Milan – a sibilant intake of breath

The affect heuristic

The dominance of conclusions over arguments is most pronounced where emotions are involved. The psychologist Paul Slovic has proposed an affect heuristic in which people let their likes and dislikes determine their beliefs about the world. Your political preference determines the arguments that you find compelling. If you like the current health policy, you believe its benefits are substantial and its costs more manageable than the costs of alternatives. If you are a hawk in your attitude toward other nations, you probably think they are relatively weak and likely to submit to your country’s will. If you are a dove, you probably think they are strong and will not be easily coerced. Your emotional attitude to such things as irradiated food, red meat, nuclear power, tattoos, or motorcycles drives your beliefs about their benefits and their risks. If you dislike any of these things, you probably believe its risks are high and its benefits negligible.

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking Fast and Slow. Random House Canada, 2011. p. 103

Our leaders are killing our kids

Oceans of ink have been spilled arguing that social media and smartphones are the reason young people around the world are not doing well.

While there may well be truth to that, to me the whole discussion seems like an evasion of the real issue: we are living in a world where our leaders are killing our kids, because they are unwilling to act on climate change even though it could bring about the end of our civilization. We live in a world where the people in charge are willing to condemn everyone who follows them to torment and destruction, all because they are unwilling to give up the conveniences of fossil fuels. The ‘leaders’ who are doing this are committing history’s most egregious crime against future generations and the natural world, yet our media and society keep treating them as the best of their kind: deserving of praise, wealth, and fancy state funerals when they reach the end.

The lesson that sends to young people is that the system does not value them in any way, and is happy to sacrifice their most vital interests for the sake of further enriching those who benefit from the fossil fuel status quo – which is not just billionaire fatcats, but billions of consumers in rich societies who take it for granted that big trucks and airplanes are the way to get around and who insist on political leaders who pretend to care about climate change, while being privately committed to keep supporting the fossil fuel industry.

Even the RCMP – an institution that sees itself as an ally (p. 41) of the fossil fuel industry – is warning about how our societal disregard for the interests of the young is fueling instability:

There is a notion of the social contract in which each generation is obligated to consider the interests of those who will come after. This covenant has been totally broken, with the almost inescapable consequence that intergenerational conflict will become more and more severe as the damage we have done to the Earth keeps destroying our ability to provide the well-off with what they feel entitled to.

What if we never respond adaptively to climate change?

A central assumption of many climate change activists and advocates for climate stability is that once people experience how destructive and painful climate change will be, they will become more willing to take actions to limit its severity – chiefly by foregoing fossil fuel production and use.

The Economist reports on how this assumption may not be justified, in discussing the threat of sea level rise to The Netherlands:

The longer-term issue, of course, is climate change. The North Sea has risen about 19cm since 1900, and the rate has increased from about 1.7mm per year to about 2.7mm since the 1990s. This makes it ever harder for riverwater to flow into the sea. With a quarter of their country lying below sea level, one might think that Dutch voters would be exceptionally worried by global warming and choose parties that strive to end carbon emissions. Yet in a general election last November they gave first place to a hard-right candidate, Geert Wilders, who wants to put global climate accords “through the shredder”. Mr Wilders’s party got 23.5% of the vote; a combined Green-Labour list got just 16%.

All across Europe this winter, as the effects of climate change grow starker, the parties that want to do something about it are getting hammered. In Germany, where the floodwaters hit first, the Green party’s popularity has plunged. Portugal’s Algarve is parched by drought, but with elections due on March 10th polls show the green-friendly left running well behind the centre- and far right. Southern Spain has declared a drought emergency, yet the pro-green Socialist-led government is teetering. Snowless ski resorts in Italy have done nothing for the fortunes of environmentalist parties; Italy’s Green party is polling at around 4%. In winter the Swiss Alps appear on heat-anomaly maps of Europe as a streak of red, 3°c above historical averages. But the hard-right Swiss People’s Party (SVP), the biggest in parliament, won even more seats in an election last autumn, while the Greens shrank.

I feel like the norm in human civilizations is that we are incredibly badly governed. People are easy to fool and deeply divided into tribes, and that provides ample opportunities for political leaders to claim credit and avoid blame.

If politics as usual is the self-serving and incompetent ruling in their own interests while putting together enough of a story to sustain public support, politics when the world is coming to an end promises to be even more dysfunctional and incapable of resolving problems.

Trudeau knocks a hole in the carbon price

I know they are hurting in terms of popularity, but offering one group an exemption to Canada’s carbon price predictably led to calls for equivalent ‘favours’ (if freedom to wreck the planet is a favour) from everyone.

It’s worth remembering how bad Canada’s total historical climate change record has been:

Liberal government set to miss 2030 emissions targets, says environment commissioner audit

Trudeau’s halt on carbon tax could undo years of his tentpole climate policy

A broad-ranging talk with James Burke

As part of promoting a new Connections series on Curiosity Stream launching on Nov. 9, I got the chance to interview historian of science and technology, science communicator, and series host James Burke:

The more interview-intensive part begins at 3:10.

Life in an inhospitable future

Because you’re going to need shelter — and people don’t give their homes away. They barricade themselves in.

So, sooner or later, exhausted and desperate, you may have to make the decision to give up and die — or, to make somebody else give up and die because they won’t accept you in their home voluntarily.

And what, in your comfortable urban life, has ever prepared you for that decision?

From episode 1 of James Burke’s 1978 TV series “Connections”, entitled: “The Trigger Effect“.

Reviewing an unreleased book and TV show

While it won’t help with my rent, I nonetheless have some very interesting work for the next few days.

I am doing a close read twice of Professor Peter Russell’s forthcoming memoirs, which has been a privelege because of the respect I have for him as a thinker and a person, and a joy because of their colour, humour, and personality.

I am also previewing a new series of James Burke’s TV show Connections, which previously ran in 1978, 1994, and 1997. I have seen those old shows many times, and I thought a lot about his book The Axemaker’s Gift back in high school. I have the chance to interview him from Monaco on Wednesday, so I am giving the new material a careful viewing and thinking through how to make the best use of the conversation. There is scarcely a person I can think of who has a more educated and wide-ranging understanding of the relationships between science, technology, and human society. Since human civilization is presently hurtling toward a brick wall which threatens to rather flatten us all, it may be invaluable to get Burke’s views on how a defensive strategy from here can be undertaken.

But then, somewhere between the UN’s 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that outlined the difference between a world at 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius of warming—which was etched into people’s minds as saying we only have twelve years to avert climate catastrophe—and the global youth climate strikes of the following year, reproductive anxiety due to the climate crisis had become mainstream.

Wray, Britt. Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis. Alfred A. Knopf Canada; 2022. p. 8

My evening-rest and sleep to meet

I have been finding it rather hard to rest and focus. My temporary accomodation doesn’t so much feel like a home as like a temporary platform from which to urgently seek housing.

I know the long-standing expectation going back decades is that Toronto and Vancouver have challenging housing markets, but things feel like they have been pushed to a higher level. Increasingly for people around me, housing has become the single most determinative factor in their lives, including in whether they have the stability to pursue sounder finances through job progression or education. The way the housing market is operating is strangling the dreams of young people, while leaving them uncertain about whether they can have any kind of desirable future at all.

Author: Milan

Neon Riding through campus