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Carbon-Tinted Glasses

August 21, 2022

Carbon-Tinted Glasses

Most of us have heard the phrase rose-tinted glasses, meaning a tendency to view the world from an optimistic, rosy, point of view.  As we also know, when we look at things through only one perspective, we can gain an unrealistic view of reality.  There is nothing wrong with being optimistic, but if that blinkers us to other aspects of life and the world, then there is no need to work for social change or environmental justice.

Rose-tinted however, are not the only style of glasses we can wear.  Over the past decade or two we have become accustomed to wearing carbon-tinted glasses.  There are many within the climate change movement wearing these glasses, and many too (sadly) within the environmental movement.

What do I mean?  First, I’ll briefly outline how we have come to be wearing carbon-tinted glasses, and then secondly, point out how those glasses blinker us.

What are carbon-tinted glasses?

Since we began to learn about climate change (from the time that it was known as the “greenhouse effect” and on) we have slipped into our western pattern of attributing linear thinking and a simplistic cause and effect mentality.  It goes like this: 1. The atmosphere is warming up, 2. It is warming up because of the build-up of carbon, 3. Carbon is being added to the atmosphere because of human causes, 4. Primarily, the burning of fossil fuels, 5. What is the solution? 6. Replace fossil fuels as the source of energy with “renewable” energy sources (particularly solar and wind.)

Central to this linear thinking is the role of carbon.  Within this tightly framed mindset the issue becomes simply one of reducing carbon.

Thus, we get blinkered by our seeing the world through carbon-tinted glasses.

What are we blinkered to?

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

The Difference Between a Forecast and a Guess

June 23, 2022

The Difference Between a Forecast and a Guess

Every forecast or guess has one refreshing quality: one will be right and the rest will be wrong.

What’s the difference between a forecast and a guess? On one level, the answer is “none”: the future is unknown and even the most informed forecast is still a guess. The evidence for this is the remarkable number of informed forecasts that prove to be as completely off-base as the wildest guesses.

On another level, there is a big difference between an informed forecast and a guess–if the informed forecast has the consequential system dynamics right. The world is complicated and discerning the consequential dynamics in the tangle of complexity is difficult.

Context and perspective matter. So do incentives. To take one example of many, war planners in the Vietnam era looked at war from the perspective of “scientific metrics” that focused on collecting data on the efficacy of sorties and combat missions. This resulted in the infamous “body counts.”

The larger context was that war could be productively distilled down to metrics, costs and attrition: the enemy was presumed to be a rational player who will give up when the pain and cost become too high.

Planners slouching in comfortable offices have many incentives to “go along to get along”: and veering off into dynamics that can’t be conveniently measured and questioning the entire foundation of the war’s planning and execution will get you sent to bureaucratic Siberia. “Getting with the program” will get you kudos and promotion.

Hmm, which will most people choose? The Pentagon Papers circulated among hundreds of senior officials, and parts of the report circulated among thousands of lower-ranking employees. Only one person took the risks of sharing the report with the American public.

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

Dawn of Everything Conclusion

May 5, 2022

Dawn of Everything Conclusion

Preface. Clearly for their conclusion to make sense you’ll need to read the book and see the evidence for yourself.  Since they challenge just about all of the ideas currently in fashion, you can find some pretty damning reviews of their book, but do not believe them, the several I’ve read entirely misstate what was actually written, the old straw man fallacy of inventing something that they didn’t say and shooting it down.  And their attitude is not at all “we’re right, you’re wrong”, no, quite the opposite.  They’re hoping to stir up fruitful avenues of inquiry, different and more meaningful ways of looking at the past, and my hope is that rather than try to invent a steady state / degrowth economy, that ecologists will team up with experts in anthropology and archeology to discuss the best sustainable ways of life from the past, how to avoid authoritarian kings, brutal agricultural societies, and more.

Here is part of their summary, and at greater length below (though they are constantly summarizing arguments throughout the book, another reason you need to actually read it).

“In trying to synthesize what we’ve learned over the last 30 years, we asked question such as “what happens if we accord significance to the 5,000 years in which cereal domestication did not lead to the emergence of pampered aristocracies, standing armies or debt peonage, rather than just the 5,000 years in which it did? What happens if we treat the rejection of urban life, or of slavery, in certain times and places as something just as significant as the emergence of those same phenomena in others?

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

Why do we need to think and act more systemically?

June 26, 2018

Why do we need to think and act more systemically?

The power and majesty of nature in all its aspects is lost on one who contemplates it merely in the detail of its parts and not as a whole.

— Pliny the Elder

An increasing number of people are beginning to understand that the world we participate in is too complex, magnificent and changeable for any single perspective to do justice to its diversity and complexity. There is more to life than a ‘theory of everything’ that reduces the awe-inspiring diversity, creativity and beauty surrounding us to a series of abstract mathematical equations.

We live in networks of relationships defined by qualities that make life worth living. Most qualities escape quantification and mathematical abstraction. We need to acknowledge and value multiple perspectives and find ways to integrate their different contributions into a framework of thinking that can inform wise action.

In order to achieve a collaborative way of acknowledging, integrating and evaluating multiple perspectives, we need to move beyond dualistic either-or logic which suggests that, if two perspectives seem to contradict each other, one of them must categorically be wrong in order for the other perspective to be right. Yet, at a time when our cultural belief in the ability of science and technology to fix all our problems is beginning to wane, we also need ways to evaluate and compare different perspectives.

Science might not offer us the ‘objective’ picture of reality we were taught in school, but it remains a powerful method of inter-subjective consensus-making and constitutes a fairly reliable basis upon which to act — more so, say, than the opinion, intuition or spontaneous insight of a single individual — in most but certainly not all cases. We should neither exclusively favour inter-subjective ‘rational’ reasoning nor only rely on individual insight and intuition, but let ourselves be informed by both, as and when appropriate.

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

On Border Incident, US Sources Give One Perspective, Own, While Russian Source Gives Multiple, Including US

May 4, 2016

On Border Incident, US Sources Give One Perspective, Own, While Russian Source Gives Multiple, Including US

These two stories make a fine illustration of why it is crucial to read broadly, pushing one’s comfort zone and challenging the tendency towards confirmation bias.

This one, by Buzzfeed (an outlet funded, for example, by a $200 million dollar investment from the NBC Universal corporation, a division of Comcast and General Electric), reports on Trump saying the US should shoot down Russian planes when they intercept US spy-planes that have their transponders turned off and are buzzing the Russian border as the US continues to advance its encirclement of Russia with militant bases.

This one, by RT, which is funded by the Russian public (like the BBC is funded by the British public), reports on the same event.

If the reader is a US citizen and only reads the Buzzfeed story, it will be unclear where the plane interception happened.  Due to the perspective and suggestions presented in the piece, and depending on how informed the reader is, it would be easy to think the event happened near the US border, rather than the Russian border.

The reader will receive mainly Trump’s quote, which says that Russia is taunting and disrespecting the US and violating the Geneva Convention agreements (by intercepting the US war-ships spy-planes buzzing its border ahead of encroaching US nuclear and militant bases – this part goes unsaid.)

No other side or context is given at all, including that Trump, same as Hillary Clinton, enthusiastically advocates torture, murder, and aggression (as does Sanders for the latter two), actual violations of the Geneva Convention the US commits continually.

No other side is given to ask what the US would do if Russian spy-planes and nuclear military bases were encroaching on the US border.

…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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