise the temperature, it is physically impossible to stop the inter-related crises you mention. The problem is not to have multiple Manhattan Projects, but rather to develop an ecological vision so that strategies to address all the problems can be integrated. I see finding ways to transform CO2 into useful products at scale as the key critical factor, alongside an urgent need to send heat to space, as we are very close to some dangerous tipping points that will be far worse than the corona virus, sending planetary weather haywire.

I'm looking forward to population growth subsiding, because that will take pressure off the resources of food and water and will less directly help in fighting temperature rise. Multiple plans are going to be implemented simultaneously. It wouldn't make sense, certainly, to wait until temperature is stabilized before acting on food and water. The fact is, we can and we must cope with these problems as it gets hotter.

DWill wrote:Mann's brief discussion of discount theory explains that unfortunate disconnect. As urgent as the need to act is, the threat of climate change still does not penetrate into psyches the way that an epidemic does.

Disclaimer: still not reading the book. I enjoy commenting more than I enjoy reading, evidently.
There are two kinds of discounts that are relevant. (I don't know which Mann discusses). One is financial, the other is psychological. Clearly the second one is at work - people have little bandwidth to spare for warnings from scientists, in the same way teenagers ignore medical advice about smoking because they are too consumed by the pressures of their own social anxieties.

Financial discounting is supposed to reflect the capacity of an economy to grow in overall capacity at a pace which allows superior response in the future. In theory we will have the economic capacity to move all of New York City (and the other coastal cities) inland in response to the rising waters. Or perhaps we will be able to conduct large scale geoengineering because we put our resources into growth now, rather than into fighting GHG accumulation. You may think I am making this up, but it was at the heart of the debate over the Stern report, the most comprehensive effort to date to take stock of costs and benefits of fighting climate change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review

Geoffrey Heal and other leading economists took issue with Stern's use of a zero discount rate, which Stern justified on the basis of intergenerational equity, the precautionary principle and the possibility that there will be no response available when the crunch comes. Ironically, within two years of the release of the Review, actual (risk-free) interest rates dropped to zero and have not recovered since. This means that the world is not increasing its capacity at all, but simply piling up cash, and Stern's choice could be justified on the basis of pure market logic.

DWill wrote:The projections of flattened population growth probably depend on large reductions in poverty. That makes sense, though it's hard to understand the relationship between having fewer kids when you have more money to support them. It happens that way.

Around here there is a tendency to think human life is determined by biological, evolutionary imperatives. And yet we know there is a fairly constant (actually, currently increasing) rate of suicides flying directly in the face of such logic. The cross-currents of psychological, social and spiritual forces are far too complex to be susceptible to easy analysis. Opportunity cost of women's time is a critical variable, (as has been demonstrated in numerous studies) but so is understanding and agency that come with education.

My current perspective comes from having had Boko Haram explained to me. In Northern Nigeria there is a social system in which older men who have been successful accumulate land and wives (as labor and a source of offspring) to become still richer. They have paid the young men to kidnap women and to terrorize schools in order to maintain the system and their status. From the time that Indo-Europeans began to feed cereal to their babies so that mothers would wean the children, lose the natural child-spacing that comes from breast-feeding, and have bigger broods, there has been a dynamic at work of men's urge to dominate overpowering natural checks on population growth, and women being the unfortunate victims of the process.

Suddenly education ("Boko") has intruded in this dynamic and put the brakes on so that women could participate in the flowering of cultural opportunities which is the wonderful side of modernity. Economists talk about quality of life taking precedence over quantity of children, but that does not nearly do justice to the way the choices feel.

DWill wrote: And that is what makes our situation more frightening (although not for you). We need economic growth to further reduce poverty. That puts more carbon in the atmosphere. It would be less bad if the growth went to raising the poor, but a lot of it will go toward making the affluent more so.

My goodness. So many false dichotomies, so little time.

First, economic growth does not necessarily mean burning more carbon. With a little nudging from appropriate prices, which was agreed on way back at Kyoto, there could have been almost as much growth with far less carbon in the atmosphere. But in practice, one might object, it will mean more carbon burned. Pouring concrete, for example, is a source of huge carbon emissions (to cook the lime, basically) and India, to choose an example, has a long way to go to get urban infrastructure (including housing) in place. True, but carbon capture can mitigate a lot of that, and it would pay the rich countries to provide the carbon capture. The list is almost literally endless, of all the many ways that incentives can motivate the modern economy to trim GHG's. If the list wasn't so long we could just order up a few key changes. But we need the decentralized incentives of price modification.

Second, the economy is moving on-line. As Amazon has demonstrated, the efficiencies of replacing a bricks-and-mortar system of distribution with an on-line system are too big to ignore. And the pricier heating and cooling get, the more obvious this will be. When all those delivery trucks are moving around on the power of renewable energy, people will get by with a lot less shopping in person and a lot more delivery to the door. But it isn't just retail space and labor that are phasing down. Headquarters jobs, the excuse for much of the commute into the city, are moving on line (with encouragement now from COVID-19). Recreation is moving to virtual reality, including, one supposes, virtual tourism. I could go on, but my point is simply that growth can actually mean less carbon, not more, and that the rich countries are the early adopters for methods showing how to organize modernity more efficiently.

Third, you worry that there is not enough growth to lift the truly poor (such as Northern Nigeria) out of poverty. But the real opportunities for financial returns are in the poor countries. The countries with abundant financial capital have not yet figured out how to move it there in large enough quantities to get the full benefits, but the urgency of accelerating economic growth in the developing countries (to defuse the ticking time bomb of population growth) means we need to give it serious attention. You note that a lot of the growth will go to rich countries. But that can, at least potentially, be an accelerant to the process of de-carbonization. And economic advancement is not zero-sum. More growth in the rich countries is likely to mean more growth in the poor countries, leading them to transition to a modern, education-based economy.

Robert Tulip wrote: Without such a ride the tiger attitude, refusing to cross the frontier, we face the peril of the Margulis prophecy.

Riding the tiger is a good metaphor for relying on technological advance alone. The disrespect for nature is endemic, and such an approach at the level of society's grand strategy encourages people to neglect the spiritual aspect of engagement with wildness, in some kind of frantic effort to use off-roading and zip-lining as a substitute for coming to grips with life. Life has limits. As anyone who works with teenagers can tell you, limits are a blessing. They feel frustrating at the time, and an adolescent attitude responds with "Challenge accepted!" But there is too much ultimacy at stake to stay in that fevered state.

Margulis may not have spelled out the nature of the future with any accuracy. But, as with most prophecy, the imagery speaks to us. It invites us back into the proper relationship with the wildness that gives life richness, and pulls us aside from the scramble for status and "achievement" into a quest for harmony with others, with nature and ultimately with the limits we inevitably face.

DWill wrote:That is another of the many examples of the Wizard/Prophet divide, which on certain points does appear to be unbridgeable. Another BT book, The Righteous Mind analyzes moral foundations and can be applied to Wizards and Prophets especially on the Sanctity foundation. When you talk about re-engineering the planet or reinventing nature, I feel a strong aversion, as from a threat of degradation (the other pole of the Sanctity/Degradation foundation). This is not a rational reaction, but neither, I would contend, is the faith that Wizards have in technology. As Mann says, it is a difference of the heart.

I'm not sure the "evolutionary roots" of Sanctity have anything to say about this difference of the heart, but I do think the heart difference is a deep truth about these choices. Those of us who think technocratic solutions still offer hope need to think deeply about how the emotional flavors of motivation lead people to think about, or deny, the fateful choices that humanity faces. Proposals for a Carbon Tax now automatically come with a Carbon Dividend. If we had thought that deeply in 1990, the resistance organized by the evil Gingrich (whose heart is three sizes too small) might never have ambushed our progress.

Robert Tulip wrote: The problem is not to have multiple Manhattan Projects, but rather to develop an ecological vision so that strategies to address all the problems can be integrated. I see finding ways to transform CO2 into useful products at scale as the key critical factor, alongside an urgent need to send heat to space, as we are very close to some dangerous tipping points that will be far worse than the corona virus, sending planetary weather haywire.

An ecological vision suggests decentralized implementation, rather than handing the responsibility to a few engineers and scientists to somehow solve the problems everyone else goes on creating. If we can't integrate the two approaches, one might even say the two cultures, then we are putting all our eggs in too few baskets.

DWill wrote:I'm looking forward to population growth subsiding, because that will take pressure off the resources of food and water and will less directly help in fighting temperature rise. Multiple plans are going to be implemented simultaneously. It wouldn't make sense, certainly, to wait until temperature is stabilized before acting on food and water. The fact is, we can and we must cope with these problems as it gets hotter.

I fully agree about the priority on food and water. And once again, pricing plays a role. The most acute water deficit in the world is in Pakistan and Western India, where the water table is dropping by half a meter per year. As The Economist magazine has repeatedly observed, this is made worse by the unwillingness to apply pricing for a scarce resource, (mainly because the relative harm to small farmers would be worst) and many, many helpful steps would be taken if the pricing was in place. They are so far from the management approaches taken by places like Windhoek, Namibia that one imagines it might even be easy to fix the deficit, but it is unlikely to happen without incentives.

Robert, good summary. But this extolling of biochar as a godsend for climate and the rest I have to question. If you're calling the stored carbon in the atmosphere biochar, what's the basis for that? What is recognized as constituting biochar is wood mass burned with low oxygen--charcoal. Biochar has been touted as a significant tool in reducing the carbon load in the atmosphere and in improving the ability of soils to retain nutrients, but here I'd have to adopt your skepticism about the difference-making of particular industries, such as solar and wind, on climate. There are many tributaries to the river of climate defense, biochar being one, perhaps. It's not likely to be the panacea you still seem to be seeking.

Robert Tulip wrote:Further on the supposed ethical choice to be barren, https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... r-children provides a false moral argument supporting this claim, explaining the popular view that children are a plague upon the planet.

There are a series of massive fails in this research, beginning with the false claim that ongoing net emissions of two tonnes of CO2 per person is compatible with climate stability. In fact we have to cut emissions to well below zero by converting CO2 into useful products at global scale. That is not something for individuals but requires combined collective action to create public policy for capital investment in promising technologies.

The entire paradigm of individual response is wrong. It is a bit like the theological debate over salvation by faith or works. Faith brings the community together in a shared recognition of deep truths about existence, whereas works enable us to divert attention from profound ideas by pretending that fidgety personal actions that are not guided by shared ideas amount to more than a hill of beans in this crazy world.

I just think that, surely, we must be beyond labeling a woman "barren" who either cannot or chooses not to have children. "Barren" women were held to be of less worth, pitied and subject to exclusion from the community. Happily, that is less the case today. I think of a childless, married woman I know who had a long career as a teacher and now spends her time benefiting the community in many other ways. She's a gift, and so can others like her be.

Sorry, but I was not just referring to women, or this historic cultural usage, rather taking a poke at the whole idea that personal decisions about family size will be a decisive factor in achieving climate stability. I simply believe that thinking along those lines of just consuming less is a counsel of despair, excluding on principal the type of economic transformation I suggest the world needs to deliver sustained abundance.

George Monbiot, a prophet in the line of Vogt, has just issued a Jeremiad on food supply. He says COVID-19 is nature's wake up call to a complacent civilization, and prophesies doom, famine and Biblical plague. I agree with him on the challenge of complacency, but see the solutions very differently.