Gilding on The Great Disruption

So I’ve done it: I finally managed to finish Paul Gilding’s eye-opening book (and, given how busy I am just now, managed to post this!), “The Great Disruption:  Why the ClimateCrisis Will Bring on the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.”  You might remember I referred to Paul’s TED talk a few weeks ago. Well, after watching that, I immediately bought the book and now, while travelling, have finally managed to finish it.

Um:  it makes you think.

In the book, Gilding builds a convincing case that humanity is on a collision course for a Great Disruption in the next 10-30 years.  He argues that our collective ecological footprint is 140% of the Earth’s carrying capacity and that this alone means that we’re living in a seriously, unsustainable deficit.  Indeed, it’s not just this that we’re over-using, but all the major life-sustaining natural resources including water, pollution-free air, ecosystem services, and of course fossil fuels (to name a few).  He argues that we’ve passed the point where we’re going to be able to avoid some serious climate and environmental disruption and he points out that at some point we’ll all recognize—probably through some horrific environmental event—that we’ve got to do something. 

Once this happens, Gilding argues that humanity will mobilize resources and efforts, much as the West did, most recently in World War II, and we will collectively declare war against climate change.  We will lose many millions (or billions) of people and likely more than 50% of the biodiversity on earth. We will suffer great political upheaval.  It will be bad, but, he argues, it must happen because we have done nothing to stop it. 

However, once we decide to act, we will limit the Earth’s temperature rise to 1°C by rapid and wide-scale cuts in carbon use. We will do this under duress because we must; the alternatives are even worse. His war on Carbon will reduce carbon massively over 5 years.  It includes (and I quote liberally from pages 135ff):

•Cutting deforestation and other logging by 50%

•Closing 1000 dirty coal power plants within 5 years

•Rationing electricity, ‘getting dressed for the war’ and rapidly driving increased efficiently

•Retrofitting 1000 coal power plants with carbon capture technology

•Erecting a wind turbine or solar power plant in every town

•Creating huge wind and solar farms in suitable locations

•Letting no waste go to waste

•Rationing the use of dirty cars to cut transportation emissions by 50%

•Preparing for biopower with Carbon-Capture-Sequestration

•Stranding half of the world’s aircraft

•Capturing or burning methane

•Moving away from climate-unfriendly protein

•Binding 1 gigaton of CO2 in the soil

•Launching a government- and community-led “shop less, live more” campaign

After the first five years, there are even more things that must be done to capture carbon and continue to reduce it so that we’re living in a ‘net-zero carbon world’.  Sound draconian; the options are even worse…even more massive human fatalities and increased suffering.

He argues that humans are really good at getting together to change when real change is needed and that our mostly to-date inefficient attempts at international treaties to control carbon will quickly scale up and start working when they have to, but unfortunately, not before.

Yet, his story does not end there.  We will have to reinvent our lives and for this he sees great promise.

I quote from page 185:

“But in telling that whole story, we have a ways to go yet.  It may seem like a fair bit to cope with—the economic crisis of the Great Disruption, followed by the one-degree war and the complete transformation of the global economy to zero net carbon, all happening in parallel to a global realignment of geopolitical power, accompanied by widespread military and social conflict from ecosystem breakdown.  All that, however, is just act one.”

One really good insight from his view of the future is that solar power is equalizing and equitable. Solar power is somewhat uniquely equalitarian:  you don’t need a power grid to have solar power thus it can be an important (and powerful, excuse the pun) way to help folks in developing countries with limited infrastructure.  And, if developing countries don’t have to compete for oil and gas, solar energy will help them develop even faster. 

Gilding also summarizes evidence (that I’ve discussed in the book and blog) about why we’ll need to end consumerism, end a growth-based economy (he notes that even classical economists always viewed a stable future where growth ended and a stable-state economy was created), and make the world a more equitable world by cutting income disparity.  Partly, this will come through those with income having to earn less because the economic system is fundamentally broken. But he paints a promising picture (more time for family, more time to relax, better income equality). 

I’m not sure I buy all of this.  Frankly, it seems to be a group selected argument to hope that we’ll raise up and cooperate, rather than get stuck in a selfish tragedy of the commons.  If major religions can’t get it together now and help end poverty, why will we do it in the future? Gilding says we must, there are no other ethical options, but we’ve ignored massive poverty to date…why will the future be any different?

Gilding makes his living as a business consultant and he’s well versed in economics.  Thus, he develops his argument about how executives should re-focus to capitalize on the total re-organization of our world’s economy. He’s not a quack; this book is worth reading and thinking about. He has the ears of business and economic world leaders.  And he offers promising suggestions on business plans that will make the world a better place.

Discussion Questions

Read this book.  Share the TED talk.  Discuss his thesis.  Don’t believe it?  What does your future look like? How will you prepare for it?  How will we end poverty and income disparity?  How will we detoxify the earth?

Ending Oil use

Charlie and I just gave a keynote address to the annual meeting of the Maryland Association for Environmental and Outdoor Educators.  What a great bunch of people!  While there, I picked up a copy of Michael Brune's "Coming Clean:  Breaking America's Addiction to Oil and Coal" which I read on the way back.  Good read.


A factoid (as of 2010):  "Germany receives as much sunshine annually as Nome, Alaska, yet's it's become the world's top producer of solar energy".


Read that again!


C'mon US, let's get it together and put solar panels on urban roofs, not the desert.  Let's eliminate subsidies for oil and gas exploration and subsidize solar electric production.  Let's mandate higher fleet mileage in the  future and help companies develop the technology to get us there.  We can do it.  We just have to want to!

How we are motivated

Drop the 'e' in emotion and you've got motion.  Add a few letters and you've got motivated.  Any way you look at it, emotions and motivation are closely related. And they should be because they're all about motivating action. 


A few weeks ago I read Drew Westen's "The Political Brain" which argues that the way to people's votes (which in some sense is a way to get people to act) is through their emotions.  Faulting the Democratic Party's logic of fact-based reasoning he writes, in the lead up to the election that got President Obama elected, that elections are won by telling compelling stories that engage people's hearts, not their logical minds.


Transferred to thinking about how we can create a more sustainable future, we need to work even harder to create compelling, emotional images of the good, the bad, and the ugly.  I still remember "The Day After"--a post-apocalyptic film about what happens after a nuclear exchange.  Presented on TV during the height of the Cold War, these horrible images seemed to motivate even more people to urge our politicians to shift us from the brink.  I think we need more films like this.  Realistic ones, not those where the Earth freezes over in hours, but ones that engage our senses and force us to think about choices.  Fear motivates us all.


We also need create positive emotions and positive images.  There ARE ways to engineer softer landings and we need to show folks that these ARE possible; if only we work.  But, if Westen is correct, data alone will not be the solution to our problems; vibrant imagery that captures our senses will.


Discussion Questions
What captures your senses?  What sorts of books, films, discussions do you think can help nudge us to a better future?

The Collapse of Complex Societies

I’ve been reading Joseph Tainter’s 1988 classic, The Collapse of Complex Societies.  In it he refutes a number of historic reasons that societies collapse (characterized by a sudden reduction in social/political organization and typically population crash—think Rome, the Mayans, and the Chaco people of America’s southwest).  The hypothesis he develops is that the marginal cost of maintaining a complex society increases to the point where individuals are paying taxes but not getting anything back.  Or, more generally, the benefits to individuals from paying the costs to maintain an increasingly complex society are reduced. 

He gives a number of examples.  Compelling ones have to do with the benefits we get from biomedical research (the cost of creating Penicillin was less than $20,000, but think about how much our society has spent trying to cure ‘cancer’—have we succeeded?), energy (now that we’re past peak oil means that the costs of obtaining oil increases while the amount of oil extracted per dollar decreases), or more generally the insight that the easy problems (whether social or otherwise) are relatively inexpensive to solve, but the more complex ones require a lot more effort to solve. 

In the end he cautions that the inter-connectedness of our current global civilization may provide some buffering against collapse (if a country fails, it may be bailed out by the banks of other countries), and it's more common for leaders and systems to change rather than society collapsing.  He highlights that a key characteristic of a true collapse is the presence of a power vacuum.

All that said, I kept thinking of all of the things for which we’re experiencing increased marginal costs… military expenditures, biomedical discoveries, energy resources, precious metals and other natural resources, pollution control, education, etc. 

If he’s right, and I encourage you to read this relatively short but compelling book, we’re at somewhat of a crossroad.  We can either simplify our lives and societies, bet that technology will solve our energy problems (much complexity can be maintained by having sufficient energy), or try to bolster our international connections to prevent power vacuums.

I worry that the energy required to keep our complex civilization running will eventually be too costly to sustain our civilization. Complexity requires work to maintain and is not always the best outcome for individuals who are paying those prices.  Societies change over time when benefits from complexity disappear. 

The rub is that when societies do collapse, they’re often followed by dark ages.

Ponder this over your next meal.

A perfect moral storm

I've been traveling and reading an outstanding book while on the road.  Stephen Gardiner's A Perfect Moral Storm:  The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change should be a must-read for anyone interested in sustainability issues.  He tackles the issue head on:  human-caused climate change is creating a huge inter-generational problem and we have to try to understand it and fix it. While fascinating, the book is a pretty difficult read and I may re-read some parts of it.  

He starts with the assertion that we must be concerned about what we leave for future generations because they're not present now to help us manage our decisions yet they will certainly be effected by them.  With this, and little else, as a starting assumption, he defines the perfect moral storm as one that has three main components:

1) a global problem (climate change acts on the earth as a whole, but the rich are creating the problem and the poor are suffering now and are likely to suffer more in the future--this is immoral)

2) an intergenerational element (those who will be impacted in the future have no say in what we do now and it's immoral to do things that we know will cause more suffering in the future)

3) a theoretical component (we don't, he argues, have a good theory of intergenerational ethics to guide us and this makes us susceptible to rationalizations and justifications that will cause inaction or insufficient action).

He warns us about how easy it is to slip into complacency and put off tackling some hard questions head on, but that if we profess to be moral, we must be concerned with protecting life on earth in the future. He also discusses the non-trivial issues of trading off real costs now (which may cause some discomfort) with unknown benefits in the future.  However, the lack of certainty, he argues, shouldn't and can't be an excuse for inaction today and those that block action are likely to be morally corrupt.

The rub, ultimately, will be to translate lucid arguments into meaningful political action and he traces the failures, to date, of our attempts to enact meaningful global legislation that might control/reverse the worst impacts of increased atmospheric CO2.

There's a LOT in this book; but it's well worth struggling over.  I want to have some friends read it and then talk about it.  I suggest you do the same.