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By William Rees – Climate change isn’t the problem, so what is?

February 8, 2021

By William Rees – Climate change isn’t the problem, so what is?

 

Thanks to friend and retired blogger Gail Zawacki at Wit’s End for bringing this excellent new talk by professor William Rees to my attention.

Rees discusses our severe state of ecological overshoot and the behaviors that prevent us from taking any useful action to make the future less bad.

Rees thinks there are two key behaviors responsible for our predicament:

  1. Base nature, which we share with all other species, to use all available resources. Most people call this the Maximum Power Principle.
  2. Creative nurture. Our learned culture defines our reality and we live this constructed reality as if it were real. “When faced with information that does not agree with their [preformed] internal structures, they deny, discredit, reinterpret or forget that information” – Wexler.

I don’t disagree with Rees on the existence or role of these behaviors, but we also need Varki’s MORT theory to explain how denial of unpleasant realties evolved and is symbiotic with our uniquely powerful intelligence, and other unique human behaviors, such as our belief in gods and life after death.

 

Some interesting points made by Rees:

  • The 2017 human eco-footprint exceeds biocapacity by 73%.
  • Half the fossil fuels and many other resources ever used by humans have been consumed in just the past 30 years.
  • Efficiency enables more consumption.
  • The past 7 years are the warmest 7 years on record.
  • Wild populations of birds, fish, mammals, and amphibians have declined 60% since 1970. Populations of many insects are down about 50%.
  • The biomass of humans and their livestock make up 95-99% of all vertebrate biomass on the planet.
  • Human population planning has declined from being the dominant policy lever in 1969 to the least researched in 2018.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Encouraging Energy Conservation: Is Less More?

January 28, 2019

Encouraging Energy Conservation: Is Less More?

Many messages about saving energy use multiple arguments to make their case. But our research suggests that may actually be the wrong approach.

Is messaging about consumers’ home-energy habits important in climate change mitigation? Many organizations say yes, and are conducting outreach to raise awareness and persuade individuals to improve their energy use.

But are the messages being used in that outreach actually working? Our research, recently published in the journal Energy Policy, suggests the types of messages that are typically used don’t always have the desired effect. This research also suggests ways to improve energy-conservation messaging.

Often energy-related messages are crafted under the assumption that the information they contain will be received, processed and acted upon in a rational way. What does this mean? As traditionally conceived, rationality implies that people maximize their utility (more commonly referred to as their happiness) subject to their material constraints (i.e. the money they have) and their beliefs about the world (i.e. the information they have).

The richness of human behavior, however, means that people don’t always act in ways that can be explained by this model. People may, for example, care about the utility of others — in other words, they may care about others’ happiness in addition to their own. Constraints may take the form of time or willpower, rather than money. People’s beliefs may be shaped not only by the objective information they have, but also by their perceptions of what other people believe. Moreover, people don’t always act according to the beliefs they hold.

The behavioral sciences have played an important role in revealing these and other nuances in the decision-making process. As a result they have led to more sophisticated decision-making theories, and consequently, to more sophisticated policy interventions based on these theories.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Culture and Behavior May Clue Climate Change Response

September 4, 2018

Culture and Behavior May Clue Climate Change Response

Photo Source Dan Costin | CC BY 2.0

Behavior acculturated to ancestral norms, originally necessitated by occupation, is the focus of a new study in China with interesting ramifications for climate change.  In general, farming requires more stable relationships than, say, herding with the constant movement of animals.  Now the authors have taken farming a step further:

They observed that northerners were three times more likely than southerners to push an obstructing chair in a Starbucks out of the way; southerners eased themselves around in order not to inconvenience whosoever had placed the chairs.  The behaviors were true to type as northerners are considered brash and aggressive, while southerners are conflict averse and deferential.

The authors ascribe the behavior to ancestral occupation.  Wheat is farmed in the north, and such dry-land farming is more individualized than rice farming in the south.  The latter requires complex irrigation systems for paddies and forces cooperation and coordination among multiple families.  The interdependence also means it is crucial not to offend anyone.  This ancestral culture prevailed despite the fact that most descendants were no longer farmers.

The question of which people change their environment and who change themselves is an important one at a time when the world has to face the existential challenge of climate change.  In the last couple of years we have seen a cooperative Europe facing a quintessential maverick, as in Donald Trump.

Mr. Trump lives in his own world ignoring the mounting research and irrefragable evidence for climate change with its human fingerprint that can no longer be disputed.  Worse still are the consequences and the inevitable danger of conflict fueled by resource needs.  Thus the melting of Arctic ice has made possible new sea pathways, opening up oil and gas exploration, and pitting Russia, the U.S., Canada and other Arctic countries against each other.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Stupid Things People Do When Their Society Breaks Down

March 2, 2016

The Stupid Things People Do When Their Society Breaks Down

A frequent mistake that many people make when considering the concept of social or economic collapse is to imagine how people and groups will behave tomorrow based on how people behave today. It is, though, extremely difficult to predict human behavior in the face of terminal chaos. What we might expect, or what Hollywood fantasy might showcase for entertainment purposes, may not be what actually happens when society breaks down.

It is also important to note that social and economic destabilization is usually a process, not an immediate event. This actually works in the favor of liberty activists and the preparedness minded. As a system moves through the stages of a breakdown, certain signals in the psychology of the population can be observed, and this gives us a warning as to how far down the rabbit hole we have actually gone.

Except in the case of a nuclear or EMP (electromagnetic pulse) event (which unfortunately are concerns because of the powder keg situation in Syria), vigilant liberty proponents could have considerably more time than the average person to preposition themselves safely. That said, there will be a host of expanding problems of a psychological nature we will have to deal with before, during and after the final leg down in the unfolding mess that internationalists often refer to as the “great global reset.”

The following list is based on social behavior patterns commonly seen during systemic crashes through modern history (the past 100 years). These are some of the stupid things people do as they begin to realize, at least subconsciously, that a SHTF scenario is in progress.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Shrinking the Technosphere, Part II

October 14, 2015

Shrinking the Technosphere, Part II

[Part I]

Political technologies have three main goals:

1. Changing the rules of the game between participants in the political process.
2. Introducing into the mass consciousness new concepts, values, opinions and convictions.
3. Direct manipulation of human behavior through mass media and administrative methods.

Political technologies pursue these tactical goals in accordance with higher, strategic imperatives, and it is only the noble nature of these higher imperatives that can justify the use of such high-handed, nondemocratic means. Yes, the ends justify the means—once in a while. It is better to save humanity and the natural world through nondemocratic means than to let it go extinct while adhering to strictly democratic ones.

But often the imperatives are far less than noble. They can be separated into two kinds:

1. To improve everyone’s welfare by pursuing the common good of the entire society, as it is understood by its best-educated, most intelligent, most decent and responsible members. Political technologies of this kind result in a virtuous cycle, building on previous successes to increase social cohesion, solidarity and setting the stage for great achievements. (These are the good kind.)

2. To enrich, empower and protect special interests at the expense of the rest of society. These kinds of political technologies either fail through internal contradiction, or result in a vicious cycle, in which those who benefit from them strive for ever-higher levels of selfish behavior at the expense of the rest, setting the stage for poor social outcomes, economic stagnation, mass violence and eventual civil war and political disintegration. (These are the bad kind.)

Let’s take the United States as an example The United States currently has more than its fair share of the latter sort. Let’s briefly review a dozen of the most important ones.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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