kentpitman

kentpitman , 1 month ago

@salixsericea

I have trouble with this because the foundations of such arguments are based on trends that presume some kind of physics, when economies are structurally, if not also actually, more like whims. A panic over something can send prices spinning in one or another direction. There is no structural requirement that yesterday relates to tomorrow.

And by these things, I include even things like Steven Pinker going on about the world getting better by studying what amount to almanacs. Truly, the betterness he describes is built on surplus, and surplus is a product of structural integrity, which is not always a visible thing. Pinker has done interesting work in other areas, but his predictions and assurances on the goodness of the world rely on really no structure at all. They have zero predictive value in my book. The moment the world has no surplus (and that is what climate change is setting us up for), all "betterness" that Pinker speaks of will evaporate like so much cotton candy.

To turn the conversation back by way of climate metaphor, it can look like the ice in, say, Antarctica has not changed as seen from a satellite, only to find that it's been melting from below due to heating oceans or some sort of volcanic effect or other effects we just haven't discovered, and things can just fall in.

The economy is the same. For a hopefully-entertaining brief parable on the matter, see my 2009 essay "Hollow Support" (http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2009/03/hollow-support.html). In it, I offer a metaphor for thinking about the economy and its fragility, which I was pondering after what was then a recent crash.

A lot of what we are doing with the economy these days has been aptly, I think, described as a "sugar high". It locally seems good, but it's not improving structure, so doom must follow.

And so back to this actual piece: High rent is something hard to sustain in hard times, so becomes a weight that weighs one down. And while I'm a big advocate of things like community kitchens, they are rarely publicly funded, and the importance of that is critical to understand.

Public funding is eschewed by many as some kind of socialism, but another way to think of it is a public commitment to making sure a process is there no matter the economy. In tough times, donations to private matters dry up, and that cascades down to hard times for our most vulnerable. To make something like this, or social security, or medicare, be publicly funded to a proper degree is to say we have no higher priority in society than the survival of our citizens. We are either committed to them or we are not, but privatization basically says we are not, that they will somehow manage to survive tough times by means we aren't willing to think through.

So there is no real backstop there. There is just the illusion of continuity from good times. And it is terrible policy, public or private, to tell people to reason about the future based on the artifacts of the past. Those artifacts can inform intuitions, but what must really inform thought is an understanding of what is changing, including the hearts of the public.

Any suggestion I can offer is unsatisfying. Some would say this is why people should be preppers, but prepperism is really only useful for temporary problems. The climate problem is so structural that no basement full of food will get anyone through it. At best it will help people survive a brief glitch or give people a chance to endure climate pain for longer before it is too much to endure.

The solution is to care about climate, and also social justice, and make structural changes there. But there seems little public appetite for that, in part because the people likely to be most affected are mindlessly backing the people who would do the worst to them.

#climate #economy #preppers #FoodSecurity #ClimateCrisis #society #privatization #privatisation

kentpitman , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

@breadandcircuses

On the ex-Bird Site, Martin Tye, Director of the Australian Regional Communities Chapter of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (https://steadystate.org/) posted this crisp summary:

«We live in the dying gasps of economic growth,
... where it claws at the last of our resources, our ecosystems & our quality of life to feed it's terminal days.

The only question is-
will it die, before we do?»

#Climate #ClimateCollapse #Capitalism #LateStageCapitalism #collapse

kentpitman , 1 month ago

@breadandcircuses

I suggest the idea that climate scientists should prominently adopt a new theory of "possible". I'm going to sketch it here, and it needs wordsmithing, but basically the notion is that if we have not seen evidence that many/most countries are willing to do a thing, then we should consider that not a possible thing. That's a "conservative" reading of "possible".

For example, speaking in purely abstract terms, let's suppose that stopping climate change meant no more eating of bananas. Climate scientists might imagine that it's easily possible to stop eating bananas and so would feel uncomfortable with a claim that it's impossible to reach climate goals because in principle banana-eating should be possible to reduce. So they would feel like they had to say that targets were reachable that merely required the cutting of banana consumption.

But if, over time, we see that no country has in fact reduced its banana consumption materially, then we need to simply line out actions like that as "possible" in the sense that a thing may indeed be "physically possible" and yet "politically impossible", much as the wearing of masks during covid was possible in some countries and next to impossible in others (sadly, I'm looking at my own country).

This kind of pragmatic terminological notion is essential because the ordinary "stretch" of words is such that we allow ourselves to say "yes, it's possible to reach 1.5C" because we see physical possibility, and so some people feel they'd be lying to say we can't reach it. And yet now the very people who said these things feel, I'm guessing, almost like they've been duped into lying to the public about what's possible, maintaining a story that allowed people to not act because some politician could point to "it's still possible" as if that was meaningful.

Or maybe in order to get the terminology to be good for everyone, a modifier or other term needs to be used, literally never saying "possible" and always saying "practical" or "pragmatically possible" and then giving that some formality by simply keeping track of what each government is committing to and which commitments they are really keeping, so that over time as people fail in their promises, what is practical or pragmatically possible is seen to be less available than what was previously thought, and so the urgency goes up because many of the possible paths are simply not reachable politically even though they are reachable physically.

I guess we each see the problems of the world through the lens of our own experience. I do language design (computer language design, but the concepts aren't that different than human language in many ways). I see this as a problem of making the words say what we need them to say, and I feel people are getting tricked by the incredible breadth of what "possible" means. What's frustrating everyone is that we have to mean something much more precise than just "theoretically possible". We have to mean something that accommodates political friction, which is every bit as real a problem right now as physics, perhaps moreso, since the physics is clear and we're only just starting to profoundly see that the problem was never one of physics but that it simply does not suit The Plutocracy to even admit or focus on the problem, however physically clear. I fear that without factoring this in, physicists will never end up saying what they mean.

I'm being approximate here. I happily accept similar-but-hopefully-better proposals along these lines that in some way accommodate the political physics, so to speak.

Or maybe someone will tell me there's a better way to conceive the source of frustration, and I'm open to that. But language seems the enemy here, and it is too easily cooptable.

#climate #terminology #language #semantics #ClimateCrisis #politics

kentpitman , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

@breadandcircuses

We are not seeing, or being allowed to see, the system as a system.

It is offered as a series of unrelated events. That's how the media covers it.

Political power is a complicated beast but the most malleable element is speech. We aren't completely hampered in our ability to communicate, and we must learn to speak about this system as a connected thing.

It isn't sufficient to take action on climate if we also take inaction (non-action) or unaction (undoing action) on climate because we aren't helping anything by isolated ceremony, only by net change.

The notion of a carbon credit, for example, is a metaphor. The idea that it's OK to mess up the climate if you also do a dance elsewhere to unmess it. Then you've just done nothing. That might seem harmless to some, but we need to do more than nothing. We need to be applying the positive side of that WITHOUT the negative side because neutrality will not save us, only the aggregation of many positives will save us.

Every time someone does something they think cancels, they are saying they think it's possible to stand outside of the system, to have done their part and to be able to safely wait for others to do their part.

Like trying to save a burning building by saying it's OK to light a few matches if you also pour a few cans of water elsewhere in the building. Like you can pour water on the part of the fire that is your own apartment and then sit comfortably in your wet living room waiting for the people downstairs to put out their own apartments, as if somehow you on the twelfth floor need only to put out your own apartment and will be safe from the building falling.

We cover the news as if these actions occur in isolation, not as part of any coherent whole. We need to cover it like the war that it is, like the war that we are losing, so that we are not surprised when in fact we do lose, as if no one had told us.

#climate #media #journalism #ClimateCommunication #EarthDay

kentpitman , 3 months ago

@breadandcircuses

"The amount of energy required to warm our oceans like this is unfathomable."

Exactly. It's like a slingshot drawn back and waiting to fire.

It's also something we used to think of, by abuse of terminology, as "a source of cool", a natural refrigerator (a place into which heat can be siphoned off) No longer are rivers and oceans healthy habitats for fish or reliable partners in cooling nuclear reactors. The planetary fridge is overfull, and the only way to repair that would be to release that heat energy to elsewhere, but how and where? We certainly don't want it in the atmosphere.

The oceans were our collective margin for error, but capitalism has seen them instead as just one more externality to be plundered. It matters now to do everything right. There is no longer friendly help waiting to pick up the slack if we goof.

kentpitman , 3 months ago

@breadandcircuses

"There are physical limits to continuous economic expansion – a fact that most economists do not seem to understand."

One of those limits is time. Failing to respect this has allowed people to think that human ingenuity can eventually come up with solutions to almost anything. And probably it can. But we don't have "eventually" to work with. And it is just not equally true that human ingenuity can come up with solutions to almost anything within a year or two.

There really is not time to invent and deploy new tech. We need to act fast enough that we have what we have. And, given that, we need to scale back. We're just in collective denial.

Some say we can't change society fast enough. But we have counterexamples, the most recent of which was covid. Almost overnight, we changed how society's core functions and cash flow worked. We did it because we knew we had no choice.

The reason we aren't changing for Climate Change is not that we can't, it's that we think we have some other choice or we think we have more time. We don't. We're just in denial.

#Climate #ClimateCrisis #ClimateDenial #Degrowth

kentpitman , 3 months ago

@vni @breadandcircuses

Used to be I was open to nuclear as a green option, not because it was perfect but because it was available and deployable without research. As time passes, I think there are safer options.

But even ignoring that, AND ignoring that the timeline starting from today is too long, you have to BOTH deploy it AND convert existing fossil systems to electric in anticipation of using it, so the timeline of conversion is in parallel, not in series, with the timeline for building the reactors. Where is THAT happening? If it is happening, it has escaped my notice.

Among myriad problems is that we presently want to "incentivize" people to switch, which is code for not caring about the timeline, for treating it as an individual problem, for not requiring anything. Until we see upgrading/conversion not as personal benefit/luxury, but as a societal essential, something for society to REQUIRE and even probably PAY to do in each household, atomic power is not a solution. We'd have to make sure everyone has electric home heat, electric cars, etc. for the presence of a reactor to count as a solution and not just an unused or underused alternative option.

And there are those claiming it's not doable to upgrade so many to electric, either in terms of natural resources, available capacity for building that much infrastructure, expenditure of CO2 etc to build all that, etc. I've not thought that through, but they may be right. Certainly it's a concern that upgrades at scale for whole populations are logistically a lot different than isolated-but-showy updates by rich people doing climate-related virtue signaling.

Some will also say the economics alone can't work. In my view, economics per se is never the real obstacle because economics is mainly a matter of priority settiing. If making climate a priority doesn't work, the problem is not economics.

But convincing people the economics is not a problem is not itself an economic problem, it's a political problem. And political problems ARE real. Politics is, sadly, a rich source of deadly amounts of delay.

Still, the main thing is to press discussion forward. We need to discuss the magnitude and textured depth of the problem in order to make complex, disruptive solutions make sense to people who otherwise think such solutions are being proposed by crazy people for naive or crazy reasons. Big change is not an easy thing to ask, there is just no other choice.

kentpitman , 5 months ago

@ArrowbearMoore @504DR @RichardAshwell @breadandcircuses

To clarify my prior remark about appreciation a bit, it goes beyond appreciation of fireflies, blades of grass, apples, and newborn life:

We understand mathematics, one source of beauty, in a way that is probably distinct, though not beyond the reach of an entity with a large brain and a lot of time. An ability to file and record and share knowledge helps a lot, probably making us more unique. An ability to do complex, efficient and precise calculation also helps.

We understand physics in detail that is probably unusual. We understand a huge amount of the glue out of which the universe is built, from quarks to DNA to comets to supernovas to galaxies.

We understand a great deal about chemistry, but we are taught lessons all the time but nature. Most entities that do something in nature are not generalists, so each is a precious and hard fought win. To lose the ecosystem is to lose these things. But we are indexers of them. We are capable of using them, we just pay to little attention to need for wisdom.

Animals don't have these things. Even the smart animals like elephants, octopi, crows, etc. That's why I said it's our job.

Eventually our sun will burn out. If by then we don't exist or don't know enough more physics, we won't climb out. To where or what is uncertain, but for a while there will be things beyond our star's gravity well. But all that understanding by us and by nature will be lost if we don't grow better ourselves. It starts not with more space program. That's not our limiting factor right now. No tech is. It starts with sustainability, pacing. We're moving too fast in tech, too slow in wisdom. We need them in sync.

Ray Bradbury's The Flying Machine treats this in poignant form. Worth a read. A very short story. (There's a copy easily findable on the web. It doesn't look like an authorized copy so I won't link it here. Maybe a better one will appear.)

kentpitman , 5 months ago

@RichardAshwell @LordCaramac @breadandcircuses

Yes, getting the press and business analysts to admit and track that some part of pricing is not cyclic is key. Once people understand that a part of the market is permanently wrecked and that the wrecking ball will continue to swing, the conversation can change more easily.

This is true of insurance where pricing didn't just rise in some places but major companies have begun to completely flee some markets, declaring them uninsurable.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/insurance-policy-california-florida-uninsurable-climate-change-first-street/

A problem not described correctly is not ripe for correct/productive/relevant solutions.

Media across the political spectrum needs to be preparing the public for this in food because pretending it's partisan will not cause the public to reason well. It'll be like masks for covid, where the topic is just a tool to randomly outrage people with lies.

#economics #EconomicCycles #journalism #media #Climate #collapse #ClimateCollapse #Prices #Metrics #food #insurance

kentpitman , 5 months ago

@LordCaramac @MattMastodon @RichardAshwell @breadandcircuses

You are WAY too optimistic. I WISH we had such luxury of time. Even the rich will have no such luxury.

Maybe we are looking at different things. I'm not just talking primary effects of climate but cascaded domino effects of those primary effects.

Once crops start failing at scale, or food supply lines get broken, civilization will crumble. Heat levels are already at a point many crops cannot bear. Not 50 years out. Now.

You think getting people to mask up was hard, when in short order such a simple act could end the pandemic? Imagine getting them to fairly ration and accept a story that it will never again for centuries or millenia be otherwise.

And people will not be just passively dying en masse. They will be killing each other in fights for food or territory, if not also to eat each other.

kentpitman , 4 months ago

@RichardAshwell @LordCaramac @MattMastodon @breadandcircuses

I doubt there can be a "properly modeled" sense of human psychology in the face of mass famine in parts of the world unused to that.

I have to believe this will follow lines like climate science did where researchers/modelers are of the opinion that "conservative" means you don't model anything you just have a hunch about and you only include effects you can prove.

Consistently for climate scientists this kind of conservatism has favored preserving individual careers at the expense of saying just how badly these things can go, and I expect the same in these other fields.

So pardon me if I don't rely on proper modeling and rely instead on my own sense of how ugly things can quickly get with the wrong set of circumstances, as is happening with the fall of democracy. What we imagine to be stable systems have fewer safeguards than we imagine and perform very badly when ideal conditions are not met.

This is partly a direct consequence of the fact that capitalism cannot see beyond the end of its nose. I have many times observed in recent years that many celebrated gains use simplistic metrics to trade away safety, robustness, redundancy, environment/ecology, and social justice on a theory that price optimization is the only goal.

In effect, the system rewards fragility and cruelty and other ills if it yields short term gains because it assumes one can always cash out and move on to other things if that strategy fails, and there is no accountability for system-wide fragility such as we saw in covid, where masks, lysol, toilet paper, vaccines, etc. were in short supply when capitalism promises to do so much better than socialism by closing its eyes to obvious issues and assuming profit will win out.

Capitalism not only doesn't value safety and robustness, seeing any robustness against issues that haven't occurred recently as economic inefficiencies to remove, but it also does not value completeness. Profit is maximized by figuring out who it's economical to serve and knowing who is too expensive to serve.

I expect this will be a bad model for food shortage during famine. I see us shrugging off such issues from a government planning point if view, preferring to "leave it to markets". And I don't see how markets will do more than focus on price gouging, shich will lead to civil unrest if the missing item is an essential like food or water.

Once the public realizes that capitalism has no plan for regular people, a tipping point is reached where panic sets in and all processes start to be chaotic. Even small perturbations in normal will upset supply chains, which are ridiculously full of single point of failure and reliance on supplies from distant locations as if transport was free and nations don't ever shut borders out if either paranoia or spite or trade imbalance leverage or other factors.

When something like wheat fails, will meager yields be merrily shipped to foreign lands or held for domestic use? Will multinats be able to continue to assert dominance or remote ownership across national borders? Will militaries be invoked? By whom against whom? How does one "model" these questions?

I didn't read the reports you cite but unless you tell me what is modeled is a very stark and honest view of what capitalism, selfishness, and nationalism really does from a qualitative modeling standpoint, not from an extrapolation of past effects in questionably similar situations, I don't see how to trust it. I expect someone would lose their job or peer review respect if they modeled these things as likely or even possible. Better to rely on things for which there is data. But that will not model "black swan" events.

I've also not fully read all of Taleb's efforts in the antifragile space, but my impression is he says don't bother modeling rare events you don't know the probability of, and instead build structures robust against chaos. We've not done that.

We're entering a new space we have not experienced where externalities aren't being tracked but do finally matter in ways i personally doubt any formal modeling will get right. They'll expect "getting it right" to be a conversation that can gradually converge over time in academic timescales we no longer have.

It matters to see potential severity more than it matters to be right on detail, like you'd model a war. Capitalism hates such planning because they think it overspends and cuts into quarterly profit.

https://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2019/09/losing-ground-in-environment.html

#capitalism #climate #collapse #modeling #society #ShareholderCapitalism #ShareholderCapitalism