The anchors holding climate thinking in an iron grip
Humanity resembles a rocket trying to break free from Earth, with a mind at the wheel that seems to know no restraint. This is something more people are starting to notice.
For instance, the UN recently (25 July) did send its nth latest warning into the world, consisting of a diagnosis (‘The disease is the addiction to fossil fuels’), and a hint at the cure (‘The disease is climate inaction’). Revolutionary in itself because, for the first time, their diagnosis moves towards social criticism. Is the system sick? However: if addicted, why don't they work that out somewhat? Shouldn't that be a piece of cake when you have 450 staff at your climate office in Bonn for years.
Thus:
- Their diagnosis is far too simplistic. The ever-increasing grasping for energy is consequence of complex social and international interdependencies. And if you don't bring those – i.e., the axioms under our interrelationships – into much deeper focus you're never going to get this disease, entanglement actually, politically touchable and decidable.
- The superficial diagnosis also leads them to stubbornly insist on a cure that amounts to mopping with the tap open. We have seen this being spoken into the microphone by scientists, politicians and the mainstream media for 20 years. They mean by “inaction” that global energy-using processes are not transitioning to renewable forms of energy inputs sufficiently quickly. But that main strategy does not and can never work at all.
Why not? First, the climate threat has been severely underestimated for 10 years and so people just waited. Then in Paris everybody got in a hurry, and a main strategy (i.e. switch to renewables in 30 years) was broadly agreed. Since then, its elaboration has not only been very half-hearted as far as the main emissions sector (i.e. transport) is concerned despite the fact that that sector meanders every other sector like a snake and determines the bulk of their emissions, but also completely quicksand.
Why quicksand? First of all, no renewable can complete its life cycle without using a considerable amount of fossil fuels due to the need for cement, steel, aluminum, copper, silicon, oil, and plastics, plus a lot of transportation and heavy machinery in mining, production, construction, and dismantling. They provide averagely 1 kwh with 1/10 the emissions of gas, but if all heavy transport (incl. planes/ships) is to operate on hydrogen, 5 times as much power from renewables is needed to make and use that hydrogen, and then if that transport increases 2 x 3 times as has been projected, there is a high chance that after the overall transition, about the same amount of greenhouse gases will be emitted from our artefacts as currently.
Secondly, because that main strategy (in the form of the NDC's) is going to be implemented on a playing field where everyone remains completely free to initiate new activities and/or expand current ones. Every citizen is allowed to buy additional cars; can decide for himself whether he flies to Mallorca every weekend, as is very common in Germany (100 outbound flights a day); every bank is allowed to update its app every week and make it heavier; every airline is allowed to order as many new planes as it wants; every airport may extend and renew runways (with cement from China); new highways, ports, railways, prisons, and hospitals are under construction everywhere, and every army is allowed to grow like crazy. Examples? More and more energy-guzzling mega data centers are being built near large onshore wind farms; arms manufacturers such as Rheinmetal and Lockheed Martin are building new factories on a large scale in Eastern Europe and the US without anyone giving a hoot about all transportation involved in getting raw materials and hardware from everywhere, and outputs to anywhere.
The consequence of all these communicating vessels/holes is that despite the fact that some countries have achieved significant emission reductions, both fossil production and global emissions (covering all sectors) have not shown any shrinkage so far, and the annual increase (±3½ ppm) of atmospheric C02 has even increased slightly.
In short: This supposedly life-saving strategy of the mainstream remains far too much blindfolded floating on the continuation of the current global exchange circus full of expanding flows between self interest pursuing decision-making parties – governments, multinationals, national corporations, ngo's, investors, banks and funds – who try to push each other out of the way with ever more new artefacts in order to consolidate their own position. It has the status of a request there, an appeal to common sense, but no steercapacity because far too many freedoms (such as freedom of enterprise, of delocation, of capital accumulation, and of consumption) by which implementation of crucial plan components can be circumvented are left alone. Not only left alone. Even promoted and worshipped.
Conclusion: The UN itself, given the shape of the ‘climate action’ it proposes (i.e. the green transition strategy), is not free from the disease it observes elsewhere. Mopping with the tap open is typical addict behaviour. And besides: Even if their green transition strategy had not been as leaky as a sieve in terms of its design (i.e. Swiss cheese that any CEO can swim through with their eyes open), the whole undertaking should have been rejected much earlier as insanely hazardous (see Hansen) because of its willingness to knowingly and intentionally enter a climate zone where multiple positive feedback loops, that could make a U-turn impossible for centuries, are in the extreme vigilance mode of ignition. When it became clear in January (2024) that the 1.5C ceiling would be exceeded in May, Hansen had the nerve to describe this madness this way: "Passing through the 1.5C world is a significant milestone because it shows that the story being told by the United Nations, with the acquiescence of its scientific advisory body, the IPCC, is a load of bullshit." And in this same context, Boyd, the UN rapporteur on human rights and the environment, recently ventured the assumption: "It's like there's something wrong with our brains that we can't understand just how grave this situation is."
I don't want to go quite as deep as Boyd, nor do I see the current suicide attempt as a global behavioural crisis that requires therapy and that requires a new can of scientists to be opened – see Herz et al.: "We work to name and frame this crisis as ‘the Human Behavioural Crisis’ and propose the crisis be recognised globally as a critical intervention point for tackling ecological overshoot"– just as climate anxiety has recently been problematised by experts and incorporated into their business model.
After all, from a human and economic point of view, there is nothing special in itself about getting stuck in a situation, and there is nothing wrong with anyone if it upsets them. After all, people often get stuck while studying, or at work, or in relationships. That's when you fall out of your familiar reality and have to rearrange your living environment, and re-establish yourself. We can do that very well ourselves. Any divorce is a huge shock. But shifting gears (changing course) – such as money flows, living situation, caring for children, esteem in the eyes of others – and then rebounding, that's part of life. Now too: Of course we can switch to living much more simply and autonomously. We just need to agree together on how to arrange the key mutual laws (the rules of the game) of exchange and trade and transfer in such a way that that way of life becomes stably realisable for each of us; that we get those degrees of freedom in our package of choices. Here too, it is about money flows, and the distribution of land and resources. We need to change those rules of the game quite profoundly. About as exhaustive as did happen in the 18th century between citizens, peasants, nobility, and ecclesiastical powers. For one fact is absolutely certain: we have to fight our way out of a trance that is quite ingrained. To be able to do that, we must first discern that trance.
As mentioned, I don't endorse Boyd's presumption ("It’s like there’s something wrong with our brains..."). Simply because I don't see mainstream behaviour (their view of reality, assessment of the state of affairs, and their policy proposals) as a disease but as arising from decision making within the degrees of freedom that their frame (frame of thought) allows them i.e. makes appear as logical/rational/normal.
But Boyd is right somewhere: we need to start problematising that frame if we are to get out of this trance. As the climate dynamics seem to be rapidly becoming more chaotic (see Watts and Milman and Watts), clarifying the key underpinnings of that frame, and also why that frame has so much toughness an sich – very difficult to lose your faith in it – becomes extremely urgent because we are going to have to start demarcating each other's behavioural options more deeply via collective policy. And so, in the public debate of the mainstream, we must be able to transcend that frame (in which it is unthinkable that we will constrain each other's demand for energy).
Consider the current situation realistically for a moment: The UN confirms with its harsh diagnosis that we have to reduce emissions much faster than we thought and are currently doing. This requires inexorably that people's current freedom of choice about what they produce and consume must be steered very strictly on the basis of what we can still afford in terms of global emissions and on the basis of what is necessary to leave as large a proportion of humanity as possible a stable environment in which they can survive. We can only design this new steering together if we can strip the current frame of thought, with which we are heading for a fiasco, of its no-go's (dungeon aspects) in much greater detail than the disease diagnosis of the UN, and transcend it.
So: Let's analyze much deeper which anchors are holding that frame (that order) in place, and how it could be tipped out of kilter. My personal jumping back and forth between scientific and farming activity during my lifetime, has caused me to learn to describe that frame with other concepts as the usual ones. With the following analysis, I try to clarify why the state of emergency has still not been declared while we are hurtling forward without brakes on a road along deep abysses. As follows.
Anchor 1
The first anchor of climate reasoning is the complete automatism of the assessment that warming must be solved through new artifacts. The strength of that automatism is determined by our interaction with them. I will explain that further on, but first in general : “What are artifacts?”
Humans are masters on earth (i.e. dominate) thanks to the ability to bend situations to our will (i.e. regulate). Any regulation must first be thought out (i.e. designed), and then applied.
- Our ability to think up (i.e. design) new things – forms, products, services, concepts – has gradually been evolving by using more and more sounds for the purpose of our mutual communication. Through those designations for chunks of our mutual processes and for what was present and changing around us, we got the Lego bricks available in our brains to imagine things and processes (realities) that could exhibit desirable workings if we could materialize them in reality.
- In applying, we learned to cast our designs in such a general form (i.e., materialize them into artifacts) that they can be used in many similar situations. With a knife you can divide, stab, and cut anywhere. Any tool such as a spoon, shovel, pan, is an example, as is any structure such as a wire, a proposition, a door, a wheel, a ship, a telephone. All are artifacts.
Each such artifact materializes a salvation. Shows us ways out. But also imposes them on the user. Draws the user into its intent. The user briefly becomes the master of the situation in which the knife or the car or the app can be applied, resides in its intent and scores the salvation (i.e. power over the situation). Just as you let yourself be carried away by the mood and will of a friend, so we are absorbed when using artifacts.
Despite Herb Simon's enthusiastic extolling of this crucial human design ability (in The Science of the Artificial, 1969 and 1998), of this ultimate rational force, I became quite wary of it at some point in my life. For example, since I was thirty, I have been working with a workhorse. As I gradually got more land (33 hectares) I also used a tractor, but for vegetable growing and farmyard manure spreading I continued to use horsepower. No car, no chainsaw, no electricity. But some solar panels for light in the darkness.
How did that come about? Why so averse to many modern conveniences? Why did I frequently choose the labour-intensive path?
When I was about 26 years old – that was in 1975 and well before the Internet age – I swam among the artificial. At my work, I had permanent connection to three computer centers via terminals and simulated economic and cognitive processes (decision-making, problem-solving, and knowledge building) on them. However, as a result, I no longer had a feel for reality because I did not maintain that contact. With the result: I myself, my being at rest in a pool of familiar feelings and sensory impressions (me in fact), disappeared into the fog. This debunked the supposed independence of my reason (common sense); its ability to exist on its own.
I was trapped in a solutionism of looking for exits in the maze of life but precisely because of this I could not solve, or rather could not deal with, the questions (such as: am I going crazy?) that arise in situations of collapsing life certainties – such as exhaustion, despair, helplessness, and severe loss. Because? Those situations demand surrender. Demand being able to accept it. Letting go of plans. Swallowing, crying, and losing. Dim and wait. But unfortunately, I could no longer get from the train of reason into such familiar states of feeling, no longer land in a “now” of inner presence – because I existed nowhere else but in rational problem-solving procedures – to realize that surrender. Result: even more desperation.
How to get out of that has not become crystal clear to me during the rest of my life – nor did I want to, by the way – but by listening to three rather vague presumptions my life got going again:
The first was to optimally maintain contact (exposure) via my sensory and muscle tissues with what is there at the moment, what exists, what can be held, what gives off impulses and thus, because it makes your body work, suffer, and dance, perpetuates and consolidates an individuality/presence. Also making that contact and feeling deep and broad enough so that reason (the solution procedures) becomes more unimportant, no longer central reigns and dominates, no longer in charge, no longer alone.
The second guess was that artifacts give you power that you can drown in and possibly go crazy (desperate) from. That they help you win but in doing so you have lost the loss. But that possible loss did evoke the impulse and desire in dealing with that situation. Salvation brings emptiness. Your ego loses hold. Andreas on digital technology: “It reduces the vibrancy of life and makes you feel like you're floating around in a daze.” In short: risky stuff that you should be extremely careful with.
Once (7 years old) when I came home to my grandmother with a tooth through my lip, and confessed to her that I had fought with some boys, she said, “Fighting is good, but never involve your big brother!”
I asked her: “Why not?”
She: “Then you won't learn to lose and make up”.
Third, minimize contact with them because you are going to be like them. As mentioned above: they draw you into their intent. During their use you adopt the thoughts (and drives) that are in and behind their construction. These drive you on and on. You become, in part, the app or knife you use. Alex Dunedin: "I think that the danger of technologies is that they are emptying our lives." You are less dancing to broad environmental impulses but must and want to constantly obey the command logic with which your devices are programmed, and involuntarily adopt that thinking in how you perceive and approach your environment. Not just computers tend to do that, or apps, even a sharp knife in your pocket may have that influence. Someone with the biggest machine (or knife) also takes the view that he or she has the most right to speak. You get carried away, so to speak. Again: risky stuff that you have to be extremely careful with.
But hey, easier thought than done, of course. Because dealing very calmly with artifacts, that is, minimizing them, by not immediately falling into the automatism of making every problem the prey of your design urge, does mean that you cannot keep up with the race. This brings me to the second anchor that holds the mainstream frame of thought in place.
Anchor 2
The character transformation resulting from increasingly cold dealings coping (remote control based on artifacts) with (and control over) more and more situations – i.e., a state of mind that hooks us to solution power and domination and makes any limitation or step back a no-go – is only partially responsible for the toughness (the anchoring) of the frame with which we face the current precarious climate condition.
The second root cause (anchor 2) of this toughness is the circumstance that in most situations we are each other's competitors in accessing the outputs of the situation. In every situation, then, there is a vital need to have at one's disposal or to develop artifacts that can win from competitors, or at least to have a chance of scoring sufficient outputs. This fear of being ousted drives the game inexorably. Outdoing others, staying ahead, trying to expand (grow) as a main strategy to stay in the race. This circumstance of mutual competition has of course been for centuries and centuries a co-prime driver of our desire for new artefacts and energy to make them work, but now certainly caused the acceleration in it, and the recent excess of it. Our momentary hard focus on artifacts is fed and bred there, intertwined with hope. Grégory Quenet: "Industrial civilization triumphed because it created an imaginary that was powerful, attractive and desired by the majority of populations".
Besides competition, esteem also considerably contributes to the urge for designs (i.e. new artifacts) with which undesirable situations can be overcome or situations can be made more pleasant. Scoring esteem (prestige/status) comes into play mainly where we cooperate and less where we try to outdo each other. It feels good to help others by providing them with solutions (artifacts) to cope with their situations; we then receive attention, applause, appreciation for our dedication; also the idea that we are important to other beings, in short that we have a right to exist, that we are something. It is one of the forms that love has taken: Say it with artifacts! Like this one. One of the listeners: "How lucky we were to have had sweet Judith Durham walk this earth with us". So gaining esteem always plays a role, even if competing is main motive. It increases the suction toward designing (inventing something) and thinking.
God
Now what makes the mainstream frame so tough? Why is it a dungeon? Why won't or can't we get out of it? Why can't we let go of that paradigm somewhat? What keeps us from thinking outside of it?
That is the fact that, thanks to huge reserves of fossil on earth, we have entered a vortex where, thanks to first a few artifacts (such as steam engine and electricity), we could free (of manual work) more and more people to design artifacts, thereby making fossil more and easier accessible as well, so that we could allow even more people scale up the quanta of artifacts so enormously that after WW2 we were able to increase everyone's access to artifacts so excessively that through everyone's constant dealing with them, almost everyone has become deeply convinced that we can actually solve anything.
The near-continuous stay in artifacts has placed us on a throne; has provided our individual position with powerful levers with regard to our environment and ourselves. We truly think we can actually dominate everything. With this overconfident spirit we currently face the world. Hot cities? We will find a solution. If not now, then later. We flutter from one promising hype, like bio-fuels (see this energetic net zero calculation), to another (hydrogen), and see absolutely no end to what else we can research and invent to defuse the climate crisis.
In short: We have escalated the artifacts to such an extent that they have installed God in us. The power of the gigantic fossil energy reserves has been transformed into a gigantic rational thinking capacity and accompanying self-conceit. And God is tough. Will not shy away from anything. Certainly not for something as simple as CO2. And if it were not this hubris of solutionism that resolutely rejects any restriction – such as taking a step back via a general spending restriction, or temporarily shutting down aviation, the internet, and defense to ensure the food supply – then hardly anyone would break through the second barrier just before such a train of thought, i.e. the fear that after applying severe limitations in the main components of their life style they will be overrun by competitors, or will perform worse as fellow competitors.
Discord
But unfortunately, as it becomes quite clear that climate is going to raise hell, the mainstream elite, as the originator and deliverer of the plan to satisfy the unlimited energy appetite of societies on the basis of a permanent barrage of existing and yet-to-be-developed artifacts – see, for example, the emerging role of CO2 removal in this advice or the spending of billions of public money on unproven climate solutions – find themselves in an extremely difficult position. Why?
Because of the liberal nature of our coexistence viz. weakly steering governments and leaving most regulation to the own initiative of society participants – via their say (decision-making power) to allocate reserves (capital) where they want – not one emitting activity was prioritized in their plan. Nothing is getting priority, nothing is being limited in volume.
As a result, in these plans, all aspects of our socio-economic living together are being overhauled at the same time. However, the execution of each overhaul is largely left to individuals and organizations. The plan gives only target percentages for emission reduction but does not, for example, come up with standardization of the artefacts to realize this reduction, nor with collective forms of implementation. Those designs are all left to independent entrerprisers, resulting in a labyrinth of realization possibilities and prospects of even newer ones on the horizon.
Consequence: Every decision-maker (company, citizen, organization) is confronted with a hell of a lot of concerns regarding all essential aspects of his living environment at the same time: how am I going to transport myself, how to heat, how to feed, how to insulate the house, where to demand energy or generate energy. On top of that he then has to solve the same or even greater set of headaches concerning emission reduction in his work or business, plus, who knows, continuously modernize many artifacts in order to be able to consolidate his position in labor performance or business output compared to competitors. Imagine you are a farmer, and you are faced with this enormous pile-up of necessary changes – for each of which you have to figure out for yourself which (immature) process you choose and by whom you could have it reliably implemented – then it is not difficult to imagine that when the contrails of masses of long-haul holiday flights once again chalk away the sun en masse while you are making hay, you decide to yourself: "Drop dead with your energy transition because if it has to go this way ....!!"
The defects of the mainstream solution are thus: (a) starting too late, (b) the insufficiently watertight design of the plans which makes it visible to everyone that it is mopping the floor with the tap running, (c) tackling too many aspects at once due to insufficient prioritization of core activities, and (d) a wholly inadequate steering to be able to implement the envisaged transition tightly and on time worldwide.
With that approach full of significant flaws, she is now scoring a political battlefield. For whatever reasons, in a short time there has emerged a huge divide in society over how to proceed. Where the dividing lines run is not clear. It is not simply thinkers versus doers, or rural versus urban, or old versus young. It is more about the fact that more and more people, overwhelmed by the changes imposed on them, perceive that the mainstream elite itself is in no way limiting itself. Why not? They are sacrificing the stability of the context (i.e. the geopolitical situation, wars, and refugee flows) in which this massive energy transition should take place to the unbridled continuation of their own expansion interests. In warfare, they are playing increasingly higher stakes and are heading toward an arms race that everyone understands that no carbon budget can handle anymore.
In short: these contradictions make many people, perhaps somewhat reinforced by their ties to fossil jobs and the fossil furnishing of their livelihood, turn their backs on the mainstream climate strategy, and because that strategy has become such a heavy policy issue, also promptly turn their backs on the elite (the designers). Turning away also from science in general; from their pedantic attitude; their privileged position; their hegemony; their condescending judging (ridiculing) of assessments other than their own by labeling them as populism or conspiracy theories or sectarian. Well, nobility resides above everything, doesn't it? And is thus besieged.
And so, to sum up, the reckless (out of solution obsession and competitive drives) bridge-too-far mitigation approach has created a global societal divide that, through its mutual strangulation (political instability and disconinuity, wars, sanctioning), delays mitigation implementation to the point where the carbon gap has become unbridgeable.
Crossing the divide
But the breadth of the present developing divide is also due to the increasing solutionist nature that extreme artifact-use has entrenched in us. It leads one to assume deep within oneself that there is one truth, especially the winning one. And that's not true, I'm afraid. There is no truth. Everyone has his own. We do not know each other's world because we are not each other. If one wins from opponents in many situations (by power, luck, or quantum) that does not make the winning truth superior, and does not erase the differences. Even if one calls God on one's side, or a moral doctrine.
However, this claim of truth – the feeling of being perfectly within one's rights – stands in the way of equal communication because it does not lead to rapprochement but to the immediate application of an enemy profile (fascist, racist, extremist, radical, despot, nationalist, narcissist, terrorist, woke, extreme right-wing, extreme left-wing) to the opponent so that his world can quickly be thrown out with the garbage. The opponent then feels scolded and excluded, and, also being God, starts to do the same, causing discussion positions to move away from each other like galaxies.
This increasing communicative ineptitude (paralysis) is a direct consequence of our drowning in artifacts (winning designs, winning moods). Where the reason rules, feeling development is neglected, and that undermines empathic ability i.e. the ability to empathize with the feelings of others, and not cycle around them too easily. It makes us off-table sweepers of anyone who calls mainstream solutions and principles profound in question. This is how reason may keep itself clean from defeats, but it is also the appropriate way to make any dog false, mean, and unruly. It comes down to communicating with the revolver on the table.
Which creates an almost hermetic seal between worlds. In this way, we are mutually deafening each other, hermetically closing off each other's worlds. Running away from debates becomes mainstream, locking themselves up in bubbles of insults and caricatures with sympathisers becomes a means to enlarge one's own group so that the next battle can be won. Simultaneously, with sturdier camp formation, within each camp the analytical discussion about the contentious issues falls drier and drier, as tighter reactions to dissident opinions are made. Thus, both between camps and within camps, the analysis of issues through logical and empathetic critical debating is deteriorating. While that kind of debating is crucial to arrive at viable policies in the current critical situation. Policies that do not crumble or fall behind, but keep us alive.
If we want to be able to do that, we will really have to dare to look our frame in the eye and question it as a first step. The membranes around it must be opened, the anchors made less lead-heavy, through mutual communication and discussion without sniping, without denigrating, without rushing to put things or opinions in a worse light than they probably are, without quickly deeming the wrong of every input. Being able to be silent, listen, and wait. And above all, being prepared to lose. That is, giving the dog opposite you the space and peace to choose between an attack or coming to you wagging its tail.
Jac Nijssen, 2024
This article has been written August 2024.
A Dutch version was published on duurzaamnieuws.nl at 23 August 2024
French version not available yet