Decoding Decoupling: Why the planet depends on it.

March 28, 2012 by · 3 Comments
Filed under: Social Brain 

In response to my last blog on the understandable madness of economic growth I received the following comment, which I think gets to the heart of the sustainability challenge:

“The issue of a no-growth economy has been rolling around for a while with little progress for the reason that it can’t be achieved at least under present economic arrangements.  Capitalism is inherently about investment which requires a return and return comes from growth.  Until we invent a system based on an entirely different principle, I’m afraid we have to work towards the decoupling that Tim Jackson derides.  If that really is impossible then we have to live with runaway climate change.” – Adam Lent

In his defence, Tim Jackson doesn’t deride decoupling, which he sees as essential. He just doesn’t think it’s enough(although he is open to the possibility that if we made an absolutely unoprecedented and incomprehensibly MASSIVE systemic push, it might be.) and makes a strong case for why he believes that. And if Jackson is right it’s a radically different economy or  runaway climate change, a stark choice between the virtually impossible and the completely disastrous.

Before we acquiese to the latter or scramble to make sense of the former, let’s just be clear about decoupling, because Jackons’s point is quite subtle.

if Jackson is right it’s a radically different economy or  runaway climate change, a stark choice between the virtually impossible and the completely disastrous. 

Most people agree that we need to lower the ecological impact of economic output. Jackson’s point seems to be that it is a mistake to view this relationship as being independent of economic growth and population growth. When these factors are taken into account, most decoupling is merely relative decoupling- ie each unit of economic output is less harmful than previously, but as long as there is economic growth and population growth, those ecological gains are relative to previous impact per output, not absolute in terms of overall impact, and you are not solving the problem. As George Monbiot put it in his book HEAT: “The only cuts that count are absolute cuts.”

This point is crucial because so much of sustainability does not adequately recognise the distinction between absolute and relative decoupling. Companies say they want to grow and want to become more sustainable, but if you accept that we need absolute decoupling(as I think any sane person must), then your bar for sustainability has to be high enough that it can compete and win against the growth imperative.

If we don’t change the fundamental principle of growth on which modern capitalism depends, what is the alternative? Reducing carbon emissions at the necessary rate means massive technological advances, huge efficiency gains and a fundamental change in the nature of growth(e.g. investment in green technologies, service rather than goods based economies). If we achieve all of that, so the argument goes, it may be possible for capitalism to carry on functioning…for a while at least.

But what if that’s just not true? In other words, what if that kind of ‘sustainable growth’ doesn’t add up in the way it it has to, and we find we are fast running out of resources in a volatile climate with a rapidly rising population? There is a question about whether that is indeed the case, but I think we must face up to the brutality of the question, rather than assume that it has to be possible to carry on with Capitalism more or less as it is, as if that were the sine qua non of life as we know it.

Capitalism may be a political axiom of the modern world, but a livable climate is an existential axiom and surely has to take precedence. As I have mentioned before, climate change is a pre-competitive issue. No livable planet, no competition. Likewise with capitalism in general. As Adam suggested above, “until we invent a system based on an entirely different principle” we are stuck with attempts to decouple…Given that most decoupling is relative rather than absolute, this suggests, to me at least, that we need to invent and develop that entirely different system sooner rather than later.

I fear for myself in this regard because it sounds like an anti-capitalist argument, and I am not a rebel by nature. Moreover, I imagine most hard-headed people would say: “that fundamental change to the structure and function of the economy is just not going to happen, and certainly not in time to prevent a global temperature rise of well above 2 degrees.”

Such people might well be right, but given what is at stake, if there is any meaningful life that doesn’t involve trying to prove them wrong?

 

 

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The Third Industrial Revolution

January 3, 2012 by · 3 Comments
Filed under: Social Brain 

They say a rainy day is no match for a sunny disposition, but London’s wet, windy, monochrome sky is enough to make the cheeriest soul wish they were elsewhere.

While weather and climate are related, weather is immediate, salient, shared and self-evident, while climatology is statistical, abstract, systemic, chronological and inaccessible. Indeed it is far from clear what kind of mandate the link between weather and climate gives us, and whether it is perhaps safer not to rely on weather as a way of communicating the climate challenge.

For instance, George Monbiot writes today about how selective attention to weather patterns is used to reinforce the narratives of climate change doubt and denial, while many have criticised Al Gore for linking extreme weather events in China and Pakistan to the need to act with urgency.

The connection between weather and climate is a narrative challenge. We want to tell a story that links them, because it makes the issue vivid and real, but the links are tentative, non-linear and probabilistic i.e. they are not good ingredients for an inspiring narrative to galvanise action on a global scale.

And narrative matters. It has been argued, for instance, that despite major policy initiatives, Obama’s green jobs initiatives never really took off because he didn’t have a compelling vision for how the myriad of policies could be woven together to create a vision of the future that people could figuratively and literally buy into.

we urgently need a narrative that is complex enough to capture the dimensions of the problem, but simple enough to make intuitive sense to billions of people. If weather can’t do that, what can?

This is no minor point because we urgently need a narrative that is complex enough to capture the dimensions of the problem, but simple enough to make intuitive sense to billions of people. If weather can’t do that, what can?

(image from voiceseducation.org)

Of all the RSA talks I attended last year, Jeremy Rifkind’s Third Industrial Revolution made the deepest impression, because he addressed the challenge of finding the right narrative head on. He spoke eloquently, passionately and coherently without prompts for 45 minutes, and it was the first RSA talk where I had to hold myself back from starting a standing ovation in the great room. (The Twitter feed suggests I wasn’t the only one).

Before I continue to wax lyrical, I should express some intuitive doubts about the speaker that I can’t quite put my finger on. He came across as warm, wise and brilliant, but I am mindful of the saying that if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is, and there is something about Rifkind’s clarity and certainty that, while it inspires, it also makes me a little nervous. For instance he valorises Europe to an American audience in way that doesn’t ring true, and appears to name-drop to a suspicious extent. He also seems over-fond of highlighting just how influential he is. These reservations might be ill-founded, or perhaps just grit for the pearl in the oyster, but I have them for whatever they are worth.

And yet, Rifkind offers a vision of the future grounded in an economic, environmental, technological, political and psychological diagnosis of the present that sounds coherent and feels compelling. Who else does that?  I strongly encourage you to listen to the talk to hear the argument for yourself, jump to the wikpedia page, or buy the book where it is unpacked in detail.

Here is my quick summary.

  • All industrial revolutions are based on an interplay or energy and information (An ontological aside- is there ultimately anything else in the world?) The first Industrial Revolution brought together print and literacy with coal steam and rail, while the second combined the telegraph and telephone with the internal combustion engine and oil. The Third industrial revolution is about bringing together renewable energy with the internet.
  • We misunderstood the financial crisis. Everything was mis-priced because we didn’t factor in the true cost of energy. We thought it was about the housing market, toxic assets, and debt, but these were corollaries of of gradually diminishing fossil fuels and increasing oil prices. We witnessed: “extraordinary binge buying designed to keep the economic engine artificially revved up while the real economy was winding down.”
  • ‘Peak globalization’ occurred in in July 2008 where ‘peak oil per capita’ happened (linking population growth to oil production). We need a completely new industrial model.
  • The new industrial revolution has five pillars:
  1. Shifting to Renewable Energy on a grand scale.
  2. Turning all buildings into power plants i.e. DIY renewable energy for everybody.
  3. Storing this energy, principally with hydrogen.
  4. Reconfiguring the world’s energy grid along the lines of the internet, allowing people to share energy, and overcoming the main problem of renewables (“the wind doesn’t always blow, the sun doesn’t always shine”…)
  5. Creating electric transport vehicles to transport energy that can be plugged into the main power grids.

All of these steps beg questions, mostly of a technological nature, but it appears that in all cases ‘we have the technology’, as they say, and the process is already under way in several parts of the world, including Rome, San Antonio and Utrecht.

This combination of renewable energy, distributed capitalism, lateral power and a change in consciousness forms the basis of the third industrial revolution. It looks like a vision worthy of the challenges we face. The Devil will surely be in the detail, but in the blueprint I sense the divine.

What is lacking is the political will to make this model the prevailing narrative of our time.

In this respect Rifkind builds on his earlier work on empathy to argue that these five pillars must emerge alongside a ‘shift in consciousness’, and he links this shift in consciousness to a political shift, illustrated in the Arab Spring in which the top-down power of the second industrial revolution is gradually replaced by what he calls ‘lateral power’- the power of non-hierarchical connections, or what is sometimes also called heterarchy. (If you listen to the audio, I ask about this shift of consciousness towards the end of the event).

This combination of renewable energy, distributed capitalism, lateral power and a change in consciousness forms the basis of the third industrial revolution. It looks like a vision worthy of the challenges we face. The Devil will surely be in the detail, but in the blueprint I sense the divine.

 

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Ask yourself: Do I want this to be true?

November 3, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Social Brain 

My previous blog on Steven Pinker provoked a welcome set of responses, including a few that implied I was only arguing against Pinker because I didn’t really want his theory to be true. This may well be the case, but if so, I am not the only one.

As Matthew Taylor put it yesterday: ”On a personal level, as someone who has all my adult life said that my reason for being is ‘to change the world’, the news that the world may be changing perfectly well without my intervention is potentially soul destroying. This is why I cling on to the idea that a great deal of the credit for the world getting better in modern times is due to those people who insisted that without action it could only get worse.”

Pinker made a smilar point when he said, “for some people, good news is bad news.”

And today I notice the Guardian’s George Monbiot is at it too: I won’t deny it: my first reaction on seeing the results of Chris Goodall’s research into our use of resources was: “I don’t want this to be true.” Obviously, I’d like to see our environmental impacts reduced, as swiftly and painlessly as possible. But if his hypothesis is right – that economic growth has been accompanied by a reduction in our consumption of stuff and might even have driven it – this would put me in the wrong. I’m among those who have argued that a decline in our use of resources requires less economic activity, or at least a transition to a steady-state economy.

What is going on here? I suspect it is just a healthy first step in argument, before you pretend to dispassionately seek the truth, to ask yourself- what do I WANT the outcome to be? I think you’ll find that more often than not you want the argument to turn out a certain way.

One response is that this kind of loading of your rational dice is a fault, but is it possible to give a more humane assessment?

Rather than assuming that reason drives values, what if our values drive our reason?  Should we subject our desires to reason, or is it more honest to use reason to justify our desires.

David Hume, no less, seemed to see all this(and much more) coming when he said: “Reason is, AND OUGHT TO BE, the slave of the passions.”

And I fear I want that to be true.

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