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: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.
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.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.
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.
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:That sounds to me like advising slowing the car by stepping on the gas.
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:I sense that you see opportunity, not obstacle, in having much greater numbers--something to do with greater complexity, perhaps?
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: Collapse has more dimensions than just that of the planet's rising temperature. Mann has done a service by reminding us of this.
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:Your statement implies that science will find a way to bail us out again and again, so that we can do whatever we want.
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: 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?
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: 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?
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.DWill wrote: You have "a range of paradigm shifts" as the bridge to a fantastic future. I've got too much Missouri in me.
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.
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: 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.
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: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.
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.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.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: 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.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.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.
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.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.DWill wrote: I can't see that perspective as being derived empirically at all, Robert.
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.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: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.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: Prophets predict impacts in order to select those that will be the least harmful.Avoiding collapse is a low bar that the current complacency about climate tipping points shows every sign of failing to clear.DWill wrote:It's more a matter of optimizing continually than of avoiding collapse, as that standard sets the bar very low.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: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 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: 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.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: 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.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: 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?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: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.DWill wrote:Geoengineering remains a very dicey prospect that faces enormous resistance geopolitically, which makes advocating for it akin to contributing to delay.
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.