Issues in the Economics of Climate Change

Economic Estimates of Damages vary significantly and are beset by difficulties leading to underestimation.

Reflections – Managing Uncertain Climates: Some Guidance for Policy Makers and Researchers. Frank Convery and Gernot Wagner. 2015. 

Selected excerpts:

Climate change—and, by extension, climate policy—is beset with unknowns and unknowables.

We believe that what we don’t know only hastens the case for action.

Dealing with uncertainty is hard under the best of circumstances, but the challenge is compounded when examining climate change, an issue that uniquely combines four characteristics—it is global, long-term, irreversible, and uncertain.

Many have pointed to the problem uncertainty poses. Pindyck (2013a), for example, offers a powerful critique of the use of integrated assessment models (IAMs) to assess climate policy, focusing in particular on their treatment of uncertainty: “IAM-based analyses of climate policy create a perception of knowledge and precision, but that perception is illusory and misleading.” Many others, including Stern (2013, 2015), largely agree. Weitzman (2009, 2011, 2012, 2014) and Wagner and Weitzman (2015) highlight the importance of tail risks and grapple with the implications. Heal and Millner (2014b) discuss the implications for decision theory, and Fisher and Le (2014) discuss the implications for policy more broadly.

Meanwhile, the ‘most likely’ value for climate sensitivity has been around 2.5 or 3°C (4.5 or 5.4°F), until the IPCC stopped using any specific number altogether in 2013. Thus, there appears to be greater and more deep-seated uncertainty around this crucial climate parameter than was thought possible only five years earlier. The IPCC’s removal of 3°C (5.4°F) as the ‘most likely’ value may well have been an effort to counter the natural tendency to focus on the average rather than the range. However, that step is still insufficient to capture the full range of uncertainty. As Weitzman (2009, 2011, 2012, 2014), Wagner and Weitzman (2015), and many others demonstrate, the relatively wide ‘likely’ range doesn’t tell all. It is the upper bound (or possible lack thereof) of climate sensitivity that ought to command particular attention because steeply increasing damage functions make even small chances of high temperature increases incredibly costly—‘catastrophic’ to use a more colloquial yet apt description. In the final analysis, climate change is a risk management problem on a planetary scale, with no chance of a do-over. That, in short, is the unprecedented nature of this problem.

All too often, uncertainty has been seen as an excuse for inaction on climate policy. This is clearly the wrong response in the face of uncertainty (Risky Business Project 2014, Wagner and Weitzman 2015). First, the uncertainty about climate sensitivity is only one of many. Just the first step in projecting climatic outcomes—calculating future emissions trajectories—is already beset with enormous uncertainties: The famous ‘IPAT’ equation breaks down impact (here, carbon emissions) into three components: population, affluence, and technology.3 Each of these components is difficult to predict individually. When combined they result in enormous uncertainty around future emissions pathways. Each other step in the climate chain—from emissions at one end to society’s reaction to the final impacts at the other—comes with further compounding uncertainties. … Third, the potentially long and ‘fat’ upper tail of the climate sensitivity distribution may yet wag us.5 This is because although the lower end of the distribution is typically and sensibly cut off at 0°C, consensus science sees no such certain threshold on the upper end. In contrast to the IPCC’s (2013) view that any climate sensitivity realization below 1°C (1.8°F) is “extremely unlikely”—a (perhaps overly precise) probability of 5% and below—it assigns the label “very unlikely”—10% and below—to anything above 6°C (10.8°F). This implies that the climate sensitivity distribution is skewed to the right, which means that higher temperature realizations are more likely than low ones (see Figure 1).



Figure 1—Climate sensitivity calibrated using a log-normal distribution

Few scientists would dispute that global average temperature increases of 2, 3, or even 4°C (3.6, 5.4, or 7.2°F) would entail profound, Earth-as-we-know-it-altering changes. The last time global average temperatures were about 2 to 3.5°C (3.6 to 6.3°F) above preindustrial levels— roughly 1 to 2.5°C (1.8 to 4.5°F) above today’s levels—sea levels were up to 20 meters (66 feet) higher than today, and today’s subtropical fauna roamed the Arctic (IPCC, 2013).6 Eventual global average warming of 5 or even 6°C (9 or 10.8°F) is beyond most scientists’ data and most people’s imagination. But when we combine our climate sensitivity calibration based on the 6 That was a bit over 3 million years ago, when global CO2 concentrations stood at 400 ppm—today’s levels! IPCC’s (2013) consensus statements, conservatively interpreted in Figure 1, with the IEA (2013) 700 ppm scenario, that’s where we end up -- a greater-than-10-percent chance of eventually exceeding average global warming of 6°C (10.8°F). 2015). Average projections are bad enough, but it’s the small-probability, high-impact events that ought to command particular attention. That possibility all but calls for a precautionary approach to climate policy.

Pindyck argues that standard climate-economy models fall victim to two important fallacies in dealing with uncertainty: by necessity, they focus on what is known and can be quantified, thus leaving out what isn’t known and can’t be quantified, and they convey a false sense of precision. Weitzman (2009, 2011, 2012, 2014) makes perhaps the most persuasive case for going beyond standard benefit-cost analysis, arguing that climate change is among a small list of potentially catastrophic low-probability, high-impact events that deserve special attention far beyond what standard treatments can offer (Wagner and Weitzman, 2015).

We would argue that existential risk on a planetary scale deserves quite different attention than, for example, “the construction of levees to avert major flooding,” two of the examples discussed by Martin and Pindyck. One could add asteroids, genetically modified organisms, robots run amok, and many others to that list. It is clear that climate change is not the only potential catastrophe facing the planet. However, climate change may, in fact, be in the unique position of having the biggest gap between the types of investments (both public and private) that science tells us are necessary and current levels of spending on it (Wagner and Weitzman, 2015). Thus, at the very least, persistent uncertainties imply that we need to move beyond benefit-cost analysis as the sole decision criterion. Heal and Millner (2013, 2014b) present a range of alternative decision criteria, with a version of a ‘precautionary principle’ being perhaps the most prominent.

If a society is to implement rational climate policy, one of the most important decisions it must make is how much value to place on future generations (Summers and Zeckhauser, 2008). This raises the crucial issue of which discount rate to use, with all its normative implications

The climate system is beset with tipping points. Witness the irreversible collapse of parts of the West Antarctic ice sheet (Joughin et al., 2014, and Rignot et al., 2014). The (theoretical) possibility and empirical implications of non-linearities and tipping points are beginning to find their way into climate-economy models (e.g., Ceronsky et al. 2011, Keller, Bolker, and Bradford, 2004, Lemoine and Traeger, 2014ab, Lontzek, Cai, and Judd, 2012, van der Ploeg and de Zeeuw, 2014). However, the work is far from done. Some tipping points interact with—and, thus, are as difficult as addressing—irreversibilities, which inevitably invoke the specter of ‘infinity’ with all the difficulties that involves. Other elements of non-linearities ‘simply’ point to the need to explore climate damage functions that don’t follow neat quadratic, exponential, or other simple functional form patterns (e.g., Crost and Traeger 2014, Sterner and Persson 2008). Much empirical work remains to be done to draw definitive conclusions about the importance of different types of damage functions, although one conclusion has already clearly emerged: virtually all non-linearities and possible tipping points point in one direction, that of more steeply rising climate damages. That once again implies a higher social cost of carbon.

Climate-economy models, IAMs, play a crucial role in climate economics and policy. For example, the current U.S. social cost of carbon (around $40 per ton of CO2 emitted in 2015 in current prices) is calculated using inputs from three models: DICE, FUND, and PAGE (U.S. Government Interagency Working Group on Social Cost of Carbon, 2013). All three models share one important characteristic: they each are the brainchild of a single academic—William Nordhaus, Richard Tol, and Chris Hope, respectively. … As of now, IAMs lag years behind the latest climate science.




The economically optimal warming limit of the planet. Falko Ueckerdt et al. 2018. 

just including the abstract and a bit of the intro:

Abstract
Both climate-change damages and climate-change mitigation will incur economic costs. While the risk of severe damages increases with the level of global warming (Allen et al., 2018; Dell et al., 2014; IPCC, 2014b; Lenton et al., 2008), mitigating costs increase steeply with more stringent warming limits (Allen et al., 2018; IPCC, 2014a; Rogelj et al., 2015). Here we show that the global warming limit that minimizes this century’s total economic costs of climate change lies between 1.9 and 2°C if temperature changes continue to impact national economic growth rates as observed in the past. The result is robust across a wide range of normative assumptions on the valuation of future welfare and inequality aversion. For our study we estimated climate change impacts on economic growth for 186 countries based on recent empirical insights (Burke et al., 2015a), and mitigation costs using a state-of-the-art energy-economy-climate model with a wide range of highly-resolved mitigation options. Our purely economic assessment, even though it omits non-monetary damages, provides support for the international Paris Agreement on climate change. The political goal of limiting global warming to “well below 2 degrees” is thus also an economically optimal goal.

Introduction

“Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above preindustrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C” is a central element of the global climate agreement reached in Paris in December 2015 (UNFCCC, 2015). This political goal builds on the scientific insight that a global warming beyond 1.5–2°C poses risks of potentially severe impacts such as insecure food and drinking water supply (Allen et al., 2018; IPCC, 2014b), threatened biodiversity (Dawson et al., 2011; Willis and Bhagwat, 2009), large-scale singular events (Lenton et al., 2008; Schellnhuber et al., 2016), displacement (Hsiang and Sobel, 2016), or human conflict (Hsiang et al., 2013a; Schleussner et al., 2016). Many of these risks and their societal consequences are difficult or even impossible to capture in economic terms. Here we focus on the direct impacts of global warming on economic output. Taking a purely economic perspective that omits non-monetary damages, we derive the optimal warming limit of the planet by minimizing this century’s (2015–2100) costs of climate change. The analysis combines mitigation cost estimates from a detailed energy-economy-climate model with an empirically based damage estimation, which assumes that the observed relation of economic damages and annual temperatures of a country remains valid for the future.

Cost-benefit integrated assessment models (Anthoff and Tol, 2014; Hope, 2013; Nordhaus, 2014, 2010) typically use “damage functions”, which aggregate the economic costs from climate impacts as a function of the global warming. Here we take a different approach. We estimate climate damages from annual gridded temperature data (0.5° x 0.5° resolution) for 186 countries based on the empirical relation between temperature deviations and economic growth rates derived in Burke et al. (Burke et al., 2015a).

In their pioneering work, Burke et al. derive an empirical relation of annual historical temperature deviations and GDP changes based on country-specific data for 50 years (1960-2010) and 166 countries (which we then apply for 186 countries). The regression analysis captures the aggregated climate-related impacts across all economic sectors that contribute to a country's GDP changes. Burke et al. find that growth rates change concave in temperature, i.e. cold-country productivity increases as annual temperature increases, while warm-country productivity decreases and this decline accelerates at higher temperatures (see Fig. A4). Damage aggregates across countries show that losses exceed benefits such that global damage estimates are high (>20% of global GDP in 2100 under RCP8.5, see Fig 1a).


MW: Even this paper, which uses unrealistic assumptions, and which estimates global damages under RCP 8.5 of >20% of global GDP in 2100, when all climate scientists and most scientists in general would argue that RCP 8.5 will lead to billions of lives lost and the collapse of the biosphere and thus civilization, nonetheless argues that it would be economically optimal to keep climate change <2C.




Climate change uncertainty and decision-making. Arun Malik, Jonathan Rothbaum, Stephen Smith. 2010.
Climate Change Uncertainty

The 2007 IPCC report on the physical science basis of climate change includes many models which show the wide range of temperature increase predictions. Figure 1 gives a sense for the uncertainties involved in climate change modeling. Each model attempts to take what we know about the climate system and determine the probability that the climate will stabilize with a global mean temperature increase from 0-10°C. While there is broad agreement across the models that temperature increases will occur, the distributions vary considerably.



The purpose of this section is to show just how pervasive the uncertainties involved in climate change are. These uncertainties and issues can be broken down into broad categories to give a sense of how they might affect different decision-makers.

2.1 Environmental Uncertainties and Issues

2.1.1 Feedback Loops – Ecological and Physical Processes

• Carbon Cycle
• Atlantic Ocean Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC)
• Clouds
• Methane and Permafrost Melting

2.1.2 Thresholds and Irreversibilities

• Sea Level Rise
• MOC
• Vegetation Cover
• CO2 Persistence in the Atmosphere

2.1.3. Precipitation
2.1.4 Extreme Weather Events
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.
2.2 Economic Uncertainties
.
.
2.3 Model and Parameter Uncertainty
.
.
3.1 Risk vs Ambiguity
3.2 Fat-Tailed Distributions
.
3.4 Unknown Unknowns
.
.
5.2 Precautionary Principle



Endogenous Growth, Convexity of Damage and Climate Risk: How Nordhaus’ Framework Supports Deep Cuts in Carbon Emissions. Nicholas Stern and Simon Dietz. 2015. (selected excerpts)

‘To slow or not to slow’ by Bill Nordhaus (1991) is a landmark in economic research. As the first analysis of the costs and benefits of policies to abate greenhouse gas emissions, it opened the profession to a new field of application – climate change. Its importance is partly illustrated by the number of times that it has been cited – on 1,150 occasions according to Google Scholar; 398 times according to the narrower, journals only measure in ISI Web of Knowledge. The context within which Nordhaus’s paper was written helps us understand its contribution. While the basic science of the greenhouse effect was set out in the nineteenth century by Fourier, Tyndall and Arrhenius, discussions surrounding the possible role of humans in enhancing it – and therefore causing global warming and climate change – began in earnest in the 1970s. For at least a decade, climate change remained largely a scientific/environmentalist’s issue, debated in specialist conferences and networks (Agrawala, 1998). Indeed, it is important to stress that the science of climate change was running years ahead of the economics (something that arguably remains the case today in understanding the impacts of climate change; Stern, 2013).

By the late 1980s, however, climate change was becoming both a policy issue and increasingly political.

… model took ‘existing models and simplified them into a few equations that are easily understood and manipulated’ (p. 920), something that has become a hallmark of Nordhaus’s work in the area.

Once again, the results of the analysis with DICE pointed to modest emissions controls, modestly increasing over time – from 10% initially to 15% in the later twenty-first century. Since these first studies with the DICE model, it has become the pre-eminent integrated assessment model (IAM) in the economics of climate change.

A central purpose of this article is to explore whether a recommendation of modest emissions reductions does indeed follow from using the DICE framework. We ask, can the framework support strong controls on emissions, if restrictive assumptions about growth, damage and climate risk are relaxed? These assumptions arguably lead to gross underestimation of the benefits of emissions reductions in DICE and other IAMs (Stern, 2013). First, we incorporate endogenous drivers of growth and we allow climate change to damage these drivers. This is in stark contrast to the current generation of IAMs… Second, we assume that the damage function linking the increase in global mean temperature with the instantaneous reduction in output is highly convex at some temperature... Third, we allow for explicit and large climate risks. ..

We conduct sensitivity analysis on high values but also specify a probability distribution reflecting the latest scientific knowledge on the climate sensitivity as set out in the recent IPCC report (IPCC, 2013). Its key characteristic is a fat tail of very high temperature outcomes that are assigned low probabilities. By contrast, most IAM studies have ignored this key aspect of climate risk by proceeding with a single, best guess value for the climate sensitivity, typically corresponding to the mode of the IPCC distribution. We note, linking the second and third points here, that the model temperature increase under business as usual a century or so from now of 3.5 or 4°C (IPCC, 2013) could be extremely damaging – this is not just a ‘tail’ issue. …

Science and impact studies tell us that, not only could we cross several key physical tipping points in the climate system by the time the 4°C mark is reached (Lenton et al., 2008), the impacts of such warming on the natural environment, economies and societies could be severe … Given the potential magnitude of transformation illustrated by this example, the assumption that Dt = 0.5 when T = 4 may be no less plausible, to put it cautiously, than assuming, as (2) does with the standard parameterisation, that Dt = 0.04 when T = 4, i.e. only 4% of output is lost as a result of temperatures not seen for 10 million plus years. 

[MW: are you f'g kidding me?! that is to say, standard DICE-like IAM economic models are full of shxt]


In standard DICE S = 3°C. However, it has long been known that there is substantial uncertainty about S (Charney, 1979). Moreover investigations in recent years (as collected by Meinshausen et al., 2009) have tended to yield estimates of the pdf of S that have a large positive skew

Figure B5 shows that the optimal mean stock of atmospheric CO2 peaks in our endogenous growth models at no more than about 500 ppm, and as little as 420 ppm, depending on the growth model and damage function. These stock levels are well below those in the standard DICE model.

5. Conclusions

‘To slow or not to slow’ (Nordhaus, 1991) and its subsequent development into the dynamic DICE model have given us what seems to be a coherent and powerful framework for assessing the costs and benefits of climate-change mitigation. But it has in-built assumptions on growth, damage and risk, which together result in gross underassessment of the overall scale of the risks from unmanaged climate change (Stern, 2013). This criticism applies with just as much force to most of the other IAMs that DICE has inspired. …

The study is only a preliminary investigation, whose purpose was to illustrate or sketch the consequences of relaxing assumptions that have limited plausibility and possible large effects on policy conclusions.


Table 4: Optimal Carbon Prices

[MW: So, estimates by Stern of SCC range from $70 to $329, as compared to: ]

“In standard DICE the emissions control rate, that is the percentage reduction in industrial carbon dioxide emissions, is 0.158 in 2015, with an associated carbon price of $44/tC in 2005 prices”






Subject to caveats implicit and explicit from articles above, and subject further to recognition that economic IAMs embed climate models’ ECS, but the economic models lag, so do not reflect the latest climate science, and ECS is now known to be higher than previously assumed; and subject to further recognition that economic models of climate damages are divorced from concepts of ecology and destruction of ecosystem services we require, fwiw, existing studies of economic damages that can be for reference include:


The Economic Consequences of Climate Change. OECD. 2015.

Page 80: In the case of a high climate sensitivity (equal to 4.5 ºC or 6 ºC temperature increase), this annual loss rises to 6% and more than 9%, respectively, by 2100. This insight also holds for climate impacts occurring before 2060: effectively any emission, whether now or in the future, triggers a series of effects and leads to an increase in climate damages for at least a century. Thus, there are damages that are already committed to now due to historical emissions; in the AD-DICE model, these gradually increase to around 0.6% of GDP (for the central ECS estimate), although the model is not fine-grained enough (and not intended to be) to assess current damage levels accurately.

[MW: so, once again, re: the insight noted above.... these types of studies are seriously divorced from reality; the notion that a planet with temperatures 6C higher will suffer only damages of (name whatever f'g arbitrary $$ value you want here) is laughably inane. see Schellnhuber's or Box's or Anderson's scientific assessment of what 4C implies -- the destruction of civilization!]



Valuing Climate Damages: Updating Estimation of the Social Cost of Carbon Dioxide. Natl Academies. 2017.

The social cost of carbon (SC-CO2) is an economic metric intended to provide a comprehensive estimate of the net damages—that is, the monetized value of the net impacts, both negative and positive— from the global climate change that results from a small (1 metric ton) increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Under Executive Orders regarding regulatory impact analysis and as required by a court ruling, the U.S. government has since 2008 used estimates of the SC-CO2 in federal rulemakings to value the costs and benefits associated with changes in CO2 emissions. In 2010, the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases (IWG) developed a methodology for estimating the SC-CO2 across a range of assumptions about future socioeconomic and physical earth systems.

The IWG asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to examine potential approaches, along with their relative merits and challenges, for a comprehensive update to the current methodology. The task was to ensure that the SC-CO2 estimates reflect the best available science, focusing on issues related to the choice of models and damage functions, climate science modeling assumptions, socioeconomic and emissions scenarios, presentation of uncertainty, and discounting.

Integrated assessment models (IAMs) are currently used by the IWG to estimate the economic consequences of CO2 emissions. The IAMs define baseline emission trajectories by projecting future economic growth, population, and technological change. In these IAMs, a 1 metric ton increase in CO2 emissions is added to the baseline emissions trajectory. This emissions increase is translated into an increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, which results in an increase in global average temperature. This temperature change, as well as changes in other relevant variables, including CO2 concentrations and income, is translated (either explicitly or implicitly) to physical impacts and monetized damages. These damages include, but are not limited to, market damages, such as changes in net agricultural productivity, energy use, and property damage from increased flood risk, as well as nonmarket damages, such as those to human health and to the services that natural ecosystems provide to society. Because most of the warming caused by an emission of CO2 into the atmosphere persists for well over a millennium, changes in CO2 emissions today may affect economic outcomes for centuries to come. Streams of monetized damages over time are converted into present value terms by discounting. The present value of damages reflects society’s willingness to trade value in the future for value today…. The IWG’s current estimate of the SC-CO2 in the year 2020 for a 3.0 percent discount rate is $42 per metric ton of CO2 emissions in 2007 U.S. dollars.

LIMITATIONS OF SIMPLE EARTH SYSTEM MODELS

In complex climate models, the parameters described in Box 4-1—ECS, TCR, TCRE, and IPT—are resultant behaviors of the climate system, not input parameters. They arise from physical properties of the Earth system, such as the heat capacity of the ocean and the magnitude of different feedbacks that amplify or dampen the temperature change caused by radiative forcing. The strength of these feedbacks depends on the state of the climate; they are not generally constant, and they may vary in response to the magnitude of forcing and spatial pattern of forcing, as well as over time (Knutti and Rugenstein, 2015). By contrast, in simple Earth system models at least some of these metrics are input parameters. For Earth system models. It is therefore important to be aware of three key limitations of this assumption and the use of ECS, TCR, TCRE, and IPT as parameters.

The first limitation is that these metrics are all defined with respect to a reference state, such as the preindustrial state of Earth.

The second limitation is that these parameters are diagnosed using tests that hold certain elements of the climate system constant. This inactivates so carbon cycle feedbacks are also excluded. If these other feedbacks are predominantly positive, then on the timescales on which they are operative, measures such as ECS and TCR will understate the expected warming.

The third limitation is that three important feedbacks are excluded from ECS and TCR: the response to changes in albedo related to land ice, changes in albedo and transpiration related to land cover changes and the dust/aerosol feedbacks that impact biogeochemical cycles. Geological data suggest that these feedbacks may amplify warming by about 50 percent relative to that expected based on ECS alone

…. Currently, the damage component of an SC-IAM translates streams of socioeconomic variables (e.g., income and population and gross domestic product) and physical climatic variables (e.g., changes in temperature and sea level) into streams of monetized damages over time. …. Another attribute of the SC-IAMs that underpin the current IWG estimates is that much of the research on which they are based is dated.

… The committee notes that the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon (2010) identified a number of potential shortcomings and critiques of the current damage formulations, which are discussed further below.
These include:

• incomplete treatment of noncatastrophic damages; 
• incomplete treatment of potential catastrophic damages; 
• uncertainty in extrapolation of damages to high temperatures; 
• incomplete treatment of adaptation and technological change; 
• omission of risk aversion with respect to high-impact damages; 
• failure to incorporate intersectoral and interregional interactions; and 
• imperfect substitutability of consumption for environmental amenities.

Other research on Valuing Climate Damages / Social Cost of Carbon / Integrated Assessment Models:

To Slow or Not to Slow: The Economics of the Greenhouse Effect. William Nordhaus. 1992.

The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review. Nicholas Stern. 2007.

Climate change uncertainty and decision-making. Arun Malik, Jonathan Rothbaum, Stephen Smith. 2010.

Towards and ecological economics. Peter Victor and Tim Jackson. 2012.

Better Growth, Better Climate: Global Report. New Climate Economy. 2014.

Endogenous Growth, Convexity of Damage and Climate Risk: How Nordhaus’ Framework Supports Deep Cuts in Carbon Emissions. Nicholas Stern and Simon Dietz. 2015.

Climate Change Risks and Adaptation: Linking Policy and Economics. OECD. 2015.

The Economic Consequences of Climate Change. OECD. 2015.

Reflections – Managing Uncertain Climates: Some Guidance for Policy Makers and Researchers. Frank Convery and Gernot Wagner. 2015.

Technical Update to Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Social Cost of Greenhouse Gas Estimates. Environment and Climate Change Canada. 2016.

Policy tradeoffs under risk of abrupt climate change. Yacov Tsur and Amos Zemel. 2016.

Economics of the Climate. Geoffrey Heal. 2017.

Valuing Climate Damages: Updating Estimation of the Social Cost of Carbon Dioxide. Natl Academies. 2017.

Frontiers of Climate Change Economics. Van der Meijden, van der Ploeg, Withagen. 2017.

Pricing Carbon and Adjusting Capital to Fend off Climate Catastrophes. Van der Ploeg, de Zeeuw. 2018.

Climate change and the macro-economy: a critical review. Sandra Batten, Bank of England staff working paper. 2018.

One Step Forward, One Step Back: Assessing the Consequences of Three Decades of Climate Gridlock in the U.S. Joseph Curtin and Max Munchmeyer, IIEA. 2019.

Ecological Economics

Economics and the Ecosystem. Real World Economics Review. 2019.

Degrowth: a theory of radical abundance. Jason Hickel.

Elements of a political economy of the postgrowth era. Max Koch.

Victim of success: civilisation is at risk. Peter McManners.

Economism and the Econocene: a coevolutionary interpretation. Richard Norgaard.

End game: the economy as eco-catastrophe and what needs to change. William Rees.

An ecosocialist path to limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C. Richard Smith.

Like blending chalk and cheese – the impact of standard economics in IPCC scenarios. Joachim Spagenberg and Lia Polotzek.

Of ecosystems and economies: re-connecting economics with reality. Clive Spash and Tone Smith.

How to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals within planetary boundaries by 2050. Per Espen Stoknes.




See also

Lenton, Timothy. Tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system. 2008.

Rockstrom, Johan. Planetary boundaries: Exploring the safe operating space for humanity. 2009.

Barnosky, Anthony. Approaching a state shift in Earth’s biosphere. 2012.

Steffen, Will. Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene. 2018.

Ehrlich, Paul and Anne. Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided? 2013.

Our Planet

A True Reality Show: The Unexpectedly Distressing ‘Our Planet’. Alison Herman, the ringer. Apr. 12, 2019.

Nature docu-series have traditionally been more of a comfort watch for curious animal-lovers. David Attenborough’s new Netflix series is decidedly not that.

The skeleton key to Our Planet, Netflix’s foray into the flourishing ecosystem of nature documentaries, is the word “remain.” In the voiceover that introduces each episode, narrator David Attenborough promises a survey of Earth’s natural wonders in all their splendor—or at least the ones we’ve left standing. Before Our Planet has shown a single mating songbird or grazing wildebeest, it’s already harshed its own vibe.

Our Planet is an unusually brazen instance of a deep-pocketed tech company airlifting a successful TV show template through sheer financial might. Not that Netflix is alone in adapting this strategy: Amazon is currently developing a fashion competition show starring the former co-hosts of Project Runway and a would-be next Game of Thrones with the quarter-billion dollar rights to another beloved series of epic fantasy novels. The marquee offering of Apple’s soon-to-launch TV+ streaming service will Voltron together the stars of Big Little Lies, Friends, and The Office. 

Our Planet, meanwhile, doesn’t just follow in the footsteps of the BBC’s bar-setting opus Planet Earth. Its production company, Silverback Films, is headed by Planet Earth and Blue Planet maestro Alastair Fothergill; its distinctive sound is that of Attenborough, the nonagenarian whose trademark instrument my colleague Brian Phillips has described as “somewhere between the voice of a golf announcer and the voice of a loving god.” 

Plenty of tropes carry over from Planet Earth to its successor. Shot over four years in 50 countries, Our Planet can’t resist the occasional humble brag about just how difficult and rare it is to capture an Arabian leopard in the wild, or a concentration of cheetahs hunting as a group. Episodes are organized into biomes like “Frozen Worlds” and “Fresh Water,” hopscotching continents to spotlight nature’s recurring patterns. Scoring and narration help anthropomorphize the animals onscreen, turning courtship rituals into full-blown relationships and the everyday work of survival into an epic struggle. 

But Our Planet distinguishes itself by emphasizing nature’s fragility as much as its beauty. Attenborough’s script is deeply concerned with the immediate effects and potential fallout of climate change. Forests and ice caps are shown shrinking from space to emphasize the sheer scale of humankind’s destruction; animals are depicted suffering the consequences of limited resources to show the intimate and devastating impact of global warming. So distressing are certain passages of Our Planet that Netflix issued a content warning for certain scenes that might disturb sensitive viewers, complete with time stamps. An interlude featuring walruses, overcrowded by vanishing sea ice onto a rocky beach, tumbling off a sheer cliff face to their likely deaths has already become infamous. Emotional trauma is an occupational hazard more commonly associated with slasher films than ecological surveys, but in this case the heads up is warranted. 

If Our Planet’s intention is to impress upon viewers the gravity of the crisis facing its namesake, Fothergill and his team succeed. But in the process, the show threads several tricky lines: between the expectations of viewers and the goals of producers; between the need to communicate a message and keep audiences engaged so they can absorb it.  

How will those who tune in expecting a mellow, possibly THC-assisted evening of stunning visuals react to an abject lesson in the impending apocalypse? Once they’ve been suitably cowed by the carnage we’ve wrought on our home and its occupants, will viewers have the will to continue or will they remain curled into the fetal position on their couch? 

Like many, I took in the recent Planet Earth and Blue Planet sequels in long, sustained gulps. I wanted to live in the world these shows presented—or rather, take reassurance in the knowledge I already did. These updates included their fair share of concessions to environmental realities, including a heartbreaking sequence in which newly hatched sea turtles were drawn to city lights instead of the sea. Mostly, however, they served as an escape from the pressures of everyday life, not a reminder of them. Nature documentaries tend to emphasize the simplicity of life in the wild, in contrast with the complexities of human civilization. Much like the gathering spots where the film crews strategically position their cameras, they serve as an oasis, a resting place for weary travelers to zone out and take in some beauty. 

Our Planet does not have this same effect, nor is it meant to. Rather than illustrate nature’s separation from humanity, Our Planet underscores how every region explored is connected on a geologic level—and that disrupting any point on this supply chain can lead to an unpleasant domino effect. Ice caps reflect sunlight back into space, keeping the rest of the planet cool; rain forests emit clouds of vapor, which result in precipitation hundreds if not thousands of miles away. Interfere with one part of these reactions, as we continue to with alarming speed, and you choke off the other. Even the rare unsullied patch of land Our Planet manages to stake out comes with a reminder that while this watering hole may be legally protected from poachers and development, others aren’t. A scenic interlude in a Madagascar forest is followed by a somber announcement the grove has been razed entirely since filming. 

Our Planet impresses the dire threat posed by climate change and unchecked growth; it does not quite inspire the compulsion to continue watching. This is not, precisely, Our Planet’s stated goal; on the spectrum of education to entertainment, this show skews heavily toward the former. At times, such commitment to principle sharpens Our Planet’s appeal as an empathetic argument for climate justice. At others, the prospect of queuing up yet another cavalcade of man-made atrocities heightens the temptation to defect for lighter fare. This creates something of a dilemma: Can Our Planet fully get its point across if receptive viewers can’t bear to stick around? Ironically, the very sympathy Our Planet works to foster is exactly what can make it so hard to endure. 

Fittingly, Our Planet’s most optimistic scene is also, in another light, its grimmest. The show’s final episode, “Forests,” includes a look at an unlikely hotspot: the ruins of Chernobyl. Among Soviet-era signage and concrete apartment blocs, trees have flourished and wildlife moved in. The result is a lush, haunting postapocalypse, with shades of films like Annihilation or Stalker—except this dreamscape is very much real. In the forced absence of human life, nature has reclaimed itself, with wolves and deer thriving where radiation-infected Homo sapiens cannot. Here, Our Planet presents a potential solution to its seemingly intractable problems. Earth is surprisingly durable, capable of recovering once its immediate source of distress is removed from the picture. 

Our Planet may be able to survive after all. The question is: Will we?

Topic: Divestment

Are Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaigns Working? A Conversation With Economist Robert Pollin. C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout. May 28, 2018.

We found two basic things from this research. First, to date, we found the total level of divestment commitments to be at about 0.7 percent of total global private fossil fuel assets (assets committed to divestment are at about $36 billion while total global private fossil fuel assets are at $4.9 trillion). Second, we found no evidence that any divestment actions, including the recent New York City pension fund decision, has had any significant negative effect on the stock prices of fossil fuel companies. 

The basic problem with the strategy is straightforward. Ethically motivated owners of fossil fuel stocks and bonds — such as the New York City Council — do certainly have the power to sell these assets as a statement of principle and act of protest. But this act of protest will have no direct impact on the operations of the fossil fuel companies as long as investors who are profit-seekers, as opposed to being motivated ethically, are willing to purchase the stocks and bonds that ethically motivated investors have put up for sale. Indeed, the core divestment strategy of selling fossil fuel assets is, at best, incomplete until one addresses this question: Is there somebody out there still willing to purchase these fossil fuel assets, and if so, and at what price? The answer is, yes, there are plenty of people ready to purchase shares of fossil fuel companies as long as they can profit by owning these shares.

American Psychiatric Association Assembly Passes Action Plan on Divestment of Fossil Fuels. Robin Cooper, MD, Psychiatric Times. Apr. 12, 2019.

Topic: Passivhaus

Passivhaus: The Greenest Building Standard? Mike Chino. Inhabitat.

Passivhaus: What is it? Homebuilding and Renovating UK. Feb. 20, 2018.

The History of Passive House: A Global Movement with North American Roots. Sara Tanigawa, Environmental And Energy Study Institute. June 23, 2017

Sonnen Brings Homebuilder Strategy to Illinois With Passive Home Project. Julian Spector, Green Tech Media. May 24, 2019.

The battery company expanded its effort to put high-end batteries into new-build, eco-friendly homes.

Institutes:

Canadian Passive House Institute.

Passive House Canada.

Passive House Institute.

Passive Home Institute US.


Vendors/Businesses:

Passive Design Solutions.

Local Impact Design.

Evolve Builders.

Irrationality and Survival

Zero Sum Survival. Part III. Survival Acres. Apr. 6, 2019.

In Part I, bullets over beans, and Part II, sudden collapse were revealed to be false memes, and yet still widely embraced.

This post is Part III, and deals with religious ideology and survival strategies.

Readers will already know that I spent years of my early life in the ministry, following and practicing what I believed to be factual and true. Just like any new zealot, I fervently embraced my new found ‘salvation’ with ardor and zest. As part of the religious teaching and indoctrination that I had once accepted as “biblically true” are the following statements – still being taught to millions today:

• Human are not responsible for the condition of the Earth;
• Humans do not have control over outcomes, including any and all human events that occur on the Earth;
• God governs all things, both the good and the bad and everything that happens is in accordance to his will and desires;
• God will “Rapture” the faithful from the coming wrath and judgement on the Earth;
• End Time events were happening then and now;
• God’s Word is found in the Bible and must be rigorously enforced and adhered to;
• The future of the Earth is not man’s concern or responsibility;
• All of the wicked and sinful will be judged;
• All the righteous will be rewarded;
• Prophecy was and has been fulfilled;
• Christianity was the true religion among all other religions;
• The Bible accurately portrays historical events, facts, people and places and is considered the final authority on all matters.

Later, I came to deconstruct each of these beliefs and their foundations by extensively examining the source of all Christian belief, the Bible. The reason for this “search for truth” became painfully obvious as I witnessed intense conflict with the church, the ministry, the membership and the world itself. Something seemed deeply amiss, including errors and contradictions that were in conflict with other parts and passages of the Bible. Explanations and attempts at clarification did not resolve these conflicts – they only worsened them.

Thus begin decades of independent study and reading by turning to historical experts, archeologists, researchers and theologians that provided evidenced based explanations to the deepest questions, on belief, on faith, on historical accuracy, on biblical characters and events, on epistemology.

I’m not going to attempt (again) to repeat here what has already been published, but if you are even slightly interested, you can read the following:

• Religion and Human Responsibility
• Breaking the Dominant Paradigm In The Survivalist Movement
• End Time Fantasies
• Morons Unite!!!

I realize it is very unlikely all of these previous posts will actually be read by those that reject anything that violates their own bias, but that’s on you if you don’t. They each convey in different ways, what I eventually found to be factual and true:

• The Bible is not God’s Word and never has been;
• The Bible is a fictional book for the most part, portraying events and characters which have never been verified or known to exist despite extensive research now spanning thousands of years;
• Entire “books”, chapters, passages and words were removed, added, modified and redacted to suit the era;
• The Bible still contains thousands of errors, contradictions, omissions, and interpolations despite this centuries of editing;
• There is no such thing as non-human responsibility for human events on Earth, humans alone are entirely and solely responsible;
• God is not real and never has been;
• Christ is not real and never has been;
• There is no such thing as the End Times;
• The Rapture is imagined fantasy;
• The early church “fathers” were quite willing to fabricate, lie and invent whatever was deemed necessary to preserve power and influence;
• Christianity was and still is a cult of significant influence on human behavior, thought and action;
• A “bible based” life of belief, faith, thought, and action is based on mostly fiction, imagination and falsified words;
• The rejection of reality by religion (all religions) has had enormous, harmful and lasting consequences upon humankind;
• Christianity has held back civilization and human development for at least one thousand years (and still counting);
• Religion and religious belief has deeply and negatively influenced politics, commerce, trade, finance and spawned numerous brutal wars and genocide (including the recent Iraq War);
• Any country that permits religion anywhere near a place of leadership is risking a return to the Dark Ages of suffering and intolerance;
• Religion operates on the principle of layered lies, sins of omission, distorted reality and mind control;
• Religion was fabricated whole cloth to attempt to explain the unknown world, and then later, to control it;
• Anyone and everyone who attempts to convert, preach, teach, testify or indoctrinate anyone else with religion is selling snake oil.

It is irrelevant to me if anyone accepts or rejects any of this. I have come to know that all of the above statements are true, factually correct and historically accurate.

There is a direct relationship with the religious beliefs and zero sum survival planning.

There will be no “intervention” by God, Christ or space aliens to “save” anyone or anything on Earth from the destructive power now being unleashed, which I will call climate change, collapsing Earth systems, natural disasters or any other events. If you are expecting this type of salvation at any level, then your survival plan is deeply and tragically flawed. In effect, it is no plan at all, and thus, zero sum survival.

There will be no Rapture, no End Times, no Tribulation, and no prophecy fulfillment. What has been, and still is, being passed off as “prophecy fulfilled” simply isn’t – it’s a highly contorted, deliberately twisted and force fit attempt of actual events (like the election of Donald Trump) to “fit” either contemporary or historical “prophecy”. NONE are accurate. None have any “meaning” whatsoever. You have to suspend all the demands for evidence, proof, verification and truth to be convinced otherwise.

ALL of the “faithful believers in Christ” (and every other religion in the world today) will endure, suffer, and die right alongside everyone else as climate change erases human habitability on planet Earth. Nobody will be raptured, nobody will be saved, nobody will escape the effects of climate change and all that it means. There are no “chosen people” or “preferred nations” either.

The longer religious cultists of the world today embrace a imaginary world-view of how life actually works on Earth, the worse things will become for everyone. The non-reality based worldview that religion teaches will continue to have a devastating impact on Earth systems, civilization and societal interactions world-wide and will, in all likelihood, lead to massive civil conflict and death (like it always has).

The rejection of science, facts, evidence, reason and even common sense by the “faithful” to imaginary deities, angels, demons, and flights of fancy are among the primary reasons the world systems are what they are today – corrupt, abusive, destructive, intolerant, unjust and greedy. Religion is not the only cause of these human ills, but it remains the largest contributor for repressing human development, reason and intelligence through fact-based education, science and literature.

This post will be painful for some and of course, rejected by others, but it is still necessary as the world and individuals “decide” how they will attempt to grapple with the existential threat that climate change has now become. Will we devolve into useless prayers and imagined fantasies of a magical but unfulfilled rescue? Or will we finally reject superstition and powerless pretending at “divine will” and accept the factual human responsibility that we did this to ourselves, and that it is solely OUR responsibility to finally act?

If there is to be a solution, or even any kind of a survival strategy – or even if there can only be an individual response to any of this, it will need to be based upon reality. Anything else is a zero sum survival strategy.

Religion must be understood to be nothing more than human constructs in the mind. That is what makes it so powerful – and so attractive. Nothing is actually required of you – just “belief”. From there, it’s supposed to be smooth sailing into eternity. Except that none of this is factually true. Humans bear the responsibility for everything that has happened on Earth (minus events of nature). Either we finally, collectively accept that responsibility – or we go on pretending otherwise.

In effect, a significant portion of the human world is having to be dragged along by every one else that has a fact-based, reality world view. It’s exhausting, and it isn’t working. It’s never worked. But it is a primary source of the problems we have with human development and human conflict. This needs to change, desperately and immediately.

some recent CJ

People Will Never, Ever Rebel As Long As They’re Successfully Propagandized. Caitlin Johnstone. March 31, 2019.

Our predicament is simple to describe. 

Since the dawn of civilization, powerful individuals have controlled the stories people tell themselves about who they are, who’s in charge, how a good citizen behaves, what groups should be loved, what groups should be hated, and what’s really going on in the world. When you study what we call history, you’re mostly just reading the ancient proto-propaganda of whatever kingdom happened to win the last war during that period of time. When you study what we call religion, you’re mostly reading stories that were advanced by ancient governments explaining why the people should be meek, forgiving taxpayers instead of rising up and killing their wealthy exploiters. 

This continues to this day. We fill our children’s heads with lies about how the world works, how the government works, how the media works, and, on a deeper level, how their own consciousness works, and the entire process is shaped to funnel power toward the people who control our stories. The modern schooling system was largely formed by John D Rockefeller, widely considered the wealthiest person in modern history, in order to create generations of docile gear-turners for the industrial plutocratic machine. Modern schooling is essentially mainstream media in a building; it promotes authorized narratives day in and day out to ensure that children will have a reaction of cognitive dissonance and rejection when confronted with information which contradicts those narratives. 

This funnels the populace seamlessly into the narrative control matrix of adulthood, where childhood indoctrination into mainstream narratives lubricates the way for continual programming of credulous minds with mass media propaganda. All the print, TV and online media they are presented with supports the status quo-supporting agendas of the same plutocratic class that John D Rockefeller dominated all those years ago. This ensures that no matter how bad things get, no matter how severely our spirits are crushed by end-stage metastatic neoliberalism, no matter how many stupid, pointless wars we’re duped into, no matter how much further we are drawn along the path toward extinction via climate chaos or nuclear war, we will never revolt to overthrow our rulers. 

That’s three paragraphs. Our predicament is simple to describe and easy to understand. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to solve. 

... 

The fact of the matter is that a populace will never rise up against its oppressors as long as it is being successfully propagandized not to. It will never, ever happen. The majority will choose the prison cell every time. 

... 

Nothing will ever be done about our predicament as long as powerful people are controlling the stories that the majority of the public believe. This is as true today as it was in John D Rockefeller’s time, which was as true as when Rome chose to spread the “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” submissiveness of Christianity throughout the Empire. The only difference is that now the powerful have a century of post-Bernays propaganda science under their belt, and a whole lot of research and development can happen in a hundred years. ...

and, for an excellent example of the power of propaganda:

The Illusory Truth Effect: How Millions Were Duped By Russiagate. Johnstone. March 26, 2019.

“Mueller Finds No Trump-Russia Conspiracy”, read the front page headline of Sunday’s New York Times. Bit by bit, mainstream American consciousness is slowly coming to terms with the death of the thrilling conspiracy theory that the highest levels of the US government had been infiltrated by the Kremlin, and with the stark reality that the mass media and the Democratic Party spent the last two and-a-half years monopolizing public attention with a narrative which never had any underlying truth to it. 

There are still holdouts, of course. Many people invested a tremendous amount of hope, credibility, and egoic currency in the belief that Robert Mueller was going to arrest high-ranking Trump administration officials and members of Trump’s own family, leading seedy characters to “flip” on the president in their own self-interest and thereby providing evidence that will lead to impeachment. Some insist that Attorney General William Barr is holding back key elements of the Mueller report, a claim which is premised on the absurd belief that Mueller would allow Barr to lie about the results of the investigation without speaking up publicly. Others are still holding out hope that other investigations by other legal authorities will turn up some Russian shenanigans that Mueller could not, ignoring Mueller’s sweeping subpoena powers and unrivaled investigative authority. But they’re coming around. 

The question still remains, though: what the hell happened? How did a fact-free conspiracy theory come to gain so much traction among mainstream Americans? How were millions of people persuaded to invest hope in a narrative that anyone objectively analyzing the facts knew to be completely false? 

The answer is that they were told that the Russiagate narrative was legitimate over and over again by politicians and mass media pundits, and, because of a peculiar phenomenon in the nature of human cognition, this repetition made it seem true. 

The rather uncreatively-named illusory truth effect describes the way people are more likely to believe something is true after hearing it said many times. This is due to the fact that the familiar feeling we experience when hearing something we’ve heard before feels very similar to our experience of knowing that something is true. When we hear a familiar idea, its familiarity provides us with something called cognitive ease, which is the relaxed, unlabored state we experience when our minds aren’t working hard at something. We also experience cognitive ease when we are presented with a statement that we know to be true. 

We have a tendency to select for cognitive ease, which is why confirmation bias is a thing; believing ideas which don’t cause cognitive strain or dissonance gives us more cognitive ease than doing otherwise. Our evolutionary ancestors adapted to seek out cognitive ease so that they could put their attention into making quick decisions essential for survival, rather than painstakingly mulling over whether everything we believe is as true as we think it is. This was great for not getting eaten by saber-toothed tigers in prehistoric times, but it’s not very helpful when navigating the twists and turns of a cognitively complex modern world. It’s also not helpful when you’re trying to cultivate truthful beliefs while surrounded by screens that are repeating the same bogus talking points over and over again. 

... 

The manipulators understand our psyches better than we understand them ourselves, and they’re getting more clever, not less. The only thing we can do to keep our heads while immersed in a society that is saturated with propaganda is be as relentlessly honest as possible, with ourselves and with the world.

Your Plans For Revolution Don’t Work. Nothing We’ve Tried Works. Johnstone. March 28, 2019.

All the old ideas for uprooting the status quo have failed. I point this out not to depress people, but to persuade them to stop twisting on locked doorknobs. The old ideas don’t work, so we need new ones. 

The political process has failed. Capitalism has failed. Socialism has failed. 

Libertarianism has failed. Marx has failed. Populism has failed. Anarchism has failed. I say this not because of any glaring flaws in any of those ideas (in theory any of them could potentially work in an alternate universe), but because we are hurtling towards extinction in the fairly near future, and none of them have saved us. 

“But Caitlin!” you may object. “My particular favorite ideology would have saved us long ago if only everyone had gotten on board with it!” 

Okay. But they didn’t. And now we’re on the brink of armageddon. That means it has failed. It doesn’t work. 

We are well on our way to extinction via climate collapse or nuclear holocaust, and even if we miss those by some miracle we are headed toward an artificial intelligence-led tech dystopia in which our consciousness is permanently enslaved by a propaganda network that is far too advanced for there to be any hope of escaping into truth. 

We are witnessing a mass extinction the likes of which we haven’t seen since the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, with some 200 species going extinct forever every single day. The very ecosystemic context in which we evolved is vanishing underneath us. More than half the world’s wildlife has vanished in forty years, and the worldwide insect population has plummeted by as much as 90 percent. Fertile soil is vanishing, and so are forests. The oceans are choking to death, 90 percent of global fish stocks are either fully fished or overfished, the seas are full of microplastics, and phytoplankton, an indispensable foundation of earth’s food chain, have been killed off by 40 percent since 1950. Science keeps pouring in showing that global warming is occurring faster than previously predicted, and there are self-reinforcing warming effects called “feedback loops” which, once set off, can continue warming the atmosphere further and further regardless of human behavior, causing more feedback loops. 

Our ecosystem is very fragile and rapidly fading, and the difference between the ability to survive without it and our current scientific capability is the difference between flying and jumping. Which won’t matter if one of the many small, unpredictable moving parts in the steadily escalating new cold war with Russia results in a nuclear weapon being deployed as a result of misunderstanding or miscommunication and sparking off the annihilation of every organism on earth, as nearly happened during the last cold war on more than one occasion. 

This is where the status quo has gotten us. All attempts to overthrow it have failed. The time is up, and the results are in. 

The political process doesn’t work. 

I say this not because the political process can’t work, due to some technical failure in the way it has been applied. I say this because it doesn’t work, as evidenced by the fact that we’re on the cusp of the apocalypse with no signs of steering clear of it. Attempts to uproot the status quo via political engagement and voting does not work. 

“But Caitlin!” you may object. “The only reason the political process doesn’t work is because it has been hijacked by corrupt powers with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo! If we can extract those corrupt powers, we can make the political process work!” 

Okay. But you didn’t. You were unable to extract the corrupt powers, and now we’re on the brink of extinction. Your strategy has failed. 

Capitalism doesn’t work.

... 

Socialism doesn't work. 

... 

Libertarianism doesn't work. 

... 

The reality is that as long as powerful people control the dominant public narratives, no ground will be gained in steering our species away from the status quo trajectory that’s killing us, because you won’t be able to awaken mainstream consciousness to what’s going on. The only thing that has any hope of prying the oligarchic hands off the steering wheel is the mainstream public seeing what they’re doing and using the power of their numbers to force drastic change in a wildly different direction. If we can’t make that happen, we’re all just banging on locked doors while the curtain closes on humanity.

Sin is a made-up religious marketing scheme. Johnstone. April 3, 2019.

... 

The popular acceptance of the concept of sin is a consequence of the way we are psychologically hardwired and the way that that wiring has been manipulated, and you see that same wiring fiddled with in similar ways in many other areas. The way centrists browbeat leftists for not falling in line with Hillary Clinton in the lead-up to the 2016 US elections, for example, often looked barely distinguishable from a gaggle of church ladies abusing one of their sisters for wanting to leave the church or get a divorce. Instead of the promise of hell it was the promise of Donald Trump ending the world, and instead of sin being disobedience to God it was disobedience to the mainstream liberal orthodoxy. But the same kind of shaming, manipulation and groupthink herd bullying was present in both cases. The notion of personal sovereign responsibility was violently rejected as anathema by the Church of the Blue Donkey. 

Sin is a tool of social manipulation just like advertising, and just like propaganda. Religion, advertising and propaganda all pull the same psychological strings. Since as far back as recorded history stretches, those with wealth and power have been using whatever tools they have at their disposal to control the ways people think and behave. When religion held more psychological weight, they used that to justify book burnings, heretic burnings, and the destruction of anything that challenged the ruling order. Now that humanity is vomiting up the plague of religion from its DNA, propaganda and advertising are taking its place.

The Revolution Has No Hollywood Ending. Johnstone. March 11, 2019.

After struggling against our own self-destructive tendencies throughout the entirety of recorded history, humanity is now at a point where that struggle is probably going to be resolved, one way or another, within the lifetime of most people reading this.
The movie about this struggle has been written with one of two possible endings. In the first, we are unable to overcome our self-destructive tendencies, and the last of our species dies by radiation poisoning or choking on the dust of an uninhabitable planet. In the second, we evolve beyond our self-destructive tendencies and move into a healthy relationship with our minds, our ecosystem, and each other. 

Neither of these two endings would work in a Hollywood blockbuster. In the first, humanity dies off not with a bang but with a whimper as a result of nuclear fallout or climate collapse. In the second, conflict and drama as we know it will cease to exist as we pull up and away from the self-destructive patterns which brought us to this point. We’ll either keep along this same destructive trajectory and meet its inevitable end very soon, or we’ll deviate from that trajectory into something wildly different. In either case, there is no kissing the girl while the credits roll, no coolly striding away from the explosion, and no spin-kicking the bad guy off a cliff into lava after uttering a short, memorable line. 

I say this because it seems like a lot of people are kind of hoping for a Hollywood ending in some way. People are hoping that Donald Trump gets arrested for conspiring with Russia and dragged off in chains and everything goes back to normal. People are hoping that President Trump drains the swamp, locks up Hillary Clinton, arrests most of Capitol Hill for child molestation, and destroys the Deep State. People are hoping there’s a violent revolution which restores individual sovereignty to the citizenry. People are hoping there’s a peaceful people’s revolution which ousts the ruling class and replaces the status quo with whatever their personal favored strain of leftism is. Everyone’s subconsciously looking for some big, momentous climax where the Good Guys are vindicated and the Bad Guys are brought to justice. 

And it just isn’t going to go down like that.

....

Don't be a fool

Asteroid to hit Earth in August 2046 - Emergency IPCC UN panel formed. Skeptical Science. April 1, 2019.

Scientists have today revealed that thanks to new radar imaging system, a 20 km-wide asteroid is on a probable collision course with earth and they calculate it has an 85% probability of striking the planet between 23-25 August, 2046. Observers from centers in Chile to Finland have confirmed the observations and are urging governments worldwide to begin efforts to avoid a global catastrophe. The plan is to mobilize industry and research together into an effort to deflect the asteroid before a collision. Briefed earlier in special meetings, the UN has formed an Intergovernmental Panel on Cosmic Catastrophe (IPCC), to consider options and advise governments. The asteroid is of a similar size to that associated with the dinosaur extinction.


Cartoon by John Cook, https://crankyuncles.com/

The plan however has immediately run into opposition from dozens of retired scientists and bloggers.

“This is just alarmist talk based in computer models. So far there is no solution to the 3-body problem in gravity and this is clearly a much more complicated N-body problem. The system is chaotic and tiny errors in measurement will blow the computer models away” said Prof Al Kaos. He dismissed the accuracy with which solar orbits are determined and navigation of planetary rockets. “The dirty secret is that they are making course corrections all the time. Tell me how Hyperion will look next year before telling me where an asteroid will be in 2046”. Scientists acknowledged some uncertainty but have stuck to their probability estimate.

Uncertainty is always our friend

“There is just so much uncertainty” said Emeritus Prof J Spicey. “Orbital measurements are complex. Telescopes need constant correction and disputes about celestial codes are famous. The critical inclination problem is still not solved and if the public were aware of the controversies concerning analytical and numerical approaches they would be far less likely to spend money on these alarmist proposals.” Blogger, A Wotts, cried FRAUD! "The scientists would make you believe that they have directly observed the asteroid and have simply applied newtonian physics. In fact, the observations have been ‘corrected’ for atmospheric refraction, telescope optics and more recently the expected track was "adjusted" for the influence of Jupiter and Saturn. Just look at the raw data - the asteroid misses by thousands of miles! They are just fiddling the data to push a global liberal agenda."

“All this alarmism depends on gravity” said Dr Richer Limpian “Fundamental to this, is the value of the gravitational constant and there is no resolution to determining its value yet” he said citing https://physicsworld.com/a/gravitational-constant-mystery-deepens-with-new-precision-measurements/ “I don’t think we should be wasting money on these hair-brained schemes until at least this has been sorted out.

Meanwhile the Flat earth society has vigorously campaigned for the disbandment of the IPCC. “All this poppy-cock is based on a fundamentally flawed cosmic model. Once you realize that all those telescopes are mounted on a flat earth, their calculated impact disappears” claimed their spokeswoman. She also expressed her frustration at getting Flat Earth papers published in regular journals. “It’s pal-review and they just throw out anything that would interrupt their nice gravy train”.
It's not bad

Other interests have claimed that a 20 km asteroid wasn’t that bad. “Sure it would be tough on those where it landed, but you know, the earth is mostly ocean and so it will likely just cause a big splash somewhere. Only 0.00001% of earth's area will be directly hit. The suggested IPCC approach and its expense is out of all proportion to the danger. Asteroid impacts are a natural process. Without them we would still be fighting for space with dinosaurs.” Similar sentiments were echoed by Emeritus Prof Hopper who expressed dismay at what he terms "a smear on innocuous orbital bodies akin to attacks on the poor Jews by Hitler." Elaborating, Hopper asserted that "Earth is made of the same materials and without these we could not survive. This asteroid will only add a tiny fraction of additional life-sustaining mass to our home planet and should be welcomed, not feared."

It's too hard

The projected cost of solutions has sparked outrage among some business leaders. “Who is going to pay for all this? Taxpayers that’s who, and businesses who have enough problems without worrying about events in 2046. When we have a strong economy again, then we would support some extra money going into trying to refine the probability of impact but now isn’t the time”. When it was pointed out that time was short, the spokesperson angrily decried the proposals saying it was just government support for select industry sectors like rocketry at the expense of traditional industry. “Besides, there is no real consensus. In an open democracy, more weight should be given to contrarian views like the flat earth people. While I have always thought the earth was round, they do have some good points to make”.

Meanwhile, several prominent scientists including a nobel laureate biologist have noted that no technology was yet available to deflect the asteroid and “since when has spending time and money trying to solve problems ever achieved anything. We would be better off digging some deep caves”.

The usual suspects

President Trump tweeted that the "idea" of an asteroid "was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." Speaking to reporters from a putting green at Mar-a-Lago, he said “I think we can be pretty sure it won't hit America, you know, it'll probably be someplace we're better off without—the moon? Kenya? I don't know, I'm not a scientist, but if I were, I wouldn't be saying these crazy things.” Meanwhile, a GOP spokeperson questioned whether it was appropriate for the U.S. government to contribute heavily to a rocket programme when scientists still couldn’t say whether the asteroid would hit the United States. "They can't even be sure it will hit Earth at all."

Dr. Sherfire Idiom, retired, pointed to a new scientific paper suggesting that a large asteroid by itself may have been insufficient to kill the dinosaurs. "Life is resilient, it finds a way. The evidence now shows that a giant asteroid is not an extinction-level event unless there's a combination of factors, such as major climate change, happening at the same time." There was no cause for alarm, he added, "because climate change is a hoax too."

School children went on strike today in support of the IPCC noting that their generation would be the ones dealing with a strike larger than one that possibly ended the dinosaurs.

Concerning Humanity's Future

Concerning Humanity’s Future: Interview with Nick Humphrey, Climatologist and Geoscientist.
Collapse of Industrial Civilization.
March 30, 2019.


NOAA image of the “bomb cyclone” that struck the Midwest earlier this month, triggering flooding in three states and taking the lives of humans and livestock. The National Weather Service described it as “incredible” and a “Great Plains cyclone of historic proportions.”

I first discovered the writings of Meteorologist/geoscientist Nick Humphrey with his brutally honest essay The Conversation No One Knows How To Have and since then have followed his posts and comments. He has been featured or quoted in a number of publications such as Mother Jones, New York Times, Washington Post, and Science Alert. Few scientists will publicly tell you how dire things are, but Nick Humphrey is not one to shy away from the truth. What follows is a Q&A interview I held with him on a variety of questions concerning humanity’s future.

ML: Can you give us a brief summary of your background and why you became interested in studying the detrimental effects of climate change?

NH: My background is in meteorology, geosciences and interdisciplinary studies. I have a Bachelor of Science in Interdisciplinary Studies from South Dakota State University. I completed a Master of Science in Geosciences with a concentration in Applied Meteorology from Mississippi State University in 2016. My education and research studies have been in the societal impacts of weather/climate, natural hazards, and advanced forecasting techniques. I also have a background in global climatology. I did undergraduate research into human decision-making in response to tornado warnings and graduate research in tropical cyclone impacts.

I have been following news and research into climate change for about the past decade. However, I became more intensive in my personal research as a result of an apparent acceleration in climate impacts in the past 4-5 yrs. My study took me to look into the research of scientists such as Dr. Natalia Shakhova, Dr. James White, Dr. Peter Wadhams, Dr. James Lovelock, and Paul Beckwith. I also looked into the interdisciplinary connections between ecological and environmental variables by Dr. Guy McPherson.

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ML: What is the most disturbing aspect of anthropogenic global warming that you are seeing today and what are its implications for the future?

NH: To me, the most disturbing aspect is the destruction of ice on the planet. It is commonly discussed among climate scientists that the planet has a high “inertia”. This means in natural climate change, there is typically a significant lag between what is happening in the atmosphere (rise in greenhouse emissions) and climate response (warming of the planet), forcing a more gradual temperature rise.

There are two very important components of Earth’s inertia.
1) Water (which can gain/lose a huge amount of heat with a gradual temperature change) and 2) Ice.
Ice, in my view, is the biggest climate regulator because it can do two things:
1) In the process of melting and freezing, heat is latent or “hidden”. Meaning it does not contribute to temperature, but to melting (heat gain) or freezing (heat loss) of ice.
2) Ice is white, so as a result, it is a high reflector of visible light, preventing absorption of heat at the surface. So it has a double impact. As the planet loses ice because of warming temperatures, there is less total ice to melt and more heat goes into warming the oceans, land and atmosphere. It takes nearly 80 times more heat to melt ice than to warm the same amount of liquid water by 1 degree C/1.8 degrees F. The less ice there is, the lower the planetary albedo, resulting in more heat entering the climate system, creating a feedback loop to destroy ice faster and accelerating planetary heating. The loss of sea ice in the Arctic is a planetary catastrophe.


Trends in sea ice thickness are another important indicator of Arctic climate change. While sea ice thickness observations are sparse, here we utilize the ocean and sea ice model, PIOMAS (Zhang and Rothrock, 2003), to visualize mean sea ice thickness from 1979 to 2019. Updated through February 2019. https://sites.uci.edu/zlabe/arctic-sea-ice-volumethickness/

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ML: With the environmental damage that has already been put into the pipeline, modern organized human society may not survive this century and we are already seeing signs of this with the destruction caused by recent extreme weather events. The city of Beira in Mozambique, recently hit by Cyclone Idai, is said to be “the first city to be completely devastated by climate change.” Do you think it’s possible to transition to a net-zero carbon emission civilization within a brief period? Would this not require a radical reconfiguration of every sector of our economy and the way in which we treat each other and the environment?

NH: In short, no, I do not think it is possible to transition to a net-zero carbon emission civilization within a decade. The idea itself is simply absurd because it would require basically returning to a pre-industrial society with none of the benefits which came from building the society provided by fossil fuels. There are some economists and environmentalists who believe you can have “green growth” but such growth leads to further environmental destruction as population and energy demands continue to grow exponentially. In order to go to a net-zero carbon civilization, you must first, ironically, increase carbon usage. More building of solar panels around the world, more building of wind farms, more building of electric cars, more concrete, more metal manufacturing, more highly polluting mining, not only of the land, but more rare Earth metals will be needed from the seas, harming ecosystems and polluting the oceans. Meanwhile, none of this stops climate change because, as you mention, there is already much damage in the pipeline.

At 500 parts per million of equivalent carbon dioxide concentration, enough greenhouse gases are currently in the atmosphere to ultimately warm the planet 4-5 degrees C/7-9 F above 1700s temperatures, raise the sea level by 220 feet/67 meters (assuming 1 ppm CO2 equivalent = 1 ft sea level rise, based on past longer-term paleoclimate change response), remove significant amounts of soil moisture, leading to the destruction of agriculture. And this is without any other carbon releases or feedbacks. Building more in an attempt to maintain civilized society with high energy consumption makes this all worse.

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ML: There are around 454 nuclear reactors around the world with several dozen more currently under construction. At least 100 U.S., European and Asian nuclear power stations are built just a few meters above sea level. With accelerated sea level rise and stronger storms on the horizon, we should be planning right now to decommission and close down these future nuclear disasters. What is your stance on nuclear energy?

NH: Nuclear reactions themselves are an effective way to produce energy. The problem is that, like any form of energy, it requires energy to produce it and leaves waste products. Fossil fuels are needed to build the nuclear reactors (especially all the concrete), water is needed to keep the reactors fuel rods cool, and nuclear waste results from the use of the reactors which must be stored safely for thousands of years. It requires civilization to function for thousands of more years to keep it functional and safe or alternatively decades to properly decommission them. Given sea level rise is accelerating with a doubling of approximately 7-10 years (possibly causing a meter of sea level rise as early as the 2040s-2050s, faster in some regions like the US East Coast), I do not believe we should building more nuclear reactors and should decommission all others as quickly as possible to save what remains of the natural world from devastating impacts of nuclear failures if civilization collapses and humans are unable to care for those sites.

I make note, it is not only nuclear power stations on coastal areas which are of concern. Stations located along rivers are at risk as well…from increasingly larger floods, drying rivers which are used for cooling, and warming rivers which do not bring in cool enough water to keep the reactors cool. These events are already happening.

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ML: What do you think about geoengineering schemes by scientists to dim the sun in order to reduce global warming and buy humanity more time to “fix” the problem? Proposed technology that could pull CO2 out of the atmosphere at the scale required is generally considered a pipe dream. At what point do you think our civilization will lose faith in technology to solve all our problems?

NH: Geoengineering schemes, to me, are equivalent to using a small band-aid for a large stab wound. It is and will be completely overwhelmed by what is happening. Spraying aerosols over the Arctic to try to cool the Arctic with increased summer cloud formation doesn’t solve the fact that there is 500 ppm of equivalent carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere which cannot be removed with the speed and scale required. You are not dealing with regions where the geoengineering is being done in closed systems. You cool one area, other areas will respond by warming further. You cool one region, atmospheric and ocean circulations will develop and intensify to transport heat to the cooling area to try to equalize the temperature imbalance. Direct ocean heating from below the ice will make it difficult to grow thick ice and not allow ice to reform in the polar night. These heat balances have always existed of course, but it was still cool enough to allow significant ice to exist in the Arctic. The atmosphere is now too altered to allow widespread sea ice to exist in the near future and geoengineering doesn’t prevent this or even delay it in a meaningful way.

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ML: In the recent extreme flooding in the U.S. Midwest, farmers suffered devastating losses with similar food shocks on the rise around the world. How do you see the world feeding itself in such an uncertain future, especially when industrial monoculture is actually increasing worldwide?

NH: In short, I do not see a way for humans to feed themselves in an organized manner. Using the worse-case estimate for warming since pre-industrial times, the planet’s land air and sea surface has averaged around +1.2 C relative to pre-industrial the past 5 years with a peak of +1.4 C in 2016. The Northern Hemisphere land masses (where most of the food on the planet is grown) are quickly approaching +2 C. And we are already seeing the impacts of both extreme heat and extreme precipitation events on crops which depend on stability at mild temperatures and an expected range of moisture. This will only worsen and in between +1.5-2 C, we will conservatively see a reduction of US crop yields by between 30-46% of recent levels. By +4 C, that falls to 63-82% as aridification —droughts which are never-ending— dominate the Great Plains/Midwest and California Central Valley with very extreme summer heat and occasional intense rainfall as well as destructive flood events, exacerbating soil erosion.

We are entering a range of weather conditions not supportive of agriculture. And not simply monoculture. All agriculture. Even other ways of doing Ag require stable weather conditions, seasonality, soils and ability to conduct economic activity between peoples. None of this will be possible in these conditions. And that assumes the ecosystems which support agriculture also remain stable and available and that is not likely given the ongoing global extinction of insects.


NASA Before/after imagery of flooding near Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska.
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ML: Many mainstream scientists feel that to “work within” the system, they have to use language that politicians and economists can understand in order to maintain credibility, i.e. the “value of ecosystem services”. Attempting to place a monetary value on every aspect of nature while externalizing the environmental cost of pollution is a major flaw of our economic system. Inaction by governments and corporations on climate change may have already condemned a large percentage of the global population to a premature death. Do you think ecocide should be an international crime?

NH: If ecocide were an international crime, we would all be guilty in some way. Obviously, I do not believe all humans are *equal* in terms of blame. A person living in the US is a far far larger consumer of energy with a bigger carbon footprint than a person in say, Kenya or Indonesia. And of course, the developing world receives cheap products (coal, plastics, etc) from the developed world. However, while greenhouse gas pollution is significant from countries such as the US and China, plastic pollution is significant *everywhere*. Mining pollution is significant everywhere. Deforestation either is or has been in the past significant from Canada to Europe, increasing in the Amazon, the continent of Africa, etc. Water is nearing depletion on the Great Plains, parts of Europe, Australia and falling quickly in the Amazon. We’ve required more energy on this planet for all the technologies which many would consider have enhanced human life and existence on this planet…improved infrastructure, medicines, monoculture farming which did allow for much higher and resilient production of crops, etc. But all of those “improvements” to the human condition come at a cost and that cost is the destruction of the natural world, and ultimately ourselves.

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ML: I understand wealthy countries have much larger carbon footprints per capita than the rest of the world due to our unsustainable consumption patterns, but the other much overlooked factor is overpopulation. We are adding roughly 90 million more people onto the planet per year, many of whom are striving to attain a similar western standard of living. Is there any ethical way to control population growth or will nature be the final arbiter? What do you think is the maximum carrying capacity for the Earth’s human population?

NH: Overpopulation is a major problem and factor in the mass extinction ongoing on the planet. However, given the scales required to fix the problem, I do not see a way to fix it which would fix the damage already done to the planet within the timeframes necessary. The only *ethical* means to control overpopulation is to educate a free population (in particular, women must have reproductive freedom) on the benefits to humans by improving the natural world. Laws will fail because it is ultimately an issue of personal physical sovereignty and humans will always fight for personal sovereignty over their bodies as it relates to sex and reproduction vs. govt interference. China’s one-child policy had a lot of unintended consequences. There are other ways to try to “control” but ultimately, what would really be needed is population decline. Given humans are a relatively large land mammal, in order for Earth to have kept ecosystem stability, the human population would have to have stayed in the millions, spread thinly across hospitable regions of the planet as hunter-gatherers. The population of hunter-gatherer/early agricultural humans in the Early Holocene (10-12,000 years ago) is estimated at 1-10 million.

Ultimately, nature appears to be “loading the gun” to make it difficult for the human population to grow much longer; and really, it will crash. The 6th mass extinction is underway and humans will be a part of this given we are at the top of the food web.

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ML: Who, living today, serves as a role model and inspiration for you and in what way? Do you follow any particular philosophy in your life?

NH: I’d say one role model of mine is my father. He died in January 2017 after a battle with cancer. He spurred my interest in science as a child and was one who always strongly emphasized the importance of finding the truth, no matter how difficult it was or the barriers that happened to be in the way. Another is Dr. Albert Einstein, who had many personal flaws, but wanted to use science to improve society and found its uses for killing and destruction of life abhorrent. He spoke the truth even when it marginalized him. Also Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who works hard to communicate complex topics in a way that can be understood and appreciated by the average person.

My only philosophy in life is to live my life to the fullest, given the incredible changes underway, and bring truthful information to people who can see what’s happening and want to know “why?”. I’m an interdisciplinarian and work to bring a more comprehensive understanding of the predicament we face to anyone willing to listen.

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ML: What do you think of the Dark Mountain Project whose members have “stopped believing in the stories our civilization tells itself”? What new stories should we be telling ourselves in this age of ecological catastrophe and extreme economic inequality?

NH: I’m not familiar with the Dark Mountain Project; however to answer the questions, I think we should stop telling stories about how grand our civilization is and celebrating its attempts to dominate nature and impose fake human superiority. Civilization, which served the purpose of insulating humans from the dangers Nature posed, has destroyed Nature at the expense of its own growth. This was true long before the development of the modern fossil-fueled world. In order to be sedentary and not be dependent upon the local forces of Nature, we needed to build towns and cities. This requires destroying forests, damming rivers, taking over land with agriculture we would control the growth and development of. This means other species, who could not stop us, lost territory. Each improvement in protecting ourselves from Nature meant more population growth, more resource needs, more energy, which in turn meant more destruction and more attempts at control. Humanity, as a hunter-gatherer species, meant our growth was dependent upon what we could find for food and water within the bounds of the climate. Our ability to enclose and mass manipulate our environment and resources meant we could grow beyond our resources and, in the process, mass pollute the world. Civilization has been an 8,000 year attempt to win a war against Nature. A war we are losing because Nature —following the laws which have governed the Universe for 14 billion years— always wins.

Nature is in control, not humans. Even our current catastrophes which were sparked by humanity’s activities were ultimately governed by the laws of Nature (physics, thermodynamics, chemistry, etc). We never were separate from it all, but a part of it. We should be telling ourselves to do what we feel is right to respect Nature and its unbreakable laws, accepting our place in the Universe as just one of many species which have a finite existence on this planet.

Nick Humphrey’s blog can be found here: https://www.patreon.com/MeteorologistNickHumphrey