Decline of the Empire

Paris Terrorism Talks Get Underway

Unless you're living in a cave, you are aware that the Paris climate talks started today. And starting today, and no doubt continuing until the talks conclude in a couple weeks, climate change has become inextricably linked with terrorism.

No Decoupling, No Free Lunch

George Monbiot published a remarkable column recently called False Promise. In so doing he called my attention to a 2013 paper entitled The material footprint of nations.

It would hard to overstate the importance of this study, as Monbiot explains.

The belief that economic growth can be detached from destruction appears to be based on a simple accounting mistake.

Before we get into this, remember that "mistake" is a Flatland word. Here at DOTE we interpret the word "mistake" as typical exercise in human self-delusion.

We can have it all; that is the promise of our age. We can own every gadget we are capable of imagining —' and quite a few that we are not. We can live like monarchs without compromising the Earth’s capacity to sustain us. The promise that makes all this possible is that as economies develop, they become more efficient in their use of resources. In other words, they decouple.

There are two kinds of decoupling: relative and absolute. Relative decoupling means using less stuff with every unit of economic growth. Absolute decoupling means a total reduction in the use of resources, even though the economy continues to grow. Almost all economists believe that decoupling — relative or absolute — is an inexorable feature of economic growth.

On this notion rests the concept of sustainable development. It sits at the heart of the climate talks in Paris next month and of every other summit on environmental issues. But it appears to be unfounded.

The reality of "decoupling" is unfounded.

Living In The Dark (Happy Thanksgiving)

A few days after the Paris terror attacks, Diane Rehm interviewed Ted Koppel, the anchor and managing editor of ABC's Nightline from 1980 to 2005. Follow the link to listen to the interview or read the transcript.

You remember Ted, right?

Ted Koppel, Doomer

Long story short, Ted thinks it is only a matter of time before terrorists bring down America's power grid, which would no doubt result in a total breakdown of American society (such as it is).

How is Ted preparing?

• REHM — What have you personally done?

• KOPPEL — Oh, you mean, apart from the barbed wire, the trenches and the machine gun emplacements?

• REHM — For your own family?

• KOPPEL —  For my own family, I have purchased for all of our kids and grandkids, a two-months' supply of freeze-dried food. And that's essentially it. And asked them to make sure...

Only two months, Ted? Cheap bastard.

• REHM —  And water?

• KOPPEL —  [and] asked them to make sure that they have adequate water supplies.

• REHM  — Interesting...

Let's hope we won't be living in the dark during this long holiday weekend.

I mean literally, not figuratively 

Happy Thanksgiving!

It's Traditional

 

If It Bleeds, It Leads

A reader (Mike C.) sent me a recent Guardian article The scientists with reasons to be cheerful. 

That article quotes Max Roser, whose full-time job is to look for things to be cheerful about. Consider this quote, and read the Guardian article for background.

[Ruth] DeFries is not the only academic trying to tell a more positive story with data.

We are hardwired to seek out bad news and focus on the things going wrong. We’re on the edge of our seats, secretly waiting for calamity. Usually the news provides.

“Things that happen in an instant are mostly bad,” says Max Roser, an economist at Oxford University. “It’s this earthquake or that horrible murder.

You’re never going to have an article on the BBC or CNN that begins by saying: ‘There’s no famine in south London today’ or: ‘Child mortality again decreased by 0.005% in Botswana’. But once you turn to statistics it gets much harder to have a pessimistic story.”

In addition to his public events and lectures, Roser runs Our World in Data, which shows how standards of living have changed over the centuries. Begun in 2011 as a “massive procrastination exercise when I was trying to write a book”, as Roser says, the site now employs full-time researchers and is looking for new sources of funding. Using the best and most official data available, he shows how global poverty continues to fall while standards of living, health and education continue to rise.

There's an obvious contradiction with Flatland here—Roser says "we are hardwired to seek out bad news," whereas I have repeatedly said that humans filter bad news (existential threats of various kinds).

What's going on here?

Oh, Wow

A new Pew Poll reveals that only 19% of Americans trust the Federal Government (chart below). It was surprising to me that National Public Radio discussed these results given the fact that trust in government is what NPR is all about (audio, partial transcript below).

Here at DOTE we know that you can trust the government just as far as you can throw it, so the only mystery is why 19% of Americans still have faith in government. I suppose that number includes all those who are feeding one way or another off the government trough. So maybe the number makes sense.

I was just beginning my first cup of coffee this morning when I heard the following discussion. Steve Inskeep is the host of NPR Morning Edition. The reporter is Ron Elving.

Inskeep — ... Is 19% trust especially low?

Elving — It's low compared to the high back in the early 60's. I stress the early 60's. In 1964, we hit a high of 77% in a comparable poll. 77% said they did have trust in government...

Facebook Hits Fiasco

For no good reason, my post A Total Disaster In Brazil went viral on Facebook, as indicated by my traffic records over the last 3 days. That's viral with a small "v" because I've gotten thousands, not millions, of hits.

Did this sudden spurt of interest increase the number of those who might be interested in reading DOTE?

The answer is "no" because my traffic records also indicate that no one at Facebook reading that Brazil article also looked at anything else I've written. 

So when I wrote this text in the Brazil disaster post

We see here that effectively there are no Bad Guys. There are only complex confluences of human errors if natural factors can be ruled out. If natural factors caused the disaster, no one is to blame 

Viewed from outside Flatland, what you're about to read is completely insane because no matter how you slice it, human activity destroyed the Rio Doce and its riparian ecosystem. If humans hadn't been around, these ecosystems would be intact

what I was actually saying must have been totally mysterious to those new Facebook readers.

There's a story about a horse and water which is apropos here. This Facebook fiasco makes me appreciate my regular readers even more than I already do. The ironic upshot is that those tunnel-vision Facebook readers won't see this post either 

So, thanks for reading here and have a nice weekend.

This track is from Brad Mehldau's new release 10 Years Solo Live.

 

The Unforgivable Sin

I heard the following discussion in a New Yorker podcast in which David Remnick interviews Elizabeth Kolbert. They are discussing the upcoming Paris climate talks. The quote starts at the 9:47 mark and runs to the end.

Remnick — Isn't this part of the problem? That in addition to the fact that we all have to change the way we live, the way we move around the globe, etc., etc., the political way [the climate issue] is discussed, and the intricacies of having to do it on an international level with countries having radically different interests, make it so hard to get from point A to B when we have to get to Z.

Kolbert —  Absolutely, absolutely, and that is the situation that we're in ... definitely a reasonable person could look at ... the geophysics and economics and the politics in despair. That is, I think, a very reasonable response. 

But, that being said...

Remnick — [interrupts] You don't have to be religious to know that despair is the one unforgivable sin.

Kolbert — [laughs] Exactly, Exactly! 

Remnick — The politicians will come home from Paris and you are assessing the meeting in Paris. What will you consider success? And what would you consider failure?

Kolbert —  If we come out of Paris with a sort of agreement that emissions must peak soon and start coming down, that would be considered success. Now, does it mean emissions will peak soon and start to come down? I can't promise you that, but [if there's] a sense that we have momentum, and therefore we're heading in a certain direction — I know this sounds horribly vague and not enough to hang the future of the planet on — but I'm going to continue on anyway.

... the idea is that this will become a virtuous cycle, money and investment will follow the direction and the signals given in Paris, that is the best we can hope for [ends]

The unforgivable sin is despair. What is despair?

the complete loss or absence of hope

From a perspective outside Flatland, we immediately see why despair is unforgivable, for it is forbidden for humans to seriously contemplate bad outcomes. This is literally unthinkable. Humans are hardwired for hope, as neuroscientist Tali Sharot and others have demonstrated. 

But why are human hardwired for hope? Why is despair unforgivable?

Here we can tell a very plausible "just-so" story, bearing in mind that all such stories are a form of 

ad hoc fallacy, an unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals.

In short, we are now making stuff up 

It is in the nature of life to be invested in the future, to provide for its own continuance, to evolve and grow. We are invested in the future through our progeny. This is no less true of humans than it is for any other animal. But we see right away that the complete absence of hope is incompatible with being invested in the future through our offspring. You can't be invested in the future if there is no future, or if it will be very difficult (if not impossible) for your progeny to thrive in the future. The future must always be better or at least no worse (in some sense) than the present and the past.

And thus humans are hardwired for hope. The fact that humans can not see their characteristic optimism —it arises out of the unconscious—reinforces our understanding that obligatory hope is instinctual.

That's my "just so" story and I'm sticking to it, though any "reasonable" person (quoting Kolbert) might be forgiven for despairing about the human response to climate change so far.

Don't Overreact To Terrorism?

Yesterday, Ezra Klein published an article called ISIS can only succeed if we overreact — so we shouldn’t.

I've got news for young Ezra — You're too late! That train has left the station! 

All the Western press has done for days now is overreact to the Paris attacks. It's terrorism 24/7 everywhere you look. And hey! — I'm talking about it too 

Therefore, by Ezra's logic —and mine too—those attacks have been a stunning success for these ISIS zealots. If you don't know how this self-centered publicity thing works, ask Donald Trump. He'll explain it to you.

Here's Ezra:

ISIS can't win. But we can lose.

We've already lost.

Amidst a week of fear over what the Islamic State can do, it's worth stopping to be clear about what it can't do. It can't invade Paris. It can't launch an air war against the United States. It can't even hold its ground — ISIS expert Will McCants estimates the group has lost between 20 and 25 percent of its territory in recent months.

The attack ISIS launched against Paris is a horror.

But it should take nothing away from its tragedy to say more Americans have died from gun violence in seven days than died in the Paris attacks. That's not to downplay the threat of terrorism, but rather to highlight what makes it different: its capacity to terrorize.

"Terrorism is a crime against the mind," the security expert Bruce Schneier told me after the Boston Marathon bombing. "The message of terrorist attacks is you’re not safe and the government can’t protect you — that the existing power structure can’t protect you."

Fear makes people do stupid things, and it makes countries do stupid things, too. And it is fear that is ISIS's real weapon here...

Klein quotes Schneier again.

The damage from terrorism is primarily emotional. To the extent this terrorist attack succeeds has very little do with the attack itself. It’s all about our reaction. We must refuse to be terrorized. Imagine if the bombs were found and moved at the last second, and no one died, but everyone was just as scared. The terrorists would have succeeded anyway.

If you are scared, they win. If you refuse to be scared, they lose, no matter how much carnage they commit.

Fear drives human responses, but there are deeper problems here, which I'll do my best to describe.

A Total Disaster In Brazil

This post is not about ISIS or future terrorism threats. As much as we grieve for France, the response to the Paris attacks are not the only thing going on in the world, though you might be forgiven for thinking so, due to some truly unfortunate flaws in the human animal — Dave

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I will simply combine the Reuters and Guardian reports, quoting one or the other when it is convenient for the narrative. Read them if you want more details.

Nine people are now confirmed dead, and a further 19 remain unaccounted for as a slow-motion environmental catastrophe continues to unfold following the collapse of two mining dams in Brazil’s mineral-rich state of Minas Gerais.

Eight days after the town of Bento Rodrigues was swept away by 50 million cubic meters of toxic mud, a slow-moving tide of toxic iron-ore residue is oozing downriver, polluting the water supply of hundreds of thousands of residents as it makes its way to the ocean.

Brazil’s national water agency, ANA, has warned that the presence of arsenic, zinc, copper and mercury now present in the Rio Doce make the water untreatable for human consumption. Already the lack of oxygen and high temperatures caused by the pollutants has killed off much of the aquatic life along a 500 kilometer stretch of the river.

A Note On Political Corruption In The United States

I see from a description of last night's Democrat debate on various issues that our political system is letting us down once again. There's nothing new about that, but it's worth some of my time to focus on political corruption in the United States.

It began when moderator John Dickerson asked Hillary Clinton, "You have received money from Wall Street. How will you convince voters you will level the playing field when you're indebted to some of its biggest players?"

Clinton initially tried to talk about her financial regulation plan, but Sanders wouldn't let her escape the issue of donations.

"Let's not be naive about it," Sanders said. "Why, over her political career, has Wall Street been the major campaign contributor to Hillary Clinton?

Now, maybe they're dumb and they don't know what they're going to get, but I don't think so."

Right. The political system is corrupt. It is awash in self-interested money. Big donors do indeed expect substantial returns on their "investments" in politicians. But the progressive dream dies hard.