Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

Catastrophes and mental collapse

Psychologically and emotionally, I have really been doing badly lately.

I have spent all of my adult life studying environmental politics and trying to fight climate change, and now we are at a juncture where the world’s leaders have effectively given up. They won’t acknowledge fossil fuels as the root of the crisis, and they are far too controlled by the fossil fuel industry to accept phasing them out as a solution. They see every new potential oil, gas, and coal project as a vehicle for wealth and self-advancement. Meanwhile, environmentalists are distracted by social issues as the long-term crisis keeps deepening, and people generally are too frightened to even perceive the truth of their situation. Perhaps scariest of all, young people don’t have a coherent and politically-activated sense of what is happening. They can’t see that their leaders are destroying their futures, and they are being drawn into the same sorts of non-solutions which are driving the rise of charlatans and authoritarians to power.

The path forward is totally unclear, and I don’t know how — psychologically or morally — to cope with a world where we have identified that the processes of collapse are accelerating but where we don’t have the honesty or the courage to work through what that means or work toward any remedy.

These are dark, dark days.

Carney on the carbon bubble and stranded assets

By some measures, based on science, the scale of the energy revolution required is staggering.

If we had started in 2000, we could have hit the 1.5°C objective by halving emissions every thirty years. Now, we must halve emissions every ten years. If we wait another four years, the challenge will be to halve emissions every year. If we wait another eight years, our 1.5°C carbon budget will be exhausted.

The entrepreneur and engineer Saul Griffith argues that the carbon-emitting properties of our committed physical capital mean that we are locked in to use up the residual carbon budget, even if no one buys another car with an internal combustion engine, installs a new gas-fired hot-water heater or, at a larger scale, constructs a new coal power plant. That’s because, just as we expect a new car to run for a decade or more, we expect our machines to be used until they are fully depreciated. If the committed emissions of all the machines over their useful lives will largely exhaust the 1.5°C carbon budget, going forward we will need almost all new machines, like cars, to be zero carbon. Currently, electric car sales, despite being one of the hottest segments of the market, are as a percentage in single digits. This implies that, if we are to meet society’s objective, there will be scrappage and stranded assets.

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To meet the 1.5°C target, more than 80 per cent of current fossil fuel reserves (including three-quarters of coal, half of gas, one-third of oil) would need to stay in the ground, stranding these assets. The equivalent for less than 2°C is about 60 per cent of fossil fuel assets staying in the ground (where they would no longer be assets).

When I mentioned the prospect of stranded assets in a speech in 2015, it was met with howls of outrage from the industry. That was in part because many had refused to perform the basic reconcilliation between the objectives society had agreed in Paris (keeping temperature increases below 2°C), the carbon budgets science estimated were necessary to achieve them and the consequences this had for fossil fuel extraction. They couldn’t, or wouldn’t, undertake the basic calculations that a teenager, Greta Thunberg, would easily master and powerfully project. Now recognition is growing, even in the oil and gas industry, that some fossil fuel assets will be stranded — although, as we shall see later in the chapter, pricing in financial markets remains wholly inconsistent with the transition.

Carney, Mark. Value(s): Building a Better World for All. Penguin Random House Canada, 2021. p. 273–4, 278

Experiential education on nuclear weapon proliferation

I have been searching for ways to get people to engage with the risks to humanity created by nuclear weapons.

The whole issue seems to collide with the affect problem: the commonplace intuitive belief that talking about good or bad things causes them to happen, or simply the instinct to move away from and avoid unpleasant issues.

Pleasant or not, nuclear weapon issues need to be considered. With the US-led international security order smashed by Donald Trump’s re-election and extreme actions, the prospect of regional arms races in the Middle East and Southeast Asia has never been greater and the resulting risks have never been so consequential.

To try to get over the ‘unwilling to talk about it’ barrier, I have been writing an interactive roleplaying simulation on nuclear weapon proliferation called Rivals. I am working toward a full prototype and play-testing, and to that end I will be attending a series of RPG design workshops at next month’s Breakout Con conference in Toronto.

I am very much hoping to connect with people who are interested in both the issue of nuclear weapon proliferation and the potential of this simulation as a teaching tool.

Trump ending the postwar security order

Having read extensively about international security and the post-WWII US-backed security order, it is very disturbing to see it all being smashed apart. From Foreign Affairs today:

Carrying out economic warfare on allies sows distrust and risks fracturing the transatlantic and Indo-Pacific security architectures that have underpinned global stability for decades. If Washington imposes tariffs on European and Asian allies, it will create a wedge that adversaries such as China and Russia will eagerly exploit. Beijing, for example, is seeking to drive a deeper divide between the U.S. and Europe by presenting itself as a more reliable economic partner. For its part, Moscow is capitalizing on transatlantic tensions to weaken NATO cohesion. The growing strategic partnership between these two authoritarian powers—cemented through military cooperation, economic agreements, and shared hostility toward the West—represents a direct challenge to the U.S.-led global order. By undermining trust with allies through indiscriminate economic aggression, Washington risks isolating itself at a time when maintaining strong, unified alliances is more critical than ever.

I think my work on regional nuclear weapons proliferation is going to become a lot more pertinent-seeming in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

Ord on the precipice that faces us

If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Humanity is about two hundred thousand years old. But the Earth will remain habitable for hundreds of millions more—enough time for millions of future generations; enough to end disease, poverty and injustice forever; enough to create heights of flourishing unimaginable today. And if we could learn to reach out further into the cosmos, we could find more time yet: trillions of years, to explore billions of worlds. Such a lifespan places present-day humanity in its earliest infancy. A vast and extraordinary adulthood awaits.

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This book argues that safeguarding humanity’s future is the defining challenge of our time. For we stand at a crucial moment in the history of our species. Fueled by technological progress, our power has grown so great that for the first time in humanity’s long history, we have the capacity to destroy ourselves—severing our entire future and everything we could become.

Yet humanity’s wisdom has grown only falteringly, if at all, and lags dangerously behind. Humanity lacks the maturity, coordination and foresight necessary to avoid making mistakes from which we could never recover. As the gap between our power and wisdom grows, our future is subject to an ever-increasing level of risk. The situation is unsustainable. So over the next few centuries, humanity will be tested: it will either act decisively to protect itself and its longterm potential, or, in all likelihood, this will be lost forever.

To survive these challenges and secure our future, we must act now: managing the risks of today, averting those of tomorrow, and becoming the kind of society that will never pose such risks to itself again.

Ord, Toby. The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. Hachette Books, 2020. p. 3–4

Working on geoengineering and AI briefings

Last Christmas break, I wrote a detailed briefing on the existential risks to humanity from nuclear weapons.

This year I am starting two more: one on the risks from artificial intelligence, and one on the promises and perils of geoengineering, which I increasingly feel is emerging as our default response to climate change.

I have had a few geoengineering books in my book stacks for years, generally buried under the whaling books in the ‘too depressing to read’ zone. AI I have been learning a lot more about recently, including through Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord’s books and Robert Miles’ incredibly helpful YouTube series (based on Amodei et al’s instructive paper).

Related re: geoengineering:

Related re: AI:

Little good ever comes from discussing climate change or nuclear weapons socially

Our social world is ruled by the affect heuristic: what feels good seems true, and what feels bad we distance ourselves from and reject. We judge what’s true or false based on it if makes us feel good or bad.

I think I’m going to stop talking to people socially about nuclear weapons and climate change.

Almost always, what the other person really wants is reassurance that their future will be OK and that the choices they are making are OK.

The conversation tends to become a cross-examination where they look for a way to dismiss me in order to protect their hopefulness and view of themself as a good person. It’s a bit like how people feel compelled to tell me how particularly important or moral (or not enjoyed) their air travel plans are, as though I am a religious authority who can forgive them. “Confess and be forgiven” is a cheerful motto for those who refuse to change their behaviour.

These conversations tend to be miserable for both sides: for them because they are presented with evidence for why they really should be fearful, when they fervently want the opposite, and for me because it just leads to more alienation to see how utterly unwilling people are to even face the problem, much less take any commensurate action. If I am convincing and give good evidence, it makes things worse for both: for them because they are getting anxious instead of reassured and for me because it reinforces how little relationship there is between evidence and human decision-making.

It is also a fundamental error to think that if a person believes that a problem is serious and that you are working on it, they will support you. You might think the chain of logic would be “the person seems to be working on a problem which I consider real and important, so I will support them at least conversationally if not materially” when it is much more often “this person is talking about something that makes me feel bad, so I will find a way to believe that they are wrong or what they are saying is irrelevant”. The desire to feel good about ourselves and the world quickly and reliably trumps whatever desire we may have to believe true things or act in a manner consistent with out beliefs.

It seems smarter going forward just to say that I won’t discuss these subjects and whatever work I am doing on them is secret.

It’s crucial when setting such boundaries to refuse to debate or justify them. Let people through that crack, and it’s sure to become another affect-driven argument about how they prefer to imagine their future as stable, safe, and prosperous and their own conduct as wise and moral — with me cast as the meanie squashing their joys.

Related:

Caring and the need to preserve the status quo

It strikes me that recognizing that a great deal of work is not strictly productive but caring, and that there is always a caring aspect even to the most apparently impersonal work, does suggest one reason why it’s so difficult to create a different society with a different set of rules. Even if we don’t like what the world look like, the fact remains that the conscious aim of most of our actions, productive or otherwise, is to do well by others; often, very specific others. Our actions are caught up in relations of caring. But most caring relations require we leave the world more or less as we found it. In the same way that teenage idealists regularly abandon their dreams of creating a better world and come to accept the compromises of adult life at precisely the moment they marry and have children, caring for others, especially over the long term, requires maintaining a world that’s relatively predictable as the grounds on which caring can take place. One cannot save to ensure a college education for one’s children unless one is sure in twenty years there will still be colleges—or for that matter, money. And that, in turns, means that love for others—people, animals, landscapes—regularly requires the maintenance of institutional structures one might otherwise despise.

Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs : A Theory. New York : Simon & Schuster, 2018. p. 219

Related:

The obligation for cheerful dishonesty in much of working life

Here, though, I want to focus on what students forced into these make-work jobs actually learn from them—lessons that they do not learn from more traditional student occupations and pursuits such as studying for tests, planning parties, and so on. Even judging by Brendan’s and Patrick’s accounts (and I could easily reference many others), I think we can conclude that from these jobs, students learn at least five things:

  1. how to operate under others’ direct supervision;
  2. how to pretend to work even when nothing needs to be done;
  3. that one is not paid money to do things, however useful or important, that one actually enjoys;
  4. that one is paid money to do things that are in no way useful or important and that one does not enjoy; and
  5. that at least in jobs requiring interaction with the public, even when one is being paid to carry out tasks that one does not enjoy, one also has to pretend to be enjoying it.

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Yet at the same time, it is precisely the make-believe aspect of their work that student workers like Patrick and Brendan find the most infuriating—indeed, that just about anyone who’s ever had a wage-labor job that was closely supervised finds the most maddening aspect of the job. Working serves a purpose, or is meant to do so. Being forced to pretend to work just for the sake of working is an indignity, since the demand is perceived—rightly—as the pure exercise of power for its own sake. If make-believe play is the purest expression of human freedom, make-believe work imposed by others is the purest expression of lack of freedom. It’s not entirely surprising, then, that the first historical evidence we have for the notion that certain categories of people really ought to be working at all times, even if there’s nothing to do, and that work needs to be made to fill their time, even if there’s nothing that really needs doing, refers to people who are not free: prisoners and slaves, two categories that historically have largely overlapped.

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Of course, we learned our lesson: if you’re on the clock, do not be too efficient. You will not be rewarded, not even by a gruff nod of acknowledgement (which is all we were really expecting). Instead, you’ll be punished with meaningless busywork. And being forced to pretend to work, we discovered, was the most absolute indignity—because it was impossible to pretend it was anything but what it was: pure degradation, a sheer exercise of the boss’s power for its own sake. It didn’t matter that we were only pretending to scrub the baseboard. Every moment spent pretending to scour the baseboard felt like some schoolyard bully gloating at us over our shoulders—except, of course, this time, the bully had the full force of law and custom on his side.

Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs : A Theory. New York : Simon & Schuster, 2018. p. 86, 92, 99