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Javier E

Can History Predict the Future? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—­­to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”)
  • He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.
  • The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions.
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  • In War and Peace and War (2006), his most accessible book, he likens himself to Hari Seldon, the “maverick mathematician” of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, who can foretell the rise and fall of empires. In those 10,000 years’ worth of data, Turchin believes he has found iron laws that dictate the fates of human societies.
  • The fate of our own society, he says, is not going to be pretty, at least in the near term. “It’s too late,”
  • The problems are deep and structural—not the type that the tedious process of demo­cratic change can fix in time to forestall mayhem.
  • Turchin likens America to a huge ship headed directly for an iceberg: “If you have a discussion among the crew about which way to turn, you will not turn in time, and you hit the iceberg directly.” The past 10 years or so have been discussion. That sickening crunch you now hear—steel twisting, rivets popping—­­is the sound of the ship hitting the iceberg.
  • Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily “elite overproduction”—­the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill.
  • Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do.
  • “You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said.
  • Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country
  • Turchin noted that a person can be part of an ideological elite rather than an economic one.
  • Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels
  • Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard.
  • The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising in­security becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people.
  • Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.
  • “I gave up because I solved the problem.” Turchin published one final monograph, Complex Population Dynamics: A Theoretical / Empirical Synthesis (2003), then broke the news to his UConn colleagues that he would be saying a permanent sayonara to the field
  • “Does population ecology have general laws?” Turchin asked. Most ecologists said no: Populations have their own dynamics, and each situation is different.
  • All sciences go through this transition to mathematization,” Turchin told me. “When I had my midlife crisis, I was looking for a subject where I could help with this transition to a mathematized science. There was only one left, and that was history.”
  • After its long adolescence of collecting and cataloging, ecology had enough data to describe these universal laws—and to stop pretending that every species had its own idiosyncrasies. “Ecologists know these laws and should call them laws,” he said.
  • The laws Turchin applied to ecology—and his insistence on calling them laws—­generated respectful controversy at the time. Now they are cited in textbooks.
  • Having left ecology, Turchin began similar research that attempted to formulate general laws for a different animal species: human beings.
  • Turchin suggested that “there are several very general law-like propositions” that could be applied to ecology.
  • If the historians weren’t going to usher in a mathematical revolution themselves, he would storm their departments and do it for them.
  • “There is a longstanding debate among scientists and philosophers as to whether history has general laws,” he and a co-author wrote in Secular Cycles (2009). “A basic premise of our study is that historical societies can be studied with the same methods physicists and biologists used to study natural systems.”
  • he likened historians reluctant to build general principles to his colleagues in biology “who care most for the private life of warblers.” “Let history continue to focus on the particular,” he wrote. Cliodynamics would be a new science
  • To seed the journal’s research, Turchin masterminded a digital archive of historical and archaeological data.
  • The coding of its records requires finesse, he told me, because (for example) the method of determining the size of the elite-aspirant class of medieval France might differ from the measure of the same class in the present-day United States. (For medieval France, a proxy is the membership in its noble class, which became glutted with second and third sons who had no castles or manors to rule over. One American proxy, Turchin says, is the number of lawyers.)
  • Historians of religion have long pondered the relationship between the rise of complex civilization and the belief in gods—especially “moralizing gods,” the kind who scold you for sinning. Last year, Turchin and a dozen co-authors mined the database (“records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality”) to answer the question conclusively. They found that complex societies are more likely to have moralizing gods, but the gods tend to start their scolding after the societies get complex, not before
  • One of Turchin’s most unwelcome conclusions is that complex societies arise through war. The effect of war is to reward communities that organize themselves to fight and survive, and it tends to wipe out ones that are simple and small-scale
  • the data are clear: Darwinian processes select for complex socie­ties because they kill off simpler ones.
  • Certain aspects of this cyclical view require relearning portions of American history, with special attention paid to the numbers of elites. The industrialization of the North, starting in the mid-19th century, Turchin says, made huge numbers of people rich. The elite herd was culled during the Civil War, which killed off or impoverished the southern slaveholding class, and during Reconstruction, when America experienced a wave of assassinations of Republican politicians.
  • “There is a very close correlation between adopting democratic institutions and having to fight a war for survival.”
  • Also unwelcome: the conclusion that civil unrest might soon be upon us, and might reach the point of shattering the country. In 2012, Turchin published an analysis of political violence in the United States, again starting with a database. He classified 1,590 incidents—riots, lynchings, any political event that killed at least one person—from 1780 to 2010. Some periods were placid and others bloody, with peaks of brutality in 1870, 1920, and 1970, a 50-year cycle.
  • In 2010, when Nature surveyed scientists about their predictions for the coming decade, most took the survey as an invitation to self-promote and rhapsodize, dreamily, about coming advances in their fields. Turchin retorted with his prophecy of doom and said that nothing short of fundamental change would stop another violent turn.
  • It wasn’t until the Progressive reforms of the 1920s, and later the New Deal, that elite overproduction actually slowed, at least for a time.
  • This oscillation between violence and peace, with elite over­production as the first horseman of the recurring American apocalypse, inspired Turchin’s 2020 prediction
  • The notion that democracy finds its strength in its essential goodness and moral improvement over its rival systems is likewise fanciful. Instead, democratic societies flourish because they have a memory of being nearly obliterated by an external enemy. They avoided extinction only through collective action, and the memory of that collective action makes democratic politics easier to conduct in the present,
  • Some sound like ideas that might have come from Senator Elizabeth Warren—tax the elites until there are fewer of them
  • others, such as a call to reduce immigration to keep wages high for American workers, resemble Trumpian protectionism.
  • He opposes credential-­oriented higher education, for example, which he says is a way of mass-producing elites without also mass-­producing elite jobs for them to occupy. Architects of such policies, he told me, are “creating surplus elites, and some become counter-elites.” A smarter approach would be to keep the elite numbers small, and the real wages of the general population on a constant rise.
  • We need to stop the runaway process of elite overproduction, but I don’t know what will work to do that, and nobody else does. Do you increase taxation? Raise the minimum wage? Universal basic income?” He conceded that each of these possibilities would have unpredictable effects
  • practice “adaptive management,” changing and modulating your approach as you go.
  • Eventually, Turchin hopes, our understanding of historical dynamics will mature to the point that no government will make policy without reflecting on whether it is hurtling toward a mathematically pre­ordained disaster.
  • He says he could imagine an Asimovian agency that keeps tabs on leading indicators and advises accordingly. It would be like the Federal Reserve, but instead of monitoring inflation and controlling monetary supply, it would be tasked with averting total civilizational collapse.
  • Since at least the 19th century, the discipline has embraced the idea that history is irreducibly complex, and by now most historians believe that the diversity of human activity will foil any attempt to come up with general laws, especially predictive ones.
  • The idea that one thing causes another, and that the causal pattern can tell you about sequences of events in another place or century, is foreign territory.
  • Turchin counters that he has heard claims of irreducible complexity before, and that steady application of the scientific method has succeeded in managing that complexity.
  • One social scientist who can speak to Turchin in his own mathematical argot is Dingxin Zhao, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago who is—incredibly—­also a former mathematical ecologist.
  • in a way I am sympathetic to Turchin. If you come to social science from natural sciences, you have a powerful way of looking at the world. But you may also make big mistakes.”
  • Turchin is nonetheless filling a historiographical niche left empty by academic historians with allergies not just to science but to a wide-angle view of the past.
  • humans are much wilier social creatures, Zhao said. A woodpecker will eat a termite, but it “will not explain that he is doing so because it is his divine right.” Humans pull ideological power moves like this all the time, Zhao said, and to understand “the decisions of a Donald Trump, or a Xi Jinping,” a natural scientist has to incorporate the myriad complexities of human strategy, emotion, and belief. “I made that change,” Zhao told me, “and Peter Turchin has not.”
  • Zhao said that human beings are just much more complicated than bugs.
  • He places himself in a Russian tradition prone to thinking sweeping, Tolstoyan thoughts about the path of history. By comparison, American historians mostly look like micro-historians.
  • Rather than bending toward progress, the arc in his view bends all the way back on itself, in a never-­ending loop of boom and bust. This puts him at odds with American historians, many of whom harbor an unspoken faith that liberal democracy is the end state of all history.
  • Writing history in this sweeping, cyclical way is easier if you are trained outside the field. “If you look at who is doing these megahistories, more often than not, it’s not actual historians,”
  • The genre’s most famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), beheld 13,000 years of human history in a single volume. Its author, Jared Diamond, spent the first half of his career as one of the world’s foremost experts on the physiology of the gall­bladder.
  • Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist who studies how children acquire parts of speech, has written a megahistory about the decline of violence across thousands of years, and about human flourishing since the Enlightenment
  • Most historians I asked about these men—and for some reason megahistory is nearly always a male pursuit—used terms like laughingstock and patently tendentious to describe them.
  • Pinker retorts that historians are resentful of the attention “disciplinary carpet­baggers” like himself have received for applying scientific methods to the humanities and coming up with conclusions that had eluded the old methods.
  • “Given the noisiness of human behavior and the prevalence of cognitive biases, it’s easy to delude oneself about a historical period or trend by picking whichever event suits one’s narrative,” he says. The only answer is to use large data sets.
  • “There’s no reason that traditional history and data science can’t merge into a cooperative enterprise,” Pinker wrote. “Knowing stuff is hard; we need to use every available tool.”
  • Turchin’s conclusions are only as good as his databases, she told me, and any database that tries to code something as complex as who constitutes a society’s elites—then tries to make like-to-like comparisons across millennia and oceans—will meet with skepticism from traditional historians
  • Turchin’s data are also limited to big-­picture characteristics observed over 10,000 years, or about 200 lifetimes. By scientific standards, a sample size of 200 is small, even if it is all humanity has.
  • Privately, some historians have told me they consider the tools he uses powerful, if a little crude. Clio­dynamics is now on a long list of methods that arrived on the scene promising to revolutionize history. Many were fads, but some survived that stage to take their rightful place in an expanding historiographical tool kit
  • Turchin’s methods have already shown their power. Cliodynamics offers scientific hypotheses, and human history will give us more and more opportunities to check its predictions—­revealing whether Peter Turchin is a Hari Seldon or a mere Nostradamus.
Javier E

The Urgent Case for Shrinking the Economy | The New Republic - 0 views

  • A classic example of this dynamic is the advent of the chain saw. A person with a chain saw can cut 10 times as many trees in the same time as a person using older methods. Logging companies did not use this invention, however, to shorten the workweek by 90 percent. They used it to cut 10 times more trees than they otherwise would have. “Lashed by the growth imperative, technology is used not to do the same amount of stuff in less time, but rather to do more stuff in the same amount of time,”
  • The problem, Hickel argues, is explained by the “paradox” first observed by the nineteenth-century economist William Stanley Jevons: In a growth system, gains in efficiency do not translate to higher wages, greater equality, more leisure, or lower emissions; they are plowed right back into the growth cycle
  • Increasing outputs of wind, solar, and other renewables are not leading to a drop in the use of fossil fuels. Instead, renewables and fossil fuels are used to satisfy rising global energy demand. “New fuels aren’t replacing the older ones,” Hickel writes. “They are being added on top of them.”
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  • The economy that Hickel envisions would cease to pursue growth, green or otherwise. Materials and energy will still be consumed, and waste generated, but at much lower levels. All impacts on the natural world will be tethered to the question, “Growth for whom, and to what ends?” In place of an individualistic consumer economy, Hickel’s post-growth economy would direct itself toward the creation of public goods that allow the many to live well—mass transit, health care—rather than to keep a few in luxury.
  • A growing body of research reveals an inverse relationship between “happiness” and growth beyond a certain point.
  • In the rich countries, general contentment peaked in 1950, when GDP and real per capita incomes were fractions of their present size (and inequality near modern historic lows); degrowthers posit that similar happiness levels will be reclaimed on the way back down the economic mountain
  • Hickel describes a post-growth economy defined by stability and equality, and the freedom and leisure possible when the economy is no longer subservient to the god of growth
  • He estimates that the U.S. economy could be scaled down by as much as 65 percent while still improving the lives of its citizens. This includes the metric most often tied to celebrations of endless growth: life expectancy.
  • degrowth will entail a steep reduction across a much wider range of high-energy consumer goods. Keeping a global economy within safe ecological limits is a zero-sum game.
  • When limited resources are directed toward clean energy infrastructure, public health care, and regenerative agriculture, it will still be possible to build and power modern 24-hour hospitals in every city, but not to have Xbox consoles, two-car garages, and giant appliances in every home.
  • would have to redefine it, too.
  • The post-growth economy could not succeed solely by redistributing wealth; it would have to redefine it, too.
  • He argues that short-term growth would have to continue in those countries that have still not achieved the basic levels of sanitation, infrastructure, and education needed for a decent standard of living, to close the gap. Their larger goal, meanwhile, would be to break free from their historical role as a source of natural resources and cheap labor for the north.
  • For degrowth to be just, global, and effective, the sharpest reduction in consumption will have to come from the north, where the greatest damage to the planet is currently being done
  • Ecological economists generally agree that the safe outer limit is eight tons
  • One person in a low-income country has a materials footprint of roughly two tons per year, a measure of total raw materials consumed, including those embodied in imports. In lower-middle–income countries, that number is four tons; in upper-middle–income countries, 12 tons. In the high-income nations of North America, Europe, and Asia, the number leaps to 28
  • The wealthiest 20 percent of the human population is responsible for 90 percent of “overshoot” carbon in the atmosphere (that is, a level of carbon that exceeds the limit needed to keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius)
  • The planet’s richest one percent has a carbon footprint twice the size of the poorest half of the world’s population combined
  • For the global north, degrowth not only starts at home, it starts with the biggest houses.
  • Less Is More doesn’t end in a poetic appreciation for nature’s majesty, but by teasing out its implications for the political project of preserving a habitable planet. Hickel devotes much of the book to explaining that degrowth must be central to this project, promising not just survival, but real democracy, social abundance, and liberation.
  • Both involve broad social shifts away from private consumption and toward the production of shared public goods.
  • This beautiful coincidence overlaps with policy programs like the Green New Deal in important way
  • In July 1979, shortly after installing a set of solar panels over the West Wing, Jimmy Carter did something peculiar for a peacetime president. He asked Americans to sacrifice: to consume less, take public transit more, value community over material things, and buy bonds to fund domestic energy development, including solar
  • Next to Schumacher’s “Buddhist economics,” Debsian socialism was reformist tinkering. Schumacher didn’t see liberation as a matter of reshuffling the ownership and management structures of the smokestack-powered growth economy. He believed a deeper transformation was needed to maintain a livable planet. This would require new socioecological blueprints “designed for permanence.” As the left and the right battled for control over growth’s levers and spoils, Schumacher pointed out how both had become blind to the rise of growth as its own self-justifying, pan-ideological religion; its patterns of production and consumption, he observed, required “a degree of violence” that did not “fit into the laws of the universe.”
  • They determined that infinite growth was, in fact, impossible on a finite planet. Barring a major course correction, the team projected, growthism would result in an ecological systems breakdown sometime in the middle of the twenty-first century
  • This warning, detailed in the 1972 bestseller The Limits to Growth, has aged better than the scorn heaped on it
  • We are now witnessing what appears to be the beginnings of the collapse predicted nearly 50 years ago
  • In his new book, Less Is More, Jason Hickel, an anthropologist and journalist, attempts to bring a comprehensive critique of growth closer to the center of the conversation, arguing through a sweeping history of capitalism that it’s uncontrolled growth, not its controlled arrest and reversal, that is the preposterous concept.
  • This economic and political revolution was reinforced by a complementary scientific one that displaced the lingering animist cosmology of pre-capitalist Europe. The dualism of Francis Bacon and Descartes held reason to be distinct from and superior to matter.
  • The idea of limitless growth is a relatively recent one. In Less Is More, Hickel traces its origins to the enclosure of the European commons in the sixteenth century
  • Starving refugees were scattered and forced into a new economy defined by neo-feudal servitude and wage labor. Landowners, meanwhile, began amassing great stores of surplus wealth.
  • By the mid-1800s, a new “science” had arisen from these assumptions. Neoclassical economics fully abstracted the economy from the natural world. The economy was geared not toward the creation of a happy and prosperous society, but toward the perpetual growth of wealth as its own end, achieved in an inherently virtuous cycle of converting labor and resources into capital, to be accumulated and reinvested in faster and more productive conversions of labor and resources
  • This ideology subsumed and profaned notions about progress and morality held by the classical economists, until eventually the field even l
  • This process unfolded despite repeated warnings along the way. Classical economists like John Stuart Mill and, to a lesser extent, Adam Smith not only acknowledged the existence of natural limits to growth, but saw economic development as a phase; at some point, they believed, nations would create enough wealth to pursue other definitions of progres
  • the caveats issued by Simon Kuznets, father of the concept adopted in the twentieth century as growth’s universal and signature metric: gross domestic product. Kuznets, Hickel points out, “warned that we should never use GDP as a normal measure of economic progress,” because GDP does not distinguish between productive and destructive behavior
  • Most people encounter the growth debate, if they encounter it at all, through the idea of “green growth.
  • This is a vision for our collective future based on the belief that technological advance will drastically reduce the amount of raw materials needed to sustain growth—a process known as dematerialization—and “decouple” growing GDP from its ecological impacts.
  • boosters of the idea point to the transition by rich countries from manufacturing to service-based economies, as well as efficiency gains in energy and in the use of materials
  • The belief that green growth will save us, also known as “ecomodernism” or “ecopragmatism,” has become a trendy article of faith among elites who acknowledge climate change and the dangers of breaching ecological boundaries
  • n 2017, Barack Obama threw his support behind the idea in an article for Science magazine, maintaining that signs of decoupling in major economies “should put to rest the argument that combatting climate change requires accepting lower growth or a lower standard of living.”
  • The argument that capitalism can grow itself out of the present crisis may be soothing to those who like the world as it is. It also relies on the kind of accounting tricks and rejection of reality
  • By only counting the emissions created within a country that imports most of its cars, washing machines, and computers, you end up pushing the emissions related to their production off the books. When you factor them back in, the picture is much less green. A number of recent studies show no evidence of meaningful decoupling—in energy or materials—even as the world increases its use of renewable energy and finds ways to use some materials more efficiently.
  • Green growth, Hickel concludes, is an ecologically incoherent “fairy tale.”
  • consider what the ecomodernist position asks us to believe. The current system requires annual growth of roughly 3 percent to avoid the shock of recession. This means doubling the size of the economy every 23 years
  • he economy of 2000 must be 20 times larger in the year 2100, and 370 times larger in the year 2200.
  • Hickel is less interested in the macroeconomic details of this future than are growth critics based in economics departments, like Tim Jackson and Kate Raworth, and more focused on the leisure, security, and general human flourish
  • he makes an alluring case that degrowth does not require anything like the “command-and-control fiasco of the Soviet Union, or some back-to-the-caves, hair-shirted disaster of voluntary impoverishment.”
  • Attaining the benefits of the post-growth economy would, however, require what the present consumer society considers “sacrifices.
  • it’s not clear how many of them are ready to give up its superficial pleasures enabled by consumer debt
  • Among nations, there’s also the question of fairness: Wouldn’t it be unjust to impose degrowth across the world, when it’s disproportionately the countries of the global north that have spent centuries burning through the planet’s resources?
  • This output tracks to the one percent’s share of global wealth—a number equal to the GDP of the bottom 169 countries.
  • Even if you accept the argument that inequality would be best addressed by more centuries of trickle-down growth, you keep running up against the simple fact of its impossibility. Even just one more century of growth—which so far has shown no sign of taking a less destructive form—will require multiple earths
  • Hickel is serious about bringing the system critiques of E.F. Schumacher and others out of their traditional cloisters and into the streets, and has sought allies in this effort
  • emphasize what Hickel calls the “beautiful coincidence” of degrowth: that “what we need to do to survive is the same as what we need to do to have better lives.”
  • Both are internationalist in outlook, and see the world through a lens of climate justice as well as climate equilibrium.
  • that is, communicating the many benefits of moving beyond the insecurity and terrors of the current system, and building a new society that is sustainable, stable, democratic, and fundamentally better in every way.
Javier E

We're not yet ready for what's already happened - 0 views

  • The planetary crisis is what I call the interlocking, complex, accelerating changes our actions are bringing on in the natural world.
  • There is an almost religious belief that by invoking the noble traditions of grand collective actions of the past, we can summon a new collective action large enough to unmake discontinuity itself.
  • In the real world, even the truly dire scenarios for the human future are no longer actually apocalyptic. Too much action is underway, and much more action is now inevitable
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  • That doesn’t mean that we don’t want the boldest, fastest action we can get.
  • The true measure of the seriousness of the planetary crisis is not destruction but discontinuity.
  • This is not the kind of language you hear in public radio policy debates, at high-ticket ideas conferences
  • No, the buzz in those circles is that the challenge of climate action is balancing progress with continuity. Trade-offs, and how to make the smartest ones.
  • one of the grimmest aspects of this crisis is its transapocalyptic nature. That is, just how much of the world can thrive relatively well while enormous numbers of people suffer
  • the perception is that if we can’t hold on to continuity, all is lost. The end of the world is nigh. Discontinuity can only mean apocalypse.
  • When we center the planetary crisis in our thinking about the world, one central fact becomes clear: our ideas about the pace of change—how fast we can create change, the costs and benefits of more rapid action, the politics of speed and delay—are the most out-of-date part of the climate/sustainability debate. Our sense of tempo is broken, and few of us are ready for how fast things are beginning to move… or that most of humanity benefits more the faster we move.
  • Tens of millions of Americans are living in the crosshairs of disaster, in a degree of economic precarity we haven’t seen since the Great Depression, a missed paycheck away from a foreclosed home, surrounded by culture wars, violence and pandemic grief.
  • We have never needed new thinking more. The demand for clear advocacy, for fresh foresight, and for strategic acumen is effectively unlimited. The supply, however, is not
  • Seen through 20th century eyes, everything is about to get really weird, really fast.
  • The human world is also discontinuous along multiple trajectories.
  • WE ARE IN DISCONTINUITY
  • Barriers to action that have stood half a century are falling now. As they fall, a vast demand is revealing itself: a demand for the new models of sustainable prosperity. Billions of people need better ways of providing for themselves—better both in the sense of more sustainable, and more accessible.
  • Even if climate change and ecological collapse mysteriously ceased to be problems tomorrow, we’d still be awash in tidal forces—technological acceleration, economic inequality, the breakdown of the nation state, deepening globalization, and so on—that together add up to an ongoing discontinuity in their own right
  • Some doomers like to take their new fluency with the ecological end times as evidence of their intellectual superiority over the sheeple who cling to say, seeking a survivable future for their kids. These “first time climate dudes” are big on casting themselves as the only ones with the guts to call it like it is.
  • These days, even former anti-environmentalists and climate denialists claim to want action on climate and sustainability
  • Those defeats have altered all our human systems, already. Not only is the Earth’s entire biosphere being transformed at a speed greater than anything humans have lived through before, but the human world has become something no human has ever experienced before.
  • Focusing a major share of public resources on meeting the planetary crisis—which is what is demanded to head off the worsening of the crisis—itself shatters the illusion that value will persist in assets and expertise that cannot endure. It forces a reckoning with reality. To go big is to burst bubbles.
  • Now, we humans have an innate desire for continuity. That desire is not the problem. Denial is. We are deeply in denial about the reality of living in discontinuity.
  • It remains a bedrock assumption, often buried too deeply to be noticed, much less questioned, that the purpose of climate action and sustainability is to prevent changes in the human world, to keep hold of what we have.
  • Above all, this means building. It means hundreds of millions of new homes; wind farms and solar fields by the tens of thousands, factories churning out batteries and electric cars and induction stoves and geothermal systems; new shipping infrastructure; the rebuilding of coastal cities everywhere; massive investments in ecosystem services, fire protections, water and soil conservation; a reinvention of huge industries like chemicals and concrete and consumer plastics; a landscape in upheaval. A giant building boom is what successful action looks like.
  • The demand for continuity, especially in America, is held is place with panic, precarity and populism.
  • My most succinct working definition of a “discontinuity” is a watershed moment, one where past experience loses its value as a guide to decision-making about the future.
  • whether we conjure up a zombie apocalypse or a future of deep adaption on the dark mountain, it is clearly far easier and less scary for most people to imagine the end of everything than a time of uncontrolled change
  • The local forecast for some may be ecological collapse with choking air and a side of failed state—but elsewhere, times are good, the skies are clear and the markets are up.
  • That doesn’t mean we won’t see almost inconceivable tragedy and mind-bogglingly stupid losses—and that we don’t want to fight like hell to minimize them—but they’re not the end of the human story. Failures are not doom.
  • “You don’t have to give up a quality of life to achieve some of the things that we know we have to achieve,” US climate envoy John Kerry said last week
  • The planetary crisis is a discontinuity. This is the most important thing about it. Failing to understand the climate/ecological emergency as an all-encompassing discontinuity in human societies is failing to understand it, full stop.
  • The consensus vision of success is one in which we solve climate change, and the human world remains pretty much as it is now, especially for those in the wealthy parts of the worl
  • Well, we all need to make some sacrifices to avoid the ecopocalypse. But our lifestyle shall endure. The consensus about success is that we must meet the planetary crisis precisely so that we can avoid changing anything important.
  • But discontinuity is not just danger. Discontinuity means change in our selves and our societies. Transformation is not just a matter of loss. The losses are profoundly tragic. They are not, however, the whole story, or even its most important plot line
  • on a wide variety of fronts, the defeats we’ve already dealt ourselves over decades of inaction are growing unignorable. Many more are coming into focus now
  • The urgency of this crisis has fused with the scale of those opportunities. Seen clearly, they are the same phenomenon, and they stand to drive both the speed of change and the rate of human progress at a pace we’re not used to imagining. The coming boom will collide with the worsening of the planetary crisis. Then things will become truly, deeply discontinuous.
  • We are surrounded by ubiquitous mismatches between the value of systems, enterprises and places given their suitability to the world we now live in, and the way those things are priced by markets. We are surrounded, in short, by bubbles
  • We are not now capable of designing a future that works in continuity with our existing systems and practices while producing emissions reductions and sustainability gains fast enough to avoid truly dire ecological harm.
  • The insistence that the point of action be the restoration of continuity leads to the belief that only massively-scaled collective action can save us
  • The planetary crisis is a crisis because it has unleashed discontinuity throughout human systems, and because only a few of us can see it yet.
  • Here in the U.S., the rhetoric of the mid-Twentieth century features prominently. We must, we are told, rise to meet the planetary emergency on a sort of wartime footing, like the industrial mobilizations of World War Two. A Green New Deal is demanded to save us. We need a climate tech Moonshot.
  • use the unexpected boon of seriousness is awakening to possibility, to the capacities we gain amidst disruption and acceleration.
  • It’s a forlorn hope that we can tackle the crisis while avoiding the very conflicts over the speed of change that created this fucking crisis in the first place.
  • These bubbles are kept inflated by denial. One of the reasons even massive programs of government spending can’t restore continuity is that to engage in spending at that scale is to reveal the fragility of the unsustainable, brittle and outdated.
  • In this untrustworthy calculus, the only costs that count are the lost profits and jobs in unsustainable industries, the only fairness is that those who don’t want to change shouldn’t have to
  • We can talk about them as separate challenges, but in reality they are all one crisis. And it is getting worse, fast.
  • president Biden’s climate proposals and actions—despite being the boldest this nation has ever seen—are not even sufficient to meet this crisis, much less to run the meter backwards into a past world that could avoid discontinuity.
  • We need thousands upon thousands of committed people learning how to lead in the real world of unprecedented and uncontrolled change, and finding ways to leverage opportunity and impact together. We need a snap forward.
  • Doomerism's "courage,” of course, is largely being fearless about profitably declaring defeat, while sacrificing young people's lives and dreams. "I am intellectually brave enough to decide you don't have a future" is pretty crap as an iconoclastic stance.
  • Belief in continuity serves a profitable purpose: it is a precondition for predatory delay.
  • The supposed imminence of apocalypse gives selfish people a reason to begin acting as if the shit has already hit the fan.
  • “When we can imagine no future we want, something far more dangerous takes its place in our minds: the future we fear. Without visions of progress worth coming together to fight for, crisis tears people apart.
  • It’s difficult to overstate the scale of the demand for sustainable prosperity and rugged systems, and how fast we need them. That demand by itself exerts a sort of strange gravity that’s hard to gauge as long as we’re focused on the loss of continuity
  • it is absolutely not too late to limit our losses to those we’ve already set in motion, and to seize our opportunities to build a better human world—indeed, quite possibly a better world than the one we have now.
  • Worse is coming. A sense of doom is a powerful force in the landscape, especially in the U.S. We ignore it at our peril.
  • he emphasis has to land on the “trade-offs” between the needs of the status quo (and those best served by it) and the speed of action demanded by real world conditions.
  • In order for good people to accept the moral implications of predatory delay—the massive losses, harms, and further discontinuity brought on by unchecked ecological mayhem—they must be convinced that the systems they're defending will still have value in the future
  • There’s more. If continuity is valid, then change is a choice, and those choosing change should compensate those being forced to change.
  • There are scores of reasons why we can’t spend our way back to continuity, beginning with the most powerful one, which is that the damage we’ve done to our climate and biosphere is not reversible in human time scales. This is a one-way trip. The ticket we’ve already bought means taking a ride that is going to land us on a different planet.
  • For predatory delay to seem reasonable, the unsustainable must be described as systems of great inherent worth, ones that can be reliably and gradually modified into new versions of themselves. They must believe in an orderly transition between their legacy and a positive future
  • The deserving are coal miners, not construction workers sent home during heat waves; gas station owners, but not shellfish farmers; auto dealership and gas stove manufacturers, but not the mountain towns whose whole economies depend on skiers showing up in the winter
  • A dark unknowable future becomes raw power in the hands of a fear-monger. All over the world, we see demagogues lashing audiences into frenzies by putting old faces of hate on people’s new fears for the world ahead of us. Combining the anxiety of crisis with political scapegoating has birthed some of the greatest evil humanity has ever seen. Make no mistake: That evil is again on the march in the world, with talk of walls and camps, wars for living space and the battle for the last remaining resources.”
  • Many responsible people, though, ignore the refusal. Or, they see it as even more reason to restore an orderly transition, to hold on to the lives we’ve built, to keep everyone feeling like we’re all in it together.
  • the most important point: We can create a better future even in a context of discontinuity.
  • Doomerism excuses reckless disregard for others and the worsening of manageable problems as unavoidable parts of the process of an unfolding apocalypse.
  • when discussing the planetary crisis, we don’t foreground these bubbles, and the extent to which a massive and widespread repricing is on its way.) We pretend a stability in our economy that doesn’t exist.
Javier E

Can Jeremy Grantham Profit From Ecological Mayhem? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Energy “will give us serious and sustained problems” over the next 50 years as we make the transition from hydrocarbons — oil, coal, gas — to solar, wind, nuclear and other sources, but we’ll muddle through to a solution to Peak Oil and related challenges. Peak Everything Else will prove more intractable for humanity. Metals, for instance, “are entropy at work . . . from wonderful metal ores to scattered waste,” and scarcity and higher prices “will slowly increase forever,” but if we scrimp and recycle, we can make do for another century before tight constraint kicks in.
  • Agriculture is more worrisome. Local water shortages will cause “persistent irritation” — wars, famines. Of the three essential macro nutrient fertilizers, nitrogen is relatively plentiful and recoverable, but we’re running out of potassium and phosphorus, finite mined resources that are “necessary for all life.” Canada has large reserves of potash (the source of potassium), which is good news for Americans, but 50 to 75 percent of the known reserves of phosphate (the source of phosphorus) are located in Morocco and the western Sahara. Assuming a 2 percent annual increase in phosphorus consumption, Grantham believes the rest of the world’s reserves won’t last more than 50 years, so he expects “gamesmanship” from the phosphate-rich.
  • he rates soil erosion as the biggest threat of all. The world’s population could reach 10 billion within half a century — perhaps twice as many human beings as the planet’s overtaxed resources can sustainably support, perhaps six times too many.
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  • most economists see global trade as a win-win proposition, but resource limitation turns it into a win-lose, zero-sum contest. “The faster China grows, the higher grain prices go, the more people in China or India who upgrade to meat, the higher the tendency for Africa to starve,” he said.
  • Grantham argues that the late-18th-century doomsayer Thomas Malthus pretty much got it right but just had the bad timing to make his predictions about unsustainable population growth on the eve of the hydrocarbon-fueled Industrial Revolution, which “partially removed the barriers to rapid population growth, wealth and scientific progress.” That put off the inevitable for a couple of centuries, but now, ready or not, the age of cheap hydrocarbons is ending. Grantham’s July letter concludes: “We humans have the brains and the means to reach real planetary sustainability. The problem is with us and our focus on short-term growth and profits, which is likely to cause suffering on a vast scale. With foresight and thoughtful planning, this suffering is completely avoidable.”
  • “E.D.F. is educating people that dealing with climate change will be good for the economy and job creation. One of Jeremy’s insights is that we can make headway on the market side because higher commodity prices will enforce greater efficiency.”
  • When he reminds us that modern capitalism isn’t equipped to handle long-range problems or tragedies of the commons (situations like overfishing or global warming, in which acting rationally in your own self-interest only deepens the harm to all), when he urges us to outgrow our touching faith in the efficiency of markets and boundless human ingenuity, and especially when he says that a wise investor can prosper in the coming hard times, his bad news and its silver lining come with a built-in answer to the skeptical question that Americans traditionally pose to egghead Cassandras: If you’re so smart, how come you’re not rich?
  • Grantham believes that the best approach may be to recast global warming, which depresses crop yields and worsens soil erosion, as a factor contributing to resource depletion. “People are naturally much more responsive to finite resources than they are to climate change,” he said. “Global warming is bad news. Finite resources is investment advice.”
  • “Americans are just about the worst at dealing with long-term problems, down there with Uzbekistan,” he said, “but they respond to a market signal better than almost anyone. They roll the dice bigger and quicker than most.”
  • Grantham, the public face of a company that manages more than $100 billion in assets, the very embodiment of a high-finance insider in blue blazer and yellow tie, has serious doubts about capitalism’s ability to address the biggest problems facing humanity.
  • Grantham says that corporations respond well to this message because they are “persuaded by data,” but American public opinion is harder to move, and contemporary American political culture is practically dataproof. “The politicians are the worst,” he said. “An Indian economist once said to me, ‘We have 28 political parties, and they all think climate change is important.’ ” Whatever the precise number of parties in India, and it depends on how you count, his point was that the U.S. has just two that matter, one that dismisses global warming as a hoax and one that now avoids the subject.
  • Grantham, who says that “this time it’s different are the four most dangerous words in the English language,” has become a connoisseur of bubbles. His historical study of more than 300 of them shows the same pattern occurring again and again. A bump in sales or some other impressive development causes people to get excited. When they do, the price of that asset class — South Sea company shares, dot-coms — goes up, and human nature and the financial industry conspire to push it higher. People want to hear good news; they tend to be bad with numbers and uncertainty, and to assume that present conditions will persist. In the financial industry, the imperative to minimize career risk produces herd behavior.
  • So it’s news when Grantham, who has built his career on the conviction that peaks and troughs will even out as prices inevitably revert to their historical mean, says that this time it really is different, and not in a good way. In his April letter, “Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever,” he argued that “we are in the midst of one of the giant inflection points in economic history.” The market is “sending us the Mother of all price signals,” warning us that “if we maintain our desperate focus on growth, we will run out of everything and crash.”
  • here’s the short version: “The prices of all important commodities except oil declined for 100 years until 2002, by an average of 70 percent. From 2002 until now, this entire decline was erased by a bigger price surge than occurred during World War II. Statistically, most commodities are now so far away from their former downward trend that it makes it very probable that the old trend has changed — that there is in fact a Paradigm Shift — perhaps the most important economic event since the Industrial Revolution.”
  • When prices go up and stay up, it’s not a bubble. Prices may always revert to the mean, but the mean can change; that’s a paradigm shift. As Grantham tells it, oil went first. For a century it steadily returned to about $16 a barrel in today’s currency, then in 1974 the mean shifted to about $35, and Grantham believes it has recently doubled again. Metals and nearly everything else — coal, corn, palm oil, soybeans, sugar, cotton — appear to be following suit. “From now on, price pressure and shortages of resources will be a permanent feature of our lives,” he argues. “The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value. We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.”
  • Grantham is taking the Malthusian side in an ongoing debate about growth and commodity prices­. The argument often circles back to the bet made in 1980 between the biologist Paul Ehrlich, who foretold catastrophic scarcity caused by overpopulation, and the economist Julian Simon, who argued that any short-term increase in resource prices caused by population growth will stimulate inventors and entrepreneurs to find new ways to exploit those resources, lowering prices in the long run. The two men picked five commodities and wagered on whether their prices, taken as an indicator of scarcity, would be higher or lower in 1990. Simon won, 5-0, even though the world’s population grew by 800 million during that decade. Malthusians have been trying to live down that defeat ever since, but, as Grantham points out in his July letter, if we extend the original bet past its arbitrary 10-year limit to the present day, Ehrlich wins the five-commodity bet 4-1, and he wins big if the bet is further extended to all important commodities.
  • He’s an impassioned environmentalist not only for the usual reasons but also because he believes humanity’s vexed relationship with the planet is the great economic story of our time. “This commodities thing may turn out to be the most interesting call of my career,” he told me. “I have no doubt we’re going to have a bad hundred years. We have the resources to gracefully handle the transition, but we won’t. We apparently can’t.”
  • “Whether the stable population will be 1.5 billion or 5 billion,” he said to me, “the question is: How do we get there?”
Javier E

Opinion | Do You Live in a 'Tight' State or a 'Loose' One? Turns Out It Matters Quite a... - 0 views

  • Political biases are omnipresent, but what we don’t fully understand yet is how they come about in the first place.
  • In 2014, Michele J. Gelfand, a professor of psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business formerly at the University of Maryland, and Jesse R. Harrington, then a Ph.D. candidate, conducted a study designed to rank the 50 states on a scale of “tightness” and “looseness.”
  • Gelfand and Harrington predicted that “‘tight’ states would exhibit a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater environmental vulnerability, fewer natural resources, greater incidence of disease and higher mortality rates, higher population density, and greater degrees of external threat.”
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  • titled “Tightness-Looseness Across the 50 United States,” the study calculated a catalog of measures for each state, including the incidence of natural disasters, disease prevalence, residents’ levels of openness and conscientiousness, drug and alcohol use, homelessness and incarceration rates.
  • Gelfand said:Some groups have much stronger norms than others; they’re tight. Others have much weaker norms; they’re loose. Of course, all cultures have areas in which they are tight and loose — but cultures vary in the degree to which they emphasize norms and compliance with them.
  • states in New England and on the West Coast were the loosest: California, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont.
  • In both 2016 and 2020, Donald Trump carried all 10 of the top “tight” states; Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden carried all 10 of the top “loose” states.
  • “Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World” in 2018, in which she described the results of a 2016 pre-election survey she and two colleagues had commissioned
  • The results were telling: People who felt the country was facing greater threats desired greater tightness. This desire, in turn, correctly predicted their support for Trump. In fact, desired tightness predicted support for Trump far better than other measures. For example, a desire for tightness predicted a vote for Trump with 44 times more accuracy than other popular measures of authoritarianism.
  • The 2016 election, Gelfand continued, “turned largely on primal cultural reflexes — ones that had been conditioned not only by cultural forces, but by a candidate who was able to exploit them.”
  • Along the same lines, if liberals and conservatives hold differing moral visions, not just about what makes a good government but about what makes a good life, what turned the relationship between left and right from competitive to mutually destructive?
  • Cultural differences, Gelfand continued, “have a certain logic — a rationale that makes good sense,” noting that “cultures that have threats need rules to coordinate to survive (think about how incredibly coordinated Japan is in response to natural disasters).
  • cultures that don’t have a lot of threat can afford to be more permissive and loose.”
  • The tight-loose concept, Gelfand argued,is an important framework to understand the rise of President Donald Trump and other leaders in Poland, Hungary, Italy, and France,
  • The gist is this: when people perceive threat — whether real or imagined, they want strong rules and autocratic leaders to help them survive
  • My research has found that within minutes of exposing study participants to false information about terrorist incidents, overpopulation, pathogen outbreaks and natural disasters, their minds tightened. They wanted stronger rules and punishments.
  • The South dominated the tight states: Mississippi, Alabama Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and North Carolina
  • Looseness, Gelfand posits, fosters tolerance, creativity and adaptability, along with such liabilities as social disorder, a lack of coordination and impulsive behavior.
  • If liberalism and conservatism have historically played a complementary role, each checking the other to constrain extremism, why are the left and right so destructively hostile to each other now, and why is the contemporary political system so polarized?
  • Gelfand writes that tightness encourages conscientiousness, social order and self-control on the plus side, along with close-mindedness, conventional thinking and cultural inertia on the minus side.
  • Niemi contended that sensitivity to various types of threat is a key factor in driving differences between the far left and far right.
  • She cited research thatfound 47 percent of the most extreme conservatives strongly endorsed the view that “The world is becoming a more and more dangerous place,” compared to 19 percent of the most extreme liberals
  • Conservatives and liberals, Niemi continued,see different things as threats — the nature of the threat and how it happens to stir one’s moral values (and their associated emotions) is a better clue to why liberals and conservatives react differently.
  • Unlike liberals, conservatives strongly endorse the binding moral values aimed at protecting groups and relationships. They judge transgressions involving personal and national betrayal, disobedience to authority, and disgusting or impure acts such as sexually or spiritually unchaste behavior as morally relevant and wrong.
  • Underlying these differences are competing sets of liberal and conservative moral priorities, with liberals placing more stress than conservatives on caring, kindness, fairness and rights — known among scholars as “individualizing values
  • conservatives focus more on loyalty, hierarchy, deference to authority, sanctity and a higher standard of disgust, known as “binding values.”
  • As a set, Niemi wrote, conservative binding values encompassthe values oriented around group preservation, are associated with judgments, decisions, and interpersonal orientations that sacrifice the welfare of individuals
  • Just as ecological factors differing from region to region over the globe produced different cultural values, ecological factors differed throughout the U.S. historically and today, producing our regional and state-level dimensions of culture and political patterns.
  • Niemi cited a paper she and Liane Young, a professor of psychology at Boston College, published in 2016, “When and Why We See Victims as Responsible: The Impact of Ideology on Attitudes Toward Victims,” which tested responses of men and women to descriptions of crimes including sexual assaults and robberies.
  • We measured moral values associated with unconditionally prohibiting harm (“individualizing values”) versus moral values associated with prohibiting behavior that destabilizes groups and relationships (“binding values”: loyalty, obedience to authority, and purity)
  • Increased endorsement of binding values predicted increased ratings of victims as contaminated, increased blame and responsibility attributed to victims, increased perceptions of victims’ (versus perpetrators’) behaviors as contributing to the outcome, and decreased focus on perpetrators.
  • For example, binding values are associated with Machiavellianism (e.g., status-seeking and lying, getting ahead by any means, 2013); victim derogation, blame, and beliefs that victims were causal contributors for a variety of harmful acts (2016, 2020); and a tendency to excuse transgressions of ingroup members with attributions to the situation rather than the person (2023).
  • What happened to people ecologically affected social-political developments, including the content of the rules people made and how they enforced them
  • Numerous factors potentially influence the evolution of liberalism and conservatism and other social-cultural differences, including geography, topography, catastrophic events, and subsistence styles
  • Joshua Hartshorne, who is also a professor of psychology at Boston College, took issue with the binding versus individualizing values theory as an explanation for the tendency of conservatives to blame victims:
  • I would guess that the reason conservatives are more likely to blame the victim has less to do with binding values and more to do with the just-world bias (the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, therefore if a bad thing happened to you, you must be a bad person).
  • Belief in a just world, Hartshorne argued, is crucial for those seeking to protect the status quo:It seems psychologically necessary for anyone who wants to advocate for keeping things the way they are that the haves should keep on having, and the have-nots have got as much as they deserve. I don’t see how you could advocate for such a position while simultaneously viewing yourself as moral (and almost everyone believes that they themselves are moral) without also believing in the just world
  • Conversely, if you generally believe the world is not just, and you view yourself as a moral person, then you are likely to feel like you have an obligation to change things.
  • I asked Lene Aaroe, a political scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark, why the contemporary American political system is as polarized as it is now, given that the liberal-conservative schism is longstanding. What has happened to produce such intense hostility between left and right?
  • There is variation across countries in hostility between left and right. The United States is a particularly polarized case which calls for a contextual explanatio
  • A central explanation typically offered for the current situation in American politics is that partisanship and political ideology have developed into strong social identities where the mass public is increasingly sorted — along social, partisan, and ideological lines.
  • I then asked Aaroe why surveys find that conservatives are happier than liberals. “Some research,” she replied, “suggests that experiences of inequality constitute a larger psychological burden to liberals because it is more difficult for liberals to rationalize inequality as a phenomenon with positive consequences.”
  • Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, elaborated in an email on the link between conservatism and happiness:
  • t’s a combination of factors. Conservatives are likelier to be married, patriotic, and religious, all of which make people happier
  • They may be less aggrieved by the status quo, whereas liberals take on society’s problems as part of their own personal burdens. Liberals also place politics closer to their identity and striving for meaning and purpose, which is a recipe for frustration.
  • Some features of the woke faction of liberalism may make people unhappier: as Jon Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have suggested, wokeism is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in reverse, urging upon people maladaptive mental habits such as catastrophizing, feeling like a victim of forces beyond one’s control, prioritizing emotions of hurt and anger over rational analysis, and dividing the world into allies and villains.
  • Why, I asked Pinker, would liberals and conservatives react differently — often very differently — to messages that highlight threat?
  • It may be liberals (or at least the social-justice wing) who are more sensitive to threats, such as white supremacy, climate change, and patriarchy; who may be likelier to moralize, seeing racism and transphobia in messages that others perceive as neutral; and being likelier to surrender to emotions like “harm” and “hurt.”
  • The authors used neural imaging to follow changes in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (known as DMPFC) as conservatives and liberals watched videos presenting strong positions, left and right, on immigration.
  • there are ways to persuade conservatives to support liberal initiatives and to persuade liberals to back conservative proposals:
  • While liberals tend to be more concerned with protecting vulnerable groups from harm and more concerned with equality and social justice than conservatives, conservatives tend to be more concerned with moral issues like group loyalty, respect for authority, purity and religious sanctity than liberals are. Because of these different moral commitments, we find that liberals and conservatives can be persuaded by quite different moral arguments
  • For example, we find that conservatives are more persuaded by a same-sex marriage appeal articulated in terms of group loyalty and patriotism, rather than equality and social justice.
  • “political arguments reframed to appeal to the moral values of those holding the opposing political position are typically more effective
  • We find support for these claims across six studies involving diverse political issues, including same-sex marriage, universal health care, military spending, and adopting English as the nation’s official language.”
  • In one test of persuadability on the right, Feinberg and Willer assigned some conservatives to read an editorial supporting universal health care as a matter of “fairness (health coverage is a basic human right)” or to read an editorial supporting health care as a matter of “purity (uninsured people means more unclean, infected, and diseased Americans).”
  • Conservatives who read the purity argument were much more supportive of health care than those who read the fairness case.
  • Liberals who read the fairness argument were substantially more supportive of military spending than those who read the loyalty and authority argument.
  • In “Conservative and Liberal Attitudes Drive Polarized Neural Responses to Political Content,” Willer, Yuan Chang Leong of the University of Chicago, Janice Chen of Johns Hopkins and Jamil Zaki of Stanford address the question of how partisan biases are encoded in the brain:
  • society. How do such biases arise in the brain? We measured the neural activity of participants watching videos related to immigration policy. Despite watching the same videos, conservative and liberal participants exhibited divergent neural responses. This “neural polarization” between groups occurred in a brain area associated with the interpretation of narrative content and intensified in response to language associated with risk, emotion, and morality. Furthermore, polarized neural responses predicted attitude change in response to the videos.
  • The four authors argue that their “findings suggest that biased processing in the brain drives divergent interpretations of political information and subsequent attitude polarization.” These results, they continue, “shed light on the psychological and neural underpinnings of how identical information is interpreted differently by conservatives and liberals.”
  • While liberals and conservatives, guided by different sets of moral values, may make agreement on specific policies difficult, that does not necessarily preclude consensus.
  • or each video,” they write,participants with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of conservative-leaning participants became more likely to support the conservative positio
  • Conversely, those with DMPFC activity time courses more similar to that of liberal-leaning participants became more likely to support the liberal position. These results suggest that divergent interpretations of the same information are associated with increased attitude polarizatio
  • Together, our findings describe a neural basis for partisan biases in processing political information and their effects on attitude change.
  • Describing their neuroimaging method, the authors point out that theysearched for evidence of “neural polarization” activity in the brain that diverges between people who hold liberal versus conservative political attitudes. Neural polarization was observed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), a brain region associated with the interpretation of narrative content.
  • The question is whether the political polarization that we are witnessing now proves to be a core, encoded aspect of the human mind, difficult to overcome — as Leong, Chen, Zaki and Willer sugges
  • — or whether, with our increased knowledge of the neural basis of partisan and other biases, we will find more effective ways to manage these most dangerous of human predispositions.
Javier E

The Great Migration - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • On the one side, there is the meritocracy, which widens inequality. On the other side, there is President Obama’s team of progressives, who are trying to mitigate inequality. The big question is: Which side is winning?
  • Smart high school students from rural Nebraska, small-town Ohio and urban Newark get to go to good universities. When they get there they often find a culture shock.
  • They’ve been raised in an atmosphere of social equality and now find themselves in a culture that emphasizes the relentless quest for distinction — to be more accomplished, more enlightened and more cutting edge. They may have been raised in a culture that emphasizes roots, but they go into a culture that emphasizes mobility — a multicultural cosmopolitanism that encourages you to go anywhere on your quest for self-fulfillment. They may have been raised among people who enter the rooms of the mighty with the nerves of a stranger, but they are now around people who enter the highest places with the confident sense they belong.
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  • But the system works. In the dorms, classrooms, summer internships and early jobs they learn how to behave the way successful people do in the highly educated hubs. There’s no economic reason to return home, and maybe it’s not even socially possible anymore.
  • The highly educated cluster around a few small nodes. Decade after decade, smart and educated people flock away from Merced, Calif., Yuma, Ariz., Flint, Mich., and Vineland, N.J. In those places, less than 15 percent of the residents have college degrees. They flock to Washington, Boston, San Jose, Raleigh-Durham and San Francisco. In those places, nearly 50 percent of the residents have college degrees.
  • the magnet places have positive ecologies that multiply innovation, creativity and wealth. The abandoned places have negative ecologies and fall further behind.
  • This sorting is self-reinforcing, and it seems to grow more unforgiving every year.
  • half of the jobs in university political science programs went to graduates of the top 11 schools. That is to say, if you have a Ph.D. from Harvard, Stanford, Princeton and so on, your odds of getting a job are very good. If you earned your degree from one of the other 100 degree-granting universities, your odds are not.
  • The first problem with the effort is that it’s like shooting a water gun into a waterfall
  • The second problem is the focus on income redistribution
  • The final problem is that, in an effort to reduce the economic concentration of power, the administration is concentrating political power in Washington
  • the liberal agenda is not very good at addressing the inequality problem it seeks to solve. The meritocracy is overwhelming the liberal project.
Javier E

Naomi Klein: How science is telling us all to revolt - 0 views

  • Serious scientific gatherings don’t usually feature calls for mass political resistance, much less direct action and sabotage. But then again, Werner wasn’t exactly calling for those things. He was merely observing that mass uprisings of people – along the lines of the abolition movement, the civil rights movement or Occupy Wall Street – represent the likeliest source of “friction” to slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control. We know that past social movements have “had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant culture evolved”, he pointed out. So it stands to reason that, “if we’re thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling to the environment, we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics”. And that, Werner argued, is not a matter of opinion, but “really a geophysics problem”.
  • in November 2012, Nature published a commentary by the financier and environmental philanthropist Jeremy Grantham urging scientists to join this tradition and “be arrested if necessary”, because climate change “is not only the crisis of your lives – it is also the crisis of our species’ existence”.
  • what Werner is doing with his modelling is different. He isn’t saying that his research drove him to take action to stop a particular policy; he is saying that his research shows that our entire economic paradigm is a threat to ecological stability. And indeed that challenging this economic paradigm – through mass-movement counter-pressure – is humanity’s best shot at avoiding catastrophe.
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  • for any closet revolutionary who has ever dreamed of overthrowing the present economic order in favour of one a little less likely to cause Italian pensioners to hang themselves in their homes, this work should be of particular interest. Because it makes the ditching of that cruel system in favour of something new (and perhaps, with lots of work, better) no longer a matter of mere ideological preference but rather one of species-wide existential necessity.
  • Anderson points out that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies – all while global consumption (and emissions) ballooned – that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the fundamental logic of prioritising GDP growth above all else.
  • Anderson and Bows argue that, if the governments of developed countries are serious about hitting the agreed upon international target of keeping warming below 2° Celsius, and if reductions are to respect any kind of equity principle (basically that the countries that have been spewing carbon for the better part of two centuries need to cut before the countries where more than a billion people still don’t have electricity), then the reductions need to be a lot deeper, and they need to come a lot sooner.
  • To have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the 2° target (which, they and many others warn, already involves facing an array of hugely damaging climate impacts), the industrialised countries need to start cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions by something like 10 per cent a year – and they need to start right now.
  • a 10 per cent drop in emissions, year after year, is virtually unprecedented since we started powering our economies with coal. In fact, cuts above 1 per cent per year “have historically been associated only with economic recession or upheaval”, as the economist Nicholas Stern put it in his 2006 report for the British government.
  • Only in the immediate aftermath of the great market crash of 1929 did the United States, for instance, see emissions drop for several consecutive years by more than 10 per cent annually, according to historical data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre
  • If we are to avoid that kind of carnage while meeting our science-based emissions targets, carbon reduction must be managed carefully through what Anderson and Bows describe as “radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the US, EU and other wealthy nations”. Which is fine, except that we happen to have an economic system that fetishises GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, and in which the neoliberal political class has utterly abdicated its responsibility to manage anything (since the market is the invisible genius to which everything must be entrusted).
  • in order to appear reasonable within neoliberal economic circles, scientists have been dramatically soft-peddling the implications of their research. By August 2013, Anderson was willing to be even more blunt, writing that the boat had sailed on gradual change. “Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post-)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony” (his emphasis).
  • there are many people who are well aware of the revolutionary nature of climate science. It’s why some of the governments that decided to chuck their climate commitments in favour of digging up more carbon have had to find ever more thuggish ways to silence and intimidate their nations’ scientists
  • If you want to know where this leads, check out what’s happening in Canada, where I live. The Conservative government of Stephen Harper has done such an effective job of gagging scientists and shutting down critical research projects that, in July 2012, a couple thousand scientists and supporters held a mock-funeral on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, mourning “the death of evidence”. Their placards said, “No Science, No Evidence, No Truth”.
Javier E

What Happened On Easter Island - A New (Even Scarier) Scenario : Krulwich Wonders... : NPR - 0 views

  • What we have here are two scenarios ostensibly about Easter Island's past, but really about what might be our planet's future. The first scenario — an ecological collapse — nobody wants that. But let's think about this new alternative — where humans degrade their environment but somehow "muddle through." Is that better? In some ways, I think this "success" story is just as scary. The Danger Of 'Success' What if the planet's ecosystem, as J.B. MacKinnon puts it, "is reduced to a ruin, yet its people endure, worshipping their gods and coveting status objects while surviving on some futuristic equivalent of the Easter Islanders' rat meat and rock gardens?"
Javier E

Championing Environment, Francis Takes Aim at Global Capitalism - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Francis’ embrace of the issue of climate change, and his broader critique of global capitalism, stem from his signature economic concern: eradicating poverty.
  • In the encyclical, Francis writes of “the intimate relationship between the poor and the fragility of the planet,” and says, “Both everyday experience and scientific research show that the gravest effects of all attacks on the environment are suffered by the poorest.”
  • He added, “As the effects of climate change worsen, we know that escaping poverty will become even more difficult.”
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  • “The pope’s ideas will be jarring to a modern reader at first. He says that people should not ascribe to the market magical qualities that can solve all problems.”
  • “Humanity is called to recognize the need for changes of lifestyle, production and consumption, in order to combat this warming or at least the human causes which produce or aggravate it,” the pope wrote. “At one extreme, we find those who doggedly uphold the myth of progress and tell us that ecological problems will solve themselves simply with the application of new technology and without any need for ethical considerations or deep change.”
  • “He’s rather brilliantly brought back a concept that has been lost for 30 years or so, since the beginning of the Reagan administration — he says profit-making can’t be the sole criteria for decision-making,
  • While the pope’s arguments against markets are likely to play poorly in Washington, they could play well in Latin American nations, especially Brazil. That nation, one of the world’s largest polluters, has a majority Roman Catholic population and has resisted devising an aggressive climate change policy, in part because of its struggles with poverty.
  • The pope said several times that developed economies owed a debt to poor nations. “A true ‘ecological debt’ exists, particularly between the global north and south, connected to commercial imbalances with effects on the environment, and the disproportionate use of natural resources by certain countries over long periods of time,”
Javier E

A New Generation of Activists Confronts the Extinction Crisis | The New Yorker - 0 views

  • the unarrested progress of climate change and environmental degradation are forcing us to stretch our imaginations beyond specific narratives of loss. We face not just the collapse of particular habitats or particular ecosystems but, as Elizabeth Kolbert documented five years ago, in “The Sixth Extinction,” a vast, general collapse.
  • a mass extinction will profoundly affect the living things likely to survive it, including us.
  • The consequences of losing obscure insects and plant life—uncharismatic microflora and fauna, not polar bear or Bengal tigers—are harder to conceptualize. The report’s authors have taken pains to insure we try anyway. “Nature, through its ecological and evolutionary processes, sustains the quality of the air, fresh water and soils on which humanity depends, distributes fresh water, regulates the climate, provides pollination and pest control and reduces the impact of natural hazards,”
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  • The group has previously estimated that, in the Americas, nature itself—animals, plants, soil, water, all of it—is worth about twenty-four trillion dollars to us, an implausibly specific figure that makes the costs of degradation both more and less concrete.
  • “I think fundamentally we’ve got to get the message across that this is a crisis for humanity that could signal the end of human civilization as we know it. It’s not about animals somewhere off in the Arctic. It’s about the life that we lead, and whether we can keep leading it, and the chaos and violence that could ensue if we don’t do something immediately.”
  • “Even as someone who is basically an alarmist, it seemed really up in your face,” Wallace-Wells said of the group’s name and messaging. “But I also think, like, you kind of can’t argue with the results.”
  • Extinction Rebellion considers climate change and looming mass extinctions as intersecting but separate and potentially competing issues. In a statement last week, in response to the I.P.B.E.S. report, the group said that “too much of the focus has been on greenhouse gases and climate change. We also face an ecological crisis—the sixth mass extinction—which is as dangerous for our planet as climate change.” Jonathan Franzen said much the same, in this magazine, in 2015, describing climate change as a “usefully imponderable” problem compared to the threat of mass extinctions.
  • “There’s places where you’re losing habitat because temperatures are increasing, climate ranges are shifting north,
  • One third of the planet right now is in production of agriculture, and only about half of that is actually agriculture that has any kind of mind for the wildlife-habitat benefits that could be provided by just doing things slightly differently.”
  • “We’re trying to convince folks that, like, if we save nature, we save ourselves,” he continued. “If you have healthy habitats, we have healthy wildlife populations with clean water—all of that can help reduce emissions.”
  • Environmental groups insist that the sage grouse, just one of the countless bird species now thought to be at risk, really matters, and not only because undermining protections for it would be a boon for the fossil-fuel industries.
  • “It’s not just the sage grouse, right?” O’Mara said. “It’s the pronghorn. It’s the pygmy rabbit, the sagebrush vole. There’s a series of smaller species and bigger species that—if the sage grouse is healthy, that means the bigger ecosystem is doing pretty well. There’s three hundred and fifty other species that are likely doing O.K. if this one indicator species is doing O.K.”
  • the reality is that you have folks in both parties that deeply care about wildlife.”
  • We could all be doing more, but there’s maybe no greater separation between Democrats and Republicans today than on climate and pollution.”
  • Unlike climate change, the extinction crisis offers no clear targets to race toward or timelines to stick to. But addressing both will require, instead, a million revolutions, large and small, in the way we interact with and think about the natural world.
Javier E

Ecology and Society: Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity - 0 views

  • We propose a new approach to global sustainability in which we define planetary boundaries within which we expect that humanity can operate safely. Transgressing one or more planetary boundaries may be deleterious or even catastrophic due to the risk of crossing thresholds that will trigger non-linear, abrupt environmental change within continental- to planetary-scale systems.
Javier E

Opinion | The Death and Birth of Europe's Parties - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In France, the ecologist party is now the first political force among 18- to 34-year-old voters. In Germany, the well-structured Greens have jumped to 20.5 percent of the votes in the European elections; national polls now credit them with an even higher share of the vote
  • The Greens’ popularity, also on the rise in the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Britain and Ireland, is forcing other parties to incorporate part of their agenda on environment
  • In the 20th century, the fight against global warming was confined to far left groups and intellectuals. Today, in this age of globalization backlash and extreme weather, it has gone mainstream.
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  • The relationship between ecology and capitalism is already emerging in the public conversation as a new paradigm, as political groups reassess their ideological foundations: those who believe that ecology and market economy are compatible compete against more radical advocates of a complete change of our growth model
  • There is a silver lining to this European upheaval, and it is an important one: the search for a better system is on, and citizens want to be part of the solution, as the large turnout at the European elections has shown. Europe is being turned into a giant political laboratory. Stay tuned.
liamhudgings

Understanding Planet-Wide Danger | JSTOR Daily - 0 views

  • Before climate change occupied our collective consciousness as the biggest threat to human existence, there was nuclear apocalypse.
  • This entwined history of militarization and ecological threat casts a shadow over how Americans respond to today’s environmental challenges. Anthropologist Joseph Masco looks at history to understand the persistence of a national security framework for approaching ecological questions even today.
  • As President Ronald Reagan was escalating confrontation with the Soviets in the 1980s, scientists were leading public debates on the possibility of a “nuclear winter.” They were actively demanding nuclear arsenals be reduced for the sake of global environmental security, often at the cost of their own reputations
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  • or the first time, the threat of planetary security exceeded national security in the public imagination.
  • At the same time, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) was grappling with the national security implications of global climate change. A 2003 DoD report noted the potential for “military confrontation…triggered by a desperate need for natural resources such as energy, food, and water rather than by conflicts over ideology, religion, or national honor.”
  • According to Masco, “to attend to the shrinking arctic ice caps or the intensifying weather patterns is to reject the idea of a national security and replace it with a planetary vision of sustainability.
magnanma

human evolution | Stages & Timeline | Britannica.com - 0 views

  • Viewed zoologically, we humans are Homo sapiens, a culture-bearing upright-walking species that lives on the ground and very likely first evolved in Africa about 315,000 years ago.
  • the exact nature of our evolutionary relationships has been the subject of debate and investigation since the great British naturalist Charles Darwin published his monumental books On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871).
  • In fact, the human “family tree” may be better described as a “family bush,” within which it is impossible to connect a full chronological series of species, leading to Homo sapiens, that experts can agree upon.
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  • The primary resource for detailing the path of human evolution will always be fossil specimens.
  • In devising such scenarios and filling in the human family bush, researchers must consult a large and diverse array of fossils, and they must also employ refined excavation methods and records, geochemical dating techniques, and data from other specialized fields such as genetics, ecology and paleoecology, and ethology (animal behaviour)—in short, all the tools of the multidisciplinary science of paleoanthropology.
  • It is generally agreed that the taproot of the human family shrub is to be found among apelike species of the Middle Miocene Epoch (roughly 16–11.6 mya) or Late Miocene Epoch (11.6–5.3 mya). Genetic data based on molecular clock estimates support a Late Miocene ancestry. Various Eurasian and African Miocene primates have been advocated as possible ancestors to the early hominins, which came on the scene during the Pliocene Epoch (5.3–2.6 mya)
zarinastone

Australia fires: 'Apocalypse' comes to Kangaroo Island - BBC News - 0 views

  • Kangaroo Island in South Australia has been likened to a Noah's Ark for its unique ecology. But after fierce bushfires tore through the island this week, there are fears it may never fully recover.
  • The fires on Kangaroo Island have been shocking for their speed and extreme behaviour.
  • Driving through the fire trail in Kangaroo Island, there are rows upon rows of blackened trees, some still burning from inside.
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  • It's an ecological disaster so big, the army have been called in.
  • But scientists are now worried about many endangered species - including the Kangaroo Island dunnart, a mouse-like marsupial, and the glossy black-cockatoo.
  • "We're struggling to look for remnants of intact vegetation where some species may still be present," says Caroline, tearfully.
  • "A lot of the flora and fauna there are distinctive because a lot of the island's habitats remained fairly pristine. It's like stepping back in time when you cross to Kangaroo Island.
  • Kangaroo Island is one of Australia's most important wildlife sanctuaries, renowned for its biodiversity. Now it's feared that half of the island (more than 215,000 hectares) has been scorched.
  • "They are likely to have perished in the flames and for those who've survived, their habitats are gone," says Prof Dickman.
  • "We have no way of knowing exactly what has been lost. [But] if you don't have habitat, you don't have species."
  • It's estimated that half of the Kangaroo Island's 50,000 koalas have perished in the fires - a huge loss for a population that was thriving here.
  • A section of the outside grounds has been turned into a makeshift clinic. Volunteers race to treat as many animals as possible.
  • And, says Sam, the worst may not be over.
Javier E

Population panic lets rich people off the hook for the climate crisis they are fuelling... - 0 views

  • Next week the BirthStrike movement – founded by women who, by announcing their decision not to have children, seek to focus our minds on the horror of environmental collapse – will dissolve itself, because its cause has been hijacked so virulently and persistently by population obsessives. The founders explain that they had “underestimated the power of ‘overpopulation’ as a growing form of climate breakdown denial”.
  • It is true that, in some parts of the world, population growth is a major driver of particular kinds of ecological damage, such as the expansion of small-scale agriculture into rainforests, the bushmeat trade and local pressure on water and land for housing. But its global impact is much smaller than many people claim.
  • The formula for calculating people’s environmental footprint is simple, but widely misunderstood: Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology (I = PAT).
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  • The global rate of consumption growth, before the pandemic, was 3% a year. Population growth is 1%. Some people assume this means that the rise in population bears one-third of the responsibility for increased consumption
  • But population growth is overwhelmingly concentrated among the world’s poorest people, who have scarcely any A or T to multiply their P. The extra resource use and greenhouse gas emissions caused by a rising human population are a tiny fraction of the impact of consumption growth.
  • Yet it is widely used as a blanket explanation of environmental breakdown.
  • Panic about population growth enables the people most responsible for the impacts of rising consumption (the affluent) to blame those who are least responsible.
  • At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, the primatologist Dame Jane Goodall, who is a patron of the charity Population Matters, told the assembled pollutocrats, some of whom have ecological footprints thousands of times greater than the global average: “All these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if there was the size of population that there was 500 years ago.”
  • If we had the global population of 500 years ago (around 500 million), and if it were composed of average UK plane passengers, our environmental impact would probably be greater than that of the 7.8 billion alive today.
  • he proposed no mechanism by which her dream might come true. This could be the attraction. The very impotence of her call is reassuring to those who don’t want change. If the answer to environmental crisis is to wish other people away, we might as well give up and carry on consuming.
  • Since the clergymen Joseph Townsend and Thomas Malthus wrote their tracts in the 18th century, poverty and hunger have been blamed not on starvation wages, war, misrule and wealth extraction by the rich, but on the reproduction rates of the poor.
  • Winston Churchill blamed the Bengal famine of 1943, that he helped to cause through the mass export of India’s rice, on the Indians “breeding like rabbits”. In 2013 Sir David Attenborough, also a patron of Population Matters, wrongly blamed famines in Ethiopia on “too many people for too little land”, and suggested that sending food aid was counter-productive.
  • Malthusianism slides easily into racism.
  • Most of the world’s population growth is happening in the poorest countries, where most people are black or brown. The colonial powers justified their atrocities by fomenting a moral panic about “barbaric”, “degenerate” people “outbreeding” the “superior races”
  • These claims have been revived today by the far right, who promote conspiracy theories about “white replacement” and “white genocide”. When affluent white people wrongly transfer the blame for their environmental impacts on to the birthrate of much poorer brown and black people, their finger-pointing reinforces these narratives. It is inherently racist.
  • The far right now uses the population argument to contest immigration into the US and the UK
  • how do we distinguish proportionate concerns about these harms from deflection and racism? Well, we know that the strongest determinant of falling birth rates is female emancipation and education. The major obstacle to female empowerment is extreme poverty. Its effect is felt disproportionately by women.
  • So a good way of deciding whether someone’s population concerns are genuine is to look at their record of campaigning against structural poverty.
  • Have they contested the impossible debts poor nations are required to pay? Have they argued against corporate tax avoidance, or extractive industries that drain wealth from poorer countries, leaving almost nothing behind
  • Or have they simply sat and watched as people remain locked in poverty, then complained about their fertility?
  • Before long, this reproductive panic will disappear. Nations will soon be fighting over immigrants: not to exclude them, but to attract them, as the demographic transition leaves their ageing populations with a shrinking tax base and a dearth of key workers.
Javier E

Opinion | Biden and Climate Change Have Reshaped the Middle East - The New York Times - 0 views

  • omething is in the air that is powerfully resetting the pieces on the Middle East chess board — pieces that had been frozen in place for years. The biggest force shifting them was Biden’s decision to pull out of Afghanistan and tell the region: “You’re home alone. If you’re looking for us, we’ll be in the Straits of Taiwan. Write often. Send oil. Bye.”
  • a second factor is intensifying the pressure of America’s leaving: Mother Nature, manifesting herself in heat waves, droughts, demographic stresses, long-term falling oil prices and rising Covid-19 cases.
  • this shift will force every leader to focus more on building ecological resilience to gain legitimacy instead of gaining it through resistance to enemies near and far.
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  • we are firmly in a transition from a Middle East shaped by great powers to a Middle East shaped by Mother Nature.
  • “The U.S. is not pulling out entirely, but it is pulling back, and all of its Sunni Arab partners are now acting to protect themselves — and to stabilize the region — in an era when the U.S. will no longer be dominant there,”
  • et’s go back to Biden. He was dead right: America’s presence in Afghanistan and tacit security guarantees around the region were both stabilizing and enabling a lot of bad behavior — boycotts, occupations, reckless adventures and brutal interventions.
  • President Barack Obama’s pullback from the region and President Donald Trump’s refusal to retaliate against Iran — after it sent a wave of drones to attack a key Saudi oil facility in 2019 — were the warning signs that America had grown weary of intervening and refereeing in the Middle East’s sectarian wars. Biden just made it official.
  • We are just at the start of this paradigm shift from resistance to resilience, as this region starts to become too hot, too populated and too water-starved to sustain any quality of life.
  • “But the U.S. will still be needed to deter Iran, should it develop a nuclear capability — and to defuse other conflicts.”
  • just as we once supplanted the Soviets as the dominant shaper in the region, Mother Nature is now supplanting America as the dominant force.
  • In Mother Nature’s Middle East, leaders will be judged not by how much they resist one another or great powers, but by how much resilience they build for their people and nations at a time when the world will be phasing out fossil fuels, at a time when all the Arab-Muslim states have booming populations under the age of 30 and at a time of intensifying climate change.
  • The United Nations recently reported that Afghanistan has been hit with the worst drought in more than 30 years. It is crushing farmers, pushing up food prices and putting 18.8 million Afghans — nearly half of the population — into food insecurity. Over to you, Mr. Taliban: You broke it, you own it.
  • there may be a day, very soon, where the United States will need to return to active Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy — not based on land for peace, but sun and fresh water for peace. EcoPeace Middle East, an alliance of Israeli, Palestinian and Jordanian environmentalists, recently put forward just such a strategy called the “Green Blue Deal.”
  • How would it work? Jordan, with its vast desert areas, has the comparative advantage to produce large amounts of cheap solar electricity to meet its own needs and also to sell to the Israeli and Palestinian grids to “generate the electricity for desalination plants that could provide all three parties abundant fresh water,”
  • All the parties there are ecologically interdependent, but they have unhealthy interdependencies rather than healthy ones. America could become the trusted mediator who forges healthy interdependencies
Javier E

Pope Francis on climate: 'Irresponsible' Western lifestyle must change - The Washington... - 0 views

  • Warning that “the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point,” Pope Francis issued a renewed call for climate action Wednesday, singling out the United States for “irresponsible” Western excess and decrying the “weakness” of world leaders for failing to take bold steps.
  • Eight years after his landmark environmental encyclical, “Laudato Si’,” in which he scolded climate change deniers and called for an “ecological conversion” among the faithful, Francis released a follow-up, known as an apostolic exhortation.
  • “If we consider that emissions per individual in the United States are about two times greater than those of individuals living in China, and about seven times greater than the average of the poorest countries, we can state that a broad change in the irresponsible lifestyle connected with the Western model would have a significant long-term impact,” the pope wrote.
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  • Francis summarized accepted science and again took aim at skeptics who deny human-made climate change. He strayed beyond climate, couching artificial intelligence as representative of a worrying inclination to “increase human power beyond anything imaginable.”
  • “We must move beyond the mentality of appearing to be concerned but not having the courage needed to produce substantial changes,” the pope wrote.
  • In his new document, Francis noted how little world leaders have accomplished since then and blamed an absence of mechanisms to hold countries to their commitments, along with a “failure of conscience and responsibility.”
  • A Vatican delegation that attended the Paris negotiations was credited with helping to influence commitments from Poland and Catholic countries in Latin America.
  • Francis — who took the name of the patron saint of ecology — stands out among popes in his push to make environmentalism a core part of the faith.
  • He continued: “To the powerful, Pope Francis dares to repeat this question: ‘Why do you want to preserve today a power that will be remembered for its inability to intervene when it was urgent and necessary to do so?’”
  • Francis focused on what he described as a broken multilateral system for global decision-making and avoided calling on Catholics to take specific steps to combat climate change.
  • According to the Pew Research Center, 54 percent of American Catholics say the planet is warming mostly because of human activity — in line with the average among all American adults, but well behind the 90 percent figure among atheists.
  • “It is safe to say that many Catholics still do not view care for the environment as a central aspect of what it means to be a Catholic,” said David Cloutier, a professor of moral theology at Catholic University. “They view it as an optional activity that some Catholics might be involved in on the side, not a central commitment. But Pope Francis clearly is trying to move the church in that direction.”
Javier E

World 'population bomb' may never go off as feared, finds study | Population | The Guar... - 0 views

  • The long-feared “population bomb” may not go off, according to the authors of a new report that estimates that human numbers will peak lower and sooner than previously forecast.
  • on current trends the world population will reach a high of 8.8 billion before the middle of the century, then decline rapidly. The peak could come earlier still if governments take progressive steps to raise average incomes and education levels.
  • The new forecasts are good news for the global environment. Once the demographic bulge is overcome, pressure on nature and the climate should start to ease, along with associated social and political tensions.
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  • The new projection, released on Monday, was carried out by the Earth4All collective of leading environmental science and economic institutions, including the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Stockholm Resilience Centre and the BI Norwegian Business School. They were commissioned by the Club of Rome for a followup to its seminal Limits to Growth study more than 50 years ago.
  • “This gives us evidence to believe the population bomb won’t go off, but we still face significant challenges from an environmental perspective. We need a lot of effort to address the current development paradigm of overconsumption and overproduction, which are bigger problems than population.”
  • Previous studies have painted a grimmer picture. Last year, the UN estimated the world population would hit 9.7 billion by the middle of the century and continue to rise for several decades afterwards.
  • But the authors caution that falling birthrates alone will not solve the planet’s environmental problems, which are already serious at the 7.8 billion level and are primarily caused by the excess consumption of a wealthy minority.
  • The report is based on a new methodology which incorporates social and economic factors that have a proven impact on birthrate, such as raising education levels, particularly for women, and improving income.
  • In the business-as-usual case, it foresees existing policies being enough to limit global population growth to below 9 billion in 2046 and then decline to 7.3 billion in 2100.
  • too little too late: “Although the scenario does not result in an overt ecological or total climate collapse, the likelihood of regional societal collapses nevertheless rises throughout the decades to 2050, as a result of deepening social divisions both internal to and between societies. The risk is particularly acute in the most vulnerable, badly governed and ecologically vulnerable economies.”
  • In the second, more optimistic scenario – with governments across the world raising taxes on the wealthy to invest in education, social services and improved equality – it estimates human numbers could hit a high of 8.5 billion as early as 2040 and then fall by more than a third to about 6 billion in 2100. Under this pathway, they foresee considerable gains by mid-century for human society and the natural environment.
  • “By 2050, greenhouse gas emissions are about 90% lower than they were in 2020 and are still falling,” according to the report. “Remaining atmospheric emissions of greenhouse gases from industrial processes are increasingly removed through carbon capture and storage. As the century progresses, more carbon is captured than stored, keeping the global temperature below 2C above pre-industrial levels. Wildlife is gradually recovering and starting to thrive once again in many places.”
Javier E

'Never summon a power you can't control': Yuval Noah Harari on how AI could threaten de... - 0 views

  • The Phaethon myth and Goethe’s poem fail to provide useful advice because they misconstrue the way humans gain power. In both fables, a single human acquires enormous power, but is then corrupted by hubris and greed. The conclusion is that our flawed individual psychology makes us abuse power.
  • What this crude analysis misses is that human power is never the outcome of individual initiative. Power always stems from cooperation between large numbers of humans. Accordingly, it isn’t our individual psychology that causes us to abuse power.
  • Our tendency to summon powers we cannot control stems not from individual psychology but from the unique way our species cooperates in large numbers. Humankind gains enormous power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way our networks are built predisposes us to use power unwisely
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  • We are also producing ever more powerful weapons of mass destruction, from thermonuclear bombs to doomsday viruses. Our leaders don’t lack information about these dangers, yet instead of collaborating to find solutions, they are edging closer to a global war.
  • Despite – or perhaps because of – our hoard of data, we are continuing to spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, pollute rivers and oceans, cut down forests, destroy entire habitats, drive countless species to extinction, and jeopardise the ecological foundations of our own species
  • For most of our networks have been built and maintained by spreading fictions, fantasies and mass delusions – ranging from enchanted broomsticks to financial systems. Our problem, then, is a network problem. Specifically, it is an information problem. For information is the glue that holds networks together, and when people are fed bad information they are likely to make bad decisions, no matter how wise and kind they personally are.
  • Traditionally, the term “AI” has been used as an acronym for artificial intelligence. But it is perhaps better to think of it as an acronym for alien intelligence
  • AI is an unprecedented threat to humanity because it is the first technology in history that can make decisions and create new ideas by itself. All previous human inventions have empowered humans, because no matter how powerful the new tool was, the decisions about its usage remained in our hands
  • Nuclear bombs do not themselves decide whom to kill, nor can they improve themselves or invent even more powerful bombs. In contrast, autonomous drones can decide by themselves who to kill, and AIs can create novel bomb designs, unprecedented military strategies and better AIs.
  • AI isn’t a tool – it’s an agent. The biggest threat of AI is that we are summoning to Earth countless new powerful agents that are potentially more intelligent and imaginative than us, and that we don’t fully understand or control.
  • repreneurs such as Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Mustafa Suleyman have warned that AI could destroy our civilisation. In a 2023 survey of 2,778 AI researchers, more than a third gave at least a 10% chance of advanced AI leading to outcomes as bad as human extinction.
  • As AI evolves, it becomes less artificial (in the sense of depending on human designs) and more alien
  • AI isn’t progressing towards human-level intelligence. It is evolving an alien type of intelligence.
  • generative AIs like GPT-4 already create new poems, stories and images. This trend will only increase and accelerate, making it more difficult to understand our own lives. Can we trust computer algorithms to make wise decisions and create a better world? That’s a much bigger gamble than trusting an enchanted broom to fetch water
  • it is more than just human lives we are gambling on. AI is already capable of producing art and making scientific discoveries by itself. In the next few decades, it will be likely to gain the ability even to create new life forms, either by writing genetic code or by inventing an inorganic code animating inorganic entities. AI could therefore alter the course not just of our species’ history but of the evolution of all life forms.
  • “Then … came move number 37,” writes Suleyman. “It made no sense. AlphaGo had apparently blown it, blindly following an apparently losing strategy no professional player would ever pursue. The live match commentators, both professionals of the highest ranking, said it was a ‘very strange move’ and thought it was ‘a mistake’.
  • as the endgame approached, that ‘mistaken’ move proved pivotal. AlphaGo won again. Go strategy was being rewritten before our eyes. Our AI had uncovered ideas that hadn’t occurred to the most brilliant players in thousands of years.”
  • “In AI, the neural networks moving toward autonomy are, at present, not explainable. You can’t walk someone through the decision-making process to explain precisely why an algorithm produced a specific prediction. Engineers can’t peer beneath the hood and easily explain in granular detail what caused something to happen. GPT‑4, AlphaGo and the rest are black boxes, their outputs and decisions based on opaque and impossibly intricate chains of minute signals.”
  • Yet during all those millennia, human minds have explored only certain areas in the landscape of Go. Other areas were left untouched, because human minds just didn’t think to venture there. AI, being free from the limitations of human minds, discovered and explored these previously hidden areas.
  • Second, move 37 demonstrated the unfathomability of AI. Even after AlphaGo played it to achieve victory, Suleyman and his team couldn’t explain how AlphaGo decided to play it.
  • Move 37 is an emblem of the AI revolution for two reasons. First, it demonstrated the alien nature of AI. In east Asia, Go is considered much more than a game: it is a treasured cultural tradition. For more than 2,500 years, tens of millions of people have played Go, and entire schools of thought have developed around the game, espousing different strategies and philosophies
  • The rise of unfathomable alien intelligence poses a threat to all humans, and poses a particular threat to democracy. If more and more decisions about people’s lives are made in a black box, so voters cannot understand and challenge them, democracy ceases to functio
  • Human voters may keep choosing a human president, but wouldn’t this be just an empty ceremony? Even today, only a small fraction of humanity truly understands the financial system
  • As the 2007‑8 financial crisis indicated, some complex financial devices and principles were intelligible to only a few financial wizards. What happens to democracy when AIs create even more complex financial devices and when the number of humans who understand the financial system drops to zero?
  • Translating Goethe’s cautionary fable into the language of modern finance, imagine the following scenario: a Wall Street apprentice fed up with the drudgery of the financial workshop creates an AI called Broomstick, provides it with a million dollars in seed money, and orders it to make more money.
  • n pursuit of more dollars, Broomstick not only devises new investment strategies, but comes up with entirely new financial devices that no human being has ever thought about.
  • many financial areas were left untouched, because human minds just didn’t think to venture there. Broomstick, being free from the limitations of human minds, discovers and explores these previously hidden areas, making financial moves that are the equivalent of AlphaGo’s move 37.
  • For a couple of years, as Broomstick leads humanity into financial virgin territory, everything looks wonderful. The markets are soaring, the money is flooding in effortlessly, and everyone is happy. Then comes a crash bigger even than 1929 or 2008. But no human being – either president, banker or citizen – knows what caused it and what could be done about it
  • AI, too, is a global problem. Accordingly, to understand the new computer politics, it is not enough to examine how discrete societies might react to AI. We also need to consider how AI might change relations between societies on a global level.
  • As long as humanity stands united, we can build institutions that will regulate AI, whether in the field of finance or war. Unfortunately, humanity has never been united. We have always been plagued by bad actors, as well as by disagreements between good actors. The rise of AI poses an existential danger to humankind, not because of the malevolence of computers, but because of our own shortcomings.
  • errorists might use AI to instigate a global pandemic. The terrorists themselves may have little knowledge of epidemiology, but the AI could synthesise for them a new pathogen, order it from commercial laboratories or print it in biological 3D printers, and devise the best strategy to spread it around the world, via airports or food supply chain
  • desperate governments request help from the only entity capable of understanding what is happening – Broomstick. The AI makes several policy recommendations, far more audacious than quantitative easing – and far more opaque, too. Broomstick promises that these policies will save the day, but human politicians – unable to understand the logic behind Broomstick’s recommendations – fear they might completely unravel the financial and even social fabric of the world. Should they listen to the AI?
  • Human civilisation could also be devastated by weapons of social mass destruction, such as stories that undermine our social bonds. An AI developed in one country could be used to unleash a deluge of fake news, fake money and fake humans so that people in numerous other countries lose the ability to trust anything or anyone.
  • Many societies – both democracies and dictatorships – may act responsibly to regulate such usages of AI, clamp down on bad actors and restrain the dangerous ambitions of their own rulers and fanatics. But if even a handful of societies fail to do so, this could be enough to endanger the whole of humankind
  • Thus, a paranoid dictator might hand unlimited power to a fallible AI, including even the power to launch nuclear strikes. If the AI then makes an error, or begins to pursue an unexpected goal, the result could be catastrophic, and not just for that country
  • magine a situation – in 20 years, say – when somebody in Beijing or San Francisco possesses the entire personal history of every politician, journalist, colonel and CEO in your country: every text they ever sent, every web search they ever made, every illness they suffered, every sexual encounter they enjoyed, every joke they told, every bribe they took. Would you still be living in an independent country, or would you now be living in a data colony?
  • What happens when your country finds itself utterly dependent on digital infrastructures and AI-powered systems over which it has no effective control?
  • In the economic realm, previous empires were based on material resources such as land, cotton and oil. This placed a limit on the empire’s ability to concentrate both economic wealth and political power in one place. Physics and geology don’t allow all the world’s land, cotton or oil to be moved to one country
  • t is different with the new information empires. Data can move at the speed of light, and algorithms don’t take up much space. Consequently, the world’s algorithmic power can be concentrated in a single hub. Engineers in a single country might write the code and control the keys for all the crucial algorithms that run the entire world.
  • AI and automation therefore pose a particular challenge to poorer developing countries. In an AI-driven global economy, the digital leaders claim the bulk of the gains and could use their wealth to retrain their workforce and profit even more
  • Meanwhile, the value of unskilled labourers in left-behind countries will decline, causing them to fall even further behind. The result might be lots of new jobs and immense wealth in San Francisco and Shanghai, while many other parts of the world face economic ruin.
  • AI is expected to add $15.7tn (£12.3tn) to the global economy by 2030. But if current trends continue, it is projected that China and North America – the two leading AI superpowers – will together take home 70% of that money.
  • uring the cold war, the iron curtain was in many places literally made of metal: barbed wire separated one country from another. Now the world is increasingly divided by the silicon curtain. The code on your smartphone determines on which side of the silicon curtain you live, which algorithms run your life, who controls your attention and where your data flows.
  • Cyberweapons can bring down a country’s electric grid, but they can also be used to destroy a secret research facility, jam an enemy sensor, inflame a political scandal, manipulate elections or hack a single smartphone. And they can do all that stealthily. They don’t announce their presence with a mushroom cloud and a storm of fire, nor do they leave a visible trail from launchpad to target
  • The two digital spheres may therefore drift further and further apart. For centuries, new information technologies fuelled the process of globalisation and brought people all over the world into closer contact. Paradoxically, information technology today is so powerful it can potentially split humanity by enclosing different people in separate information cocoons, ending the idea of a single shared human reality
  • For decades, the world’s master metaphor was the web. The master metaphor of the coming decades might be the cocoon.
  • Other countries or blocs, such as the EU, India, Brazil and Russia, may try to create their own digital cocoons,
  • Instead of being divided between two global empires, the world might be divided among a dozen empires.
  • The more the new empires compete against one another, the greater the danger of armed conflict.
  • The cold war between the US and the USSR never escalated into a direct military confrontation, largely thanks to the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. But the danger of escalation in the age of AI is bigger, because cyber warfare is inherently different from nuclear warfare.
  • US companies are now forbidden to export such chips to China. While in the short term this hampers China in the AI race, in the long term it pushes China to develop a completely separate digital sphere that will be distinct from the American digital sphere even in its smallest buildings.
  • The temptation to start a limited cyberwar is therefore big, and so is the temptation to escalate it.
  • A second crucial difference concerns predictability. The cold war was like a hyper-rational chess game, and the certainty of destruction in the event of nuclear conflict was so great that the desire to start a war was correspondingly small
  • Cyberwarfare lacks this certainty. Nobody knows for sure where each side has planted its logic bombs, Trojan horses and malware. Nobody can be certain whether their own weapons would actually work when called upon
  • Such uncertainty undermines the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. One side might convince itself – rightly or wrongly – that it can launch a successful first strike and avoid massive retaliation
  • Even if humanity avoids the worst-case scenario of global war, the rise of new digital empires could still endanger the freedom and prosperity of billions of people. The industrial empires of the 19th and 20th centuries exploited and repressed their colonies, and it would be foolhardy to expect new digital empires to behave much better
  • Moreover, if the world is divided into rival empires, humanity is unlikely to cooperate to overcome the ecological crisis or to regulate AI and other disruptive technologies such as bioengineering.
  • The division of the world into rival digital empires dovetails with the political vision of many leaders who believe that the world is a jungle, that the relative peace of recent decades has been an illusion, and that the only real choice is whether to play the part of predator or prey.
  • Given such a choice, most leaders would prefer to go down in history as predators and add their names to the grim list of conquerors that unfortunate pupils are condemned to memorise for their history exams.
  • These leaders should be reminded, however, that there is a new alpha predator in the jungle. If humanity doesn’t find a way to cooperate and protect our shared interests, we will all be easy prey to AI.
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