The environment – Page 2 – a sibilant intake of breath

Not doing well

I don’t like the practice of answering people’s questions with the response I guess they most want to hear. Lately, with people who I know to a certain degree, if they ask, I have just been saying that I am not doing well, and if they follow up provide a brief explanation of how multilateralism and evidence-based policy are collapsing while the world commits itself to climate chaos.

I tend to get two fallacious responses.

The first is the inductive fallacy: bad things have happened before (Black Death, WWI, etc) and people and civilization have endured, therefore we will endure whatever climate change brings as well. In terms of logic, this is an obviously weak argument. If a man is playing Russian Roulette and manages to pull the trigger once without getting shot, that doesn’t prove that trigger-pulling is nothing to worry about. Furthermore, there are excellent reasons to think the world is more dangerous now than at the times of the Black Death or WWI. It wouldn’t take too many nuclear strikes against cities to produce a nuclear winter which would essentially kill us all.

The other is motivated reasoning: you need to have hope. This approach basically rejects the value of knowledge and thinking, or at least the idea that hypotheses should be tested against logic and evidence. Deciding how you want to feel in advance, and then seeking out beliefs that reinforce the feeling, is a recipe for ending up totally deluded about the world. Someone who decides what they think based on how they want to feel loses the connection which a skeptical mind maintains with the empirical world. Instead, they become like transcendentalist gurus who only care about how the world seems inside their own mind. They are no longer able to help anybody, except perhaps to become as disconnected and useless as they are.

I know people who ask how you are doing seldom want an honest answer. It’s a social cue to come back with a light and social answer. At the same time, I am utterly terrified about how the population normalizes and ignores the dismal signs of just how much trouble humanity is in. The mechanisms that let people cope and maintain a tolerable emotional bubble around themselves seem thoroughly interconnected with the mechanisms which are letting us destroy the future because we don’t want to think about scary things, or give any consideration to the interests of others when we choose what to do for ourselves.

I have been trying to make sense of why I feel so intensely unhappy now, especially when in numerous ways life was a lot worse while I was in the PhD program. The closest thing to answer is that before I felt like there were worthwhile things to try to achieve in the world, but I was just being blocked from taking part effectively in them by nearby obstacles and barriers. Now I feel like I have no idea whatsoever of what to do to try to dodge the planetary calamity ahead. With the climate change activist movement distracted and disempowered, I also feel uniquely alone.

Fiction, versus reality’s lack of resolution

In all the time while I have been concerned, and later terrified, about climate change and the future of life on Earth, I still had the narrative convention of fiction influencing my expectations: the emergence of a big problem will imperil and inspire a group of people to find solutions and eventually the people threatened by the problem will accept if not embrace the solutions. A tolerable norm is disrupted and then restored because people have the ability to perceive and reason, and the willingness and virtue to act appropriately when they see what’s wrong.

Now, I feel acutely confronted by what a bad model for human reactions this is. It seems to me now that we almost never want to understand problems or their real causes; we almost always prefer an easy answer and somebody to blame. The narrative arc of ‘problem emerges, people understand problem, people solve problem’ has a real-world equivalent more like ‘problems emerge but people usually miss or misunderstand them, and where they do perceive problems to exist they interpret them using stories where the most important purpose is to justify and protect the powerful’.

If the history happening around us were a movie, it might be one that I’d want to walk out of, between the unsatisfying plot and the unsympathetic actors. Somehow the future has come to feel more like a sentence than a promise: something which will need to be endured, watching everything good that humankind has achieved getting eroded and destroyed, and in which having the ability to understand and name what is happening just leads to those around you punishing and rejecting you by reflex.

Catastrophes and mental collapse

Psychologically and emotionally, I have really been doing badly lately.

I have spent all of my adult life studying environmental politics and trying to fight climate change, and now we are at a juncture where the world’s leaders have effectively given up. They won’t acknowledge fossil fuels as the root of the crisis, and they are far too controlled by the fossil fuel industry to accept phasing them out as a solution. They see every new potential oil, gas, and coal project as a vehicle for wealth and self-advancement. Meanwhile, environmentalists are distracted by social issues as the long-term crisis keeps deepening, and people generally are too frightened to even perceive the truth of their situation. Perhaps scariest of all, young people don’t have a coherent and politically-activated sense of what is happening. They can’t see that their leaders are destroying their futures, and they are being drawn into the same sorts of non-solutions which are driving the rise of charlatans and authoritarians to power.

The path forward is totally unclear, and I don’t know how — psychologically or morally — to cope with a world where we have identified that the processes of collapse are accelerating but where we don’t have the honesty or the courage to work through what that means or work toward any remedy.

These are dark, dark days.

Carney on the carbon bubble and stranded assets

By some measures, based on science, the scale of the energy revolution required is staggering.

If we had started in 2000, we could have hit the 1.5°C objective by halving emissions every thirty years. Now, we must halve emissions every ten years. If we wait another four years, the challenge will be to halve emissions every year. If we wait another eight years, our 1.5°C carbon budget will be exhausted.

The entrepreneur and engineer Saul Griffith argues that the carbon-emitting properties of our committed physical capital mean that we are locked in to use up the residual carbon budget, even if no one buys another car with an internal combustion engine, installs a new gas-fired hot-water heater or, at a larger scale, constructs a new coal power plant. That’s because, just as we expect a new car to run for a decade or more, we expect our machines to be used until they are fully depreciated. If the committed emissions of all the machines over their useful lives will largely exhaust the 1.5°C carbon budget, going forward we will need almost all new machines, like cars, to be zero carbon. Currently, electric car sales, despite being one of the hottest segments of the market, are as a percentage in single digits. This implies that, if we are to meet society’s objective, there will be scrappage and stranded assets.

…

To meet the 1.5°C target, more than 80 per cent of current fossil fuel reserves (including three-quarters of coal, half of gas, one-third of oil) would need to stay in the ground, stranding these assets. The equivalent for less than 2°C is about 60 per cent of fossil fuel assets staying in the ground (where they would no longer be assets).

When I mentioned the prospect of stranded assets in a speech in 2015, it was met with howls of outrage from the industry. That was in part because many had refused to perform the basic reconcilliation between the objectives society had agreed in Paris (keeping temperature increases below 2°C), the carbon budgets science estimated were necessary to achieve them and the consequences this had for fossil fuel extraction. They couldn’t, or wouldn’t, undertake the basic calculations that a teenager, Greta Thunberg, would easily master and powerfully project. Now recognition is growing, even in the oil and gas industry, that some fossil fuel assets will be stranded — although, as we shall see later in the chapter, pricing in financial markets remains wholly inconsistent with the transition.

Carney, Mark. Value(s): Building a Better World for All. Penguin Random House Canada, 2021. p. 273–4, 278

Photos from the Yellowknife drive

In the summer of 2003, I broke with my long avoidance of air travel so that I could first help my brother Sasha move from Behchokǫ̀, in the Northwest Territories near Yellowknife, back to Victoria, BC.

We did the drive through a vast terrain of wildfires in three intensive days, with Sasha driving.

I had been meaning for ages to get our photos processed, but because of the financial pain of the long PhD all my computers and software are quite obselete and were unable to handle the RAW files from his specific Fuji camera.

I have finally figured a workaround using Adobe’s digital negative (DNG) format, so now the photos are up.

Living across the country and avoiding flying, I have seen far too little of my brothers in recent years. I justified it because I thought I was living my values by making lifestyle choices to reduce my climate impact, and because I still hoped humanity might be reaching a level of understanding where we take the crisis seriously and respond in a useful and adaptive way.

Now I think I need to do a complete re-evaluation of what sort of political project makes sense. Ever since I first became involved in environmentalism in the 1990s, I had thought that eventually the universal experience of how the world is changing in frightening ways would make people willing to make changes themselves. Now, I really don’t know.

Still, I am immensely grateful that I got to spend this intensive time with Sasha and that our relationship is still deep and meaningful after years of almost exclusively telecommunicating. His integrity and determination are inspirations to me, and I try to draw from his example while trying to live my own life well.

If all goes well, human history is just beginning. Humanity is about two hundred thousand years old. But the Earth will remain habitable for hundreds of millions more—enough time for millions of future generations; enough to end disease, poverty and injustice forever; enough to create heights of flourishing unimaginable today. And if we could learn to reach out further into the cosmos, we could find more time yet: trillions of years, to explore billions of worlds. Such a lifespan places present-day humanity in its earliest infancy. A vast and extraordinary adulthood awaits.

…

This book argues that safeguarding humanity’s future is the defining challenge of our time. For we stand at a crucial moment in the history of our species. Fueled by technological progress, our power has grown so great that for the first time in humanity’s long history, we have the capacity to destroy ourselves—severing our entire future and everything we could become.

Yet humanity’s wisdom has grown only falteringly, if at all, and lags dangerously behind. Humanity lacks the maturity, coordination and foresight necessary to avoid making mistakes from which we could never recover. As the gap between our power and wisdom grows, our future is subject to an ever-increasing level of risk. The situation is unsustainable. So over the next few centuries, humanity will be tested: it will either act decisively to protect itself and its longterm potential, or, in all likelihood, this will be lost forever.

To survive these challenges and secure our future, we must act now: managing the risks of today, averting those of tomorrow, and becoming the kind of society that will never pose such risks to itself again.

Ord, Toby. The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. Hachette Books, 2020. p. 3–4

Working on geoengineering and AI briefings

Last Christmas break, I wrote a detailed briefing on the existential risks to humanity from nuclear weapons.

This year I am starting two more: one on the risks from artificial intelligence, and one on the promises and perils of geoengineering, which I increasingly feel is emerging as our default response to climate change.

I have had a few geoengineering books in my book stacks for years, generally buried under the whaling books in the ‘too depressing to read’ zone. AI I have been learning a lot more about recently, including through Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord’s books and Robert Miles’ incredibly helpful YouTube series (based on Amodei et al’s instructive paper).

Related re: geoengineering:

Related re: AI:

Little good ever comes from discussing climate change or nuclear weapons socially

Our social world is ruled by the affect heuristic: what feels good seems true, and what feels bad we distance ourselves from and reject. We judge what’s true or false based on it if makes us feel good or bad.

I think I’m going to stop talking to people socially about nuclear weapons and climate change.

Almost always, what the other person really wants is reassurance that their future will be OK and that the choices they are making are OK.

The conversation tends to become a cross-examination where they look for a way to dismiss me in order to protect their hopefulness and view of themself as a good person. It’s a bit like how people feel compelled to tell me how particularly important or moral (or not enjoyed) their air travel plans are, as though I am a religious authority who can forgive them. “Confess and be forgiven” is a cheerful motto for those who refuse to change their behaviour.

These conversations tend to be miserable for both sides: for them because they are presented with evidence for why they really should be fearful, when they fervently want the opposite, and for me because it just leads to more alienation to see how utterly unwilling people are to even face the problem, much less take any commensurate action. If I am convincing and give good evidence, it makes things worse for both: for them because they are getting anxious instead of reassured and for me because it reinforces how little relationship there is between evidence and human decision-making.

It is also a fundamental error to think that if a person believes that a problem is serious and that you are working on it, they will support you. You might think the chain of logic would be “the person seems to be working on a problem which I consider real and important, so I will support them at least conversationally if not materially” when it is much more often “this person is talking about something that makes me feel bad, so I will find a way to believe that they are wrong or what they are saying is irrelevant”. The desire to feel good about ourselves and the world quickly and reliably trumps whatever desire we may have to believe true things or act in a manner consistent with out beliefs.

It seems smarter going forward just to say that I won’t discuss these subjects and whatever work I am doing on them is secret.

It’s crucial when setting such boundaries to refuse to debate or justify them. Let people through that crack, and it’s sure to become another affect-driven argument about how they prefer to imagine their future as stable, safe, and prosperous and their own conduct as wise and moral — with me cast as the meanie squashing their joys.

It strikes me that recognizing that a great deal of work is not strictly productive but caring, and that there is always a caring aspect even to the most apparently impersonal work, does suggest one reason why it’s so difficult to create a different society with a different set of rules. Even if we don’t like what the world look like, the fact remains that the conscious aim of most of our actions, productive or otherwise, is to do well by others; often, very specific others. Our actions are caught up in relations of caring. But most caring relations require we leave the world more or less as we found it. In the same way that teenage idealists regularly abandon their dreams of creating a better world and come to accept the compromises of adult life at precisely the moment they marry and have children, caring for others, especially over the long term, requires maintaining a world that’s relatively predictable as the grounds on which caring can take place. One cannot save to ensure a college education for one’s children unless one is sure in twenty years there will still be colleges—or for that matter, money. And that, in turns, means that love for others—people, animals, landscapes—regularly requires the maintenance of institutional structures one might otherwise despise.

Graeber, David. Bullshit Jobs : A Theory. New York : Simon & Schuster, 2018. p. 219

NotebookLM on CFFD scholarship

I would have expected that by now someone would have written a comparative analysis on pieces of scholarly writing on the Canadian campus fossil fuel divestment movement: for instance, engaging with both Joe Curnow’s 2017 dissertation and mine from 2022.

So, I gave both public texts to NotebookLM to have it generate an audio overview. It wrongly assumes that Joe Curnow is a man throughout, and mangles the pronunciation of “Ilnyckyj” in a few different ways — but at least it acts like it has read about the texts and cares about their content.

It is certainly muddled in places (though perhaps in ways I have also seen in scholarly literature). For example, it treats the “enemy naming” strategy as something that arose through the functioning of CFFD campaigns, whereas it was really part of 350.org’s “campaign in a box” from the beginning.

This hints to me at how large language models are going to be transformative for writers. Finding an audience is hard, and finding an engaged audience willing to share their thoughts back is nigh-impossible, especially if you are dealing with scholarly texts hundreds of pages long. NotebookLM will happily read your whole blog and then have a conversation about your psychology and interpersonal style, or read an unfinished manuscript and provide detailed advice on how to move forward. The AI isn’t doing the writing, but providing a sort of sounding board which has never existed before: almost infinitely patient, and not inclined to make its comments all about its social relationship with the author.

I wonder what effect this sort of criticism will have on writing. Will it encourage people to hew more closely to the mainstream view, but providing a critique that comes from a general-purpose LLM? Or will it help people dig ever-deeper into a perspective that almost nobody shares, because the feedback comes from systems which are always artificially chirpy and positive, and because getting feedback this way removes real people from the process?

And, of course, what happens when the flawed output of these sorts of tools becomes public material that other tools are trained on?

Category: The environment