Rees: Cognitive minimalism: Trivializing catastrophe

Seems we know how to fix global heating. William E Rees. Sep 24, 2026
And what we ‘know’ will kill us


In a recent Guardian article, Eduardo Porter argues that humanity’s best bet in our defence against global heating is heavy investment in air conditioning, particularly in the most exposed low-income nations. The piece begins with a critique of the (allegedly dangerous) notion that our global climate conundrum results from overconsumption—particularly of energy—and excess population:

“The greenest campaigners against climate change have long suffered from a crippling shortcoming: they too often frame the challenge as a problem of excess consumption. This motivates calls to ‘degrow’ the economy and to curb the population” (my italics).”

Porter goes on to assert that “Nowhere has the tension between this proposition and reality become more palpable during this sweltering summer than in the conversation over air conditioning.”

I admit to having to stop to catch my breath at that point—for three reasons, actually. First, my subconscious suddenly, rudely, brought it to my attention that Porter’s article was not just a bit of clever satire aimed at society’s perversely simplistic, utterly ineffective approach to climate change. Second was disappointment that Porter­—like most folks—still sees global heating/climate change as the existential threat facing confronting humanity and, third, was mild shock at what the author meant by “reality”. This last tripwire in particular jogged me into awareness that Porter was serious.

So, just what is the real story here?

Let’s step back a bit.

There can hardly be a better illustration of the fact that human beings routinely observe the same phenomena and ‘problems’ from radically different cognitive universes. It’s not the nature of reality that shapes our perceptions as much as how and what we think about what we perceive. And just how any human group, including modern techno-industrial (MTI) society, perceives/thinks about reality reflects quirky aspects of our species’ evolutionary heritage.

This is not a trivial observation. Even Shakespeare reminds us, through Antonio in The Tempest, that ‘What’s past is prologue’—and H. sapiens’ evolutionary past provides a profoundly cautionary prologue to our contemporary eco-predicament and future fate.

First, there is no dispute that anatomically modern humans evolved for hundreds of millennia in relatively simple social and biophysical environments that posed only modest short-term challenges to the evolving human brain. The lasting result is that humans are cognitively adapted to… well, ‘simple’. Even modern humans’ instinctive approach to problems is simplistic, reductionist and myopic. We tend to see ‘problems’ one at a time, in isolation from everything else, rarely connecting the dots among issues that are intimately related facets of the same complex phenomena—think of news reports on global heating, plunging biodiversity, marine dead zones, ocean acidification, micro-plastic contamination, and, yes, air conditioning, each issue typically floating free from all the others.

It’s not our fault that we are not systems thinkers; it’s basic human nature, it’s just the way we are. And while ‘just the way we are’ obviously served well enough for hunter-gatherers, it is dismally inadequate for people trying to cope with the mind-boggling, often human-made complexities of the 21st Century. It may well be that we moderns have rendered ourselves cognitively obsolete.

A second evolutionary hold-over is that humans are innate story-tellers. All human groups and societies make sense of the world by ‘socially constructing’ shared narratives (tribal myths, religious doctrines, political ideologies, even scientific theories) that may or may not accurately reflect crucial aspects of objective reality.

Significantly, people acquire their culture’s narratives unconsciously, automatically, simply by growing up and being ‘educated’ within that particular socio-cultural context. We can’t avoid this process; we’re all in it together, yet the average person on the street isn’t aware that s/he has been subliminally programmed with a complex cultural worldview consisting of several overlapping made-up stories.

Of course, we subsequently have no choice but to ‘act out of’ our prescribed narratives as true believers, as if these particular narratives were real and true. When they are not, there can be tragic consequences.

And this is where cognitive imprinting becomes relevant to global heating. Consider that MTI culture is in thrall of a particularly pernicious meta-narrative, the quasi-religious yet largely-unspoken belief in human exceptionalism. This is the fabricated notion that H. sapiens is not like other species. According to exceptionalists, humans are superior beings; some assert that we have an immortal soul; humans are not part of, nor dependent on, nature; we are exempt from natural laws; individual and social behaviors are mostly socially and culturally determined.

Ironically, then, while human exceptionalism is itself a product of H. sapiens’ innate proclivity for story-telling and believing, it denies that our evolutionary heritage significantly influences how humans ‘act out’ in the world.

But, in fact, it does—in spades. Exceptionalism provides the theoretical foundation for MTI societies’ dominant growth-demanding neo-liberal economics (including socialist and communist variations). Standard models represent the economy and ‘the environment’ as separate, largely independent systems, a material absurdity bolstered by economists’ hubristic add-on: human ingenuity, not nature, is the ultimate resource. In the neoliberal cognitive universe, technology can substitute for any good or service provided by nature, so there are no binding limits to material or population growth.

Cognitive minimalism: Trivializing catastrophe

Which brings us back to Eduardo Porter’s techno-anthropocentric narrative about global heating and poor countries. Porter argues that, whether to power their economies or cool their homes, hot low-income countries must achieve faster economic growth. He insists that “Their economic development is indispensable for the global battle against climate change.” The possibility that excess material growth is already the cause of Earth’s over-heating climate carries no weight—who cares anyway, as long as air conditioners provide a viable substitute?

According to Porter, degrowthers don’t understand that humanity has “prospered despite environmental constraints: through innovation”; similarly, proponents of smaller populations don’t get that “innovation needs people”. The more people, the more geniuses and thus the higher the probability that we will discover breakthrough technologies—like air conditioning.

In the Porter/MTI cognitive universe, limiting access to air conditioning would not only increase mortality (i.e., slow population growth) but higher temperatures would reduce labour and students’ productivity and otherwise constrain the productivity of “human capital” (i.e., slow economic growth). According to Porter, even learning how to produce zero-carbon energy “on a vast scale everywhere” will be easier to achieve in a rich, growing, air-conditioned world than in a poor hot one.

Let’s be clear—I’m not down-playing climate change. Accelerating global heating portends horrific consequences. According to one recent worst-case assessment, just two Celsius degrees warming puts two billion people at risk of death by 2050; the toll rises to four billion if the temperature rises by three degrees.

There is little doubt, then, that as the world tracks toward a catastrophic 3 C increase in mean global temperature, air-conditioning will become a hot-button issue. In fact, many high-income countries got there first and are already near-saturation. Ninety percent of households in the US and Japan, for example, enjoy air-conditioning—but the 2.8 billion people living in the hottest parts of the world (e.g., India, Indonesia) are lucky to find a patch of shade. Meanwhile, as temperatures increase, so do peoples’ incomes. With rising need and unsatisfied demand for a cool-air fix, the International Energy Agency projects the global stock of air-conditioners to more than double by 2050, from 2.5 billion to 5.6 billion units.

On its surface, and in an infinite ‘environment’, this might seem to be a logically humane, morally persuasive, and physically harmless adaptive ‘solution’. But here’s the thing. The Porter/MTI cognitive universe exemplifies MTI culture’s reductionist first-order cause--effect thinking. It characteristically treats global heating as an isolated technical glitch whose felt impact is readily techno-solved.

Air conditioning = applied ingenuity; end of story.

Except it isn’t. There could hardly be a more dismally inadequate approach to real world biophysical reality. Porter’s framing of air-conditioning exposes virtually the entire array of Earth-destroying beliefs, values and assumptions that define modern, growth-obsessed MTI culture. In particular, by isolating global heating as the problem and air conditioning the obvious techno-solution—one consistent with maintaining economic and population growth—Porter abstracts the whole overheating conundrum from systemic reality, from its wider social and biophysical contexts.

Staying cool in the face of rising temperatures isn’t even the only heat-associated problem. Porter passes over such other messy consequences as chronic drought, empty wells, crop failures, local famines, mass migrations, civil unrest, and geopolitical chaos. Need I mention that the inevitable biodiversity die-off and ecosystems collapses are also omitted from Porter’s exceptionalist universe? All in, the Porter/MTI worldview comes off as a serious cognitive aberration if not a form of collective insanity. It is certainly an excellent case study in how to trivialize catastrophe.

Cognitive expansion: Seeing fever as symptom

Contrast the Porter/MTI reductionist framing with a more realistically-grounded eco-centric perspective. This systems version of reality includes the ecosphere, i.e., the biophysical ‘environment’ that contains and constrains the human enterprise and without which the latter could not exist. It recognizes our modern socio- eco-metacrisis as a complex systems dilemma in which the anticipated explosion of air conditioners is only a miniscule isolated pixel in a vastly larger, rapidly moving, picture of incipient global eco-cultural disaster.

In short, eco-centric cognition generates a holistically more expansive mindscape; its wide-angle lens reveals crucial facts and features totally absent from the Porter/MTI vision. Most importantly, it brings into clear focus that the sheer scale of the global human enterprise is the overriding driver of our contemporary meta-crisis and shows that it could not be otherwise on a finite planet.

As previously detailed:

· The human population is about 14,000 times greater than the arithmetic mean among species of non-human mammals of similar body size. If humans were an ecologically ‘normal’ (i.e., typical) species, our global population would be <600,000.

· The sheer weight of the human population is 10 times greater than the biomass of all other terrestrial mammals. If we add our domestic livestock, the combined weight of humans and their farm animals comprises >96% of total mammalian biomass on Earth. Wild mammal species combined account for <4%.

· The mass of human-made artefacts (i.e., the material output of human activities) now exceeds total natural biomass on Earth.

· H. sapiens has become the greatest geological force changing the face of Earth. For example, we move about 24 times more material around the planet than rivers move sediment to the oceans.

Is it not astonishing how much our growth-obsessed economic mindset can hide from view? Even this small sample of eco-indicators removes the blinders. With clearer vision it becomes obvious that the bloated human economy is already in advanced ecological overshoot, consuming and polluting beyond the ecosphere’s regenerative and assimilative capacities respectively. Now we can see that anthropogenic climate change is an excess waste (CO2) issue and realize that global heating/climate change is by no means the definitive problem—climate chaos is but one major co-symptom of the real existential crisis, ecological overshoot. In the exceptionalist cognitive universe, economists fantasize that the economy is decoupling from the ‘environment’. Meanwhile, in the real world, MTI culture has actually been merging with the ecosphere and, in the process, depleting and dissipating the biophysical basis of its own existence.

And it’s not done yet—the world shows no sign of going ‘cold turkey’ on its growth addiction. Given MTI culture’s current trajectory, there will be a 50% increase in total material throughput, from 96 billion metric tons (Gt) in 2020 to 145 Gt in 2050. Some analysts suggest that resource extraction may reach as much as 184 Gt by 2050. Expect waste generation to rise proportionately.

Obviously, the anticipated massive increase in material and (mostly fossil) energy consumption can only accelerate eco-destruction including the heating surge we’re ostensibly trying to subdue. The merger of the human enterprise with the ecosphere is actually a hostile take-over; each incremental increase in economic scale and human population drives a corresponding loss of ‘nature’ and life-support functions. Four billion deaths may not even be the ‘worst case’ outcome. All things considered, the Porter/MTI universe is a recipe for global eco-cultural catastrophe, one affecting most multi-cellular life on Earth.

What to believe?

Astute readers may quite reasonably point out that both the Porter/MTI and the eco-centric cognitive universes are mere social constructs. There’s no denying it—these opposing visions are fabrications made up by people with different intentions, built-in biases, academic backgrounds, data sets and cultural exposures. On what basis can ordinary people choose between them? And, by the way, couldn’t there be any number of other cognitive constructs?

Fair enough, but consider an important corollary framed by the late Neil Postman:

“You may say if you wish that all reality is a social construction, but you cannot deny that some constructions are ‘truer’ than others”

Postman was discussing the relationship between words (i.e., cognitive constructs) and the external world of things and processes that we use those words to describe. He notes that “…the key to intelligence, if not sanity, is to be able to assess with some accuracy the extent to which words refer to the [external] world of non-words”. Effective procedures and beliefs ‘work’ because they are based on suppositions or hypotheses “whose ‘truths’ have been tested and shown to be in accord with our limited conception of the structure of reality”. If one assemblage of words is more ‘accurate’ than another, it is a ‘truer’, closer, representation of objective reality.

And, extreme relativists aside, there is such a thing as objective reality. Understanding key aspects of that reality is how humans build airplanes that fly safely and devise vaccines that work. It’s why most cancer patients would rather consult a well-trained surgical oncologist than the neighbourhood wizard or witch. The surgeon’s training and language—his/her cognitive universe—is likely to provide the more accurate description of cancer-as-disease, not to mention human anatomy and physiology.

So it is that ecocentric cognition generates a truer depiction of humanity’s de facto intimate connection to the ecosphere than does the Porter/MTI brand of exceptionalist detachment. The former is based on the best of ecological, earth and climate science. The later springs from hubristic arrogance, wishful thinking and science denial. Which mindset provides the most promising guide to the future?

The lesson in all this is quite simple:

Nothing is true just because you believe it, but with perseverance, good research, and critical thinking, you may come to believe that which is true.

Which reminds me of something the inimitable Mark Twain is alleged to have said: “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you in trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so!”