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Climate Change: What About the Marxists?

September 6, 2018

Climate Change: What About the Marxists?

Photo Source Akuppa John Wigham | CC BY 2.0

Author John Steinbeck in 1962 asked, “Why must progress look so much like destruction?” (1) In fact, ever-expanding production of things – progress, in other words – promotes destruction in the form of climate change. Perpetrators of boundless production dominate in our governments and society, and so climate change has advanced. The story might have been different had capitalism never existed.

Cuban president Fidel Castro said as much on June 12, 1992. He was addressing the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development – known as the “Earth Summit” – in Rio de Janeiro.

Castro declared that, “An important biological species — humankind— is at risk of disappearing due to the rapid and progressive elimination of its natural habitat. We are becoming aware of this problem when it is almost too late to prevent it.” He mentioned that “consumer societies … consume two-thirds of all metals and three-fourths of the energy produced worldwide. They have poisoned the seas and the rivers … They have saturated the atmosphere with gases, altering climatic conditions with the catastrophic effects we are already beginning to suffer … Tomorrow will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago.”

At the Earth Summit that day, 154 nations signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Now, however, “the Earth System may be approaching a planetary threshold that could lock in a continuing rapid pathway toward much hotter conditions—Hothouse Earth. This pathway would be propelled by strong, intrinsic, biogeophysical feedbacks difficult to influence by human actions.”  This was according to a scientific paper published August 6 bythe National Academy of Sciences.

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Three Delusions: Paper Wealth, a Booming Economy, and Bitcoin

December 27, 2017

Three Delusions: Paper Wealth, a Booming Economy, and Bitcoin

Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive.”

– Charles Mackay
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Delusions are often viewed as reflecting some deficiency in reasoning ability. The risk of thinking about delusions in this way is that it encourages the belief that logical, intelligent people are incapable of delusion. An examination of the history of financial markets suggests a different view. Specifically, faced with unusual or extraordinary price advances, there is a natural tendency (particularly in the presence of crowds, feedback loops, and potential rewards) to look for explanations. The problem isn’t that logic or reason has failed, but that the inputs have been distorted, and in the attempt to justify the advance amid the speculative excitement, careful data-gathering is replaced by a tendency to confuse temporary factors for fundamental underpinnings.

While true psychological delusions are different from financial ones, a similar principle is suggested by psychological research. Delusions are best understood not as deficiencies in logic, but rather as explanations that have been logically reached on the basis of distorted inputs. For example, individuals with delusions appear vulnerable to differences in perception that may involve more vivid, intense, or emotionally-charged sensory input. While those differences might be driven by neurological factors, the person experiencing these unusual perceptions looks to develop an explanation. Maher emphasized that despite the skewed input, the delusions themselves are derived by completely normal reasoning processes. Similarly, Garety & Freeman found that delusions appear to reflect not a defect in reasoning itself, but a defect “which is best described as a data-gathering bias, a tendency for people with delusions to gather less evidence” so they tend to jump to conclusions.

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Volatility and the Alchemy of Risk

October 21, 2017

Volatility and the Alchemy of Risk

Reflexivity in the Shadows of Black Monday 1987

The Ouroboros, a Greek word meaning ‘tail devourer’, is the ancient symbol of a snake consuming its own body in perfect symmetry. The imagery of the Ouroboros evokes the infinite nature of creation from destruction. The sign appears across cultures and is an important icon in the esoteric tradition of Alchemy. Egyptian mystics first derived the symbol from a real phenomenon in nature. In extreme heat a snake, unable to self-regulate its body temperature, will experience an out-of- control spike in its metabolism. In a state of mania, the snake is unable to differentiate its own tail from its prey, and will attack itself, self-cannibalizing until it perishes. In nature and markets, when randomness self-organizes into too perfect symmetry, order becomes the source of chaos (1).

The Ouroboros is a metaphor for the financial alchemy driving the modern Bear Market in Fear. Volatility across asset classes is at multi-generational lows. A dangerous feedback loop now exists between ultra-low interest rates, debt expansion, asset volatility, and financial engineering that allocates risk based on that volatility. In this self-reflexive loop volatility can reinforce itself both lower and higher. In a market where stocks and bonds are both overvalued, financial alchemy is the only way to feed our global hunger for yield, until it kills the very system it is nourishing.

The Global Short Volatility trade now represents an estimated $2+ trillion in financial engineering strategies that simultaneously exert influence over, and are influenced by, stock market volatility(2). We broadly define the short volatility trade as any financial strategy that relies on the assumption of market stability to generate returns, while using volatility itself as an input for risk taking. Many popular institutional investment strategies, even if they are not explicitly shorting derivatives, generate excess returns from the same implicit risk factors as a portfolio of short optionality, and contain hidden fragility.

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What Defines Appropriate Technology?

October 5, 2017

WHAT DEFINES APPROPRIATE TECHNOLOGY?

OUR CURRENT ADDICTION TO TECHNOLOGY

If there is one defining aspect of our modern civilization it´s that we are a technological species. Compared to other organisms with whom we share this planet, we Homo sapiens aren´t exactly well adapted to long term survival. We have no coat of fur to keep us warm, we don´t have sharp teeth or claws to hunt with, and we´re extremely vulnerable to the elements around us at all times.

In fact, we kind of resemble in some ways a mishap of evolution; an unfortunate paint spill that sticks out on an otherwise beautifully painted canvas. If it weren´t for our ability to shape and alter our surroundings through technology we would have most likely long ago passed into the annals of history along with the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon.

The lion has its deftness and sharp claws, the monarch butterfly has its mesmerizing and threatening wing patterns, and us humans have nothing but a decently sized brain and the gift of self-conscious which has allowed us to reshape our surroundings through the use of technology. That which is our defining characteristic, however, has also been one of the main causes of the crises we now face.

HOW TO DEFINE WHAT IS APPROPRIATE FOR A PLACE

There are no universally appropriate technologies because we live in a diverse world where different contexts affect the “appropriateness” of each place. Agrarian author Wes Jackson states that nature must be our measure of what is right and correct for each place. We would add that the realities of the community where we live should also be an important factor regarding how we are to live in our places.

The fourth permaculture principle is “apply self-regulation and accept feedback.” Several of our current technologies are simply too large and too powerful to allow us to receive feedback.

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Sociocultural Boundaries

October 6, 2015

Sociocultural Boundaries Header

Sociocultural Boundaries

Some years ago now a team of Swedish scientists proposed an interesting framework for understanding planetary environmental problems. It generated a range of responses from the environmental community, mostly positive. I had what is undoubtedly a very unusual response to their framework, and while it is perhaps old news, it may still be useful to present it here. As an anthropologist, I see planetary problems from a cultural and evolutionary perspective that could offer a different take on the subject.

Estimates of how the different control variables for seven planetary boundaries have changed from 1950 to present. The green shaded polygon represents the safe operating space. Source: Steffen et al. 2015
Estimates of how the different control variables for nine planetary boundaries have changed from 1950 to present. The green shaded polygon represents the safe operating space. Source: Steffen et al. 2015

First, though, I want to say that the identification of the nine interrelated environmental ‘boundaries’ has been unquestionably of great value (Planetary Boundaries). Raising awareness about the problems and emphasizing nonlinear feedbacks effects, and so the possible triggering of abrupt global environmental changes, are integral to a more sophisticated discussion of climate change and the other problems they highlight. To list them, they are climate change, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, nutrient fluxes, global freshwater use, land use change, biodiversity loss, aerosol loading, and chemical pollution.

SteffenExponential
The great acceleration of the Anthropocene. Source.

The nine ‘boundaries’ are concisely represented in their popular diagram. The green space in the center represents the safe operating values. If the wedge exceeds the green space then it has already crossed its threshold and become a threat of flipping to a disastrous state for our human presence on the planet. Worse, the problems are interrelated and interactions are a grave threat. As an example of dangerous interactions, loss of soil moisture, degradation of land to new land types, and biodiversity loss all reduce the ability of ecosystems to sequester CO2, and thus increase greenhouse effects.

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Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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