Reflections on Garden World Politics Douglass Carmichael

Bjørn Lomborg: $100bn a year needed to fight climate change | Environment | The Guardian

doug carmichael — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 18:31:53 +0000

The world’s most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today” and “a challenge humanity must confront”, in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.

Bjørn Lomborg, the self-styled “sceptical environmentalist” once compared to Adolf Hitler by the UN’s climate chief, is famous for attacking climate scientists, campaigners, the media and others for exaggerating the rate of global warming and its effects on humans, and the costly waste of policies to stop the problem.

via guardian.co.uk

He was both a beneficiary of polarization (he got famous)and a victim (he was never as much a denier as portrayed. perhaps sloppy might be better). But this is a belll weather event. (sorry for the pun).

Getting comfortable with graphics

doug carmichael — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 18:20:57 +0000

STRANGE AND WONDERFUL: An Informal Visual History of Manuscript Books and Albums (Sanctuary, $50), with an introduction by the art critic Jed Perl. But there are selections from a delightful handmade book called “Collezione di Rebus” (1820), with original watercolor drawings that replace words in sentences or phrases. This was produced 27 years before Oliver Byrne used the rebus concept in “The First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid,” though there is no evidence to prove that this is where he got the idea. Doubtless not a single professional artist or designer was inspired by the journals and albums in this book, since each of them is the work of an amateur, although some were created by people who wanted to be published authors.

via nytimes.com

We are exploring the use of graphics as aids to memory. Individuals have memories but groups do no0t absent artifacts or rituals.

More on the psychology of climate change

doug carmichael — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:42:43 +0000

But social scientists have identified another major reason: Climate change has become an ideologically polarizing issue. It taps into deep personal identities and causes what Dan Kahan of Yale calls “protective cognition” — we judge things in part on whether we see ourselves as rugged individualists mastering nature or as members of interconnected societies who live in harmony with the environment. Powerful special interests like the coal and oil industries have learned how to halt movement on climate policy by exploiting the fear people feel when their identities are threatened.

via nytimes.com

Much more realistic about science, perceptions, projections, values, and change.

More on high risk

doug carmichael — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:11:42 +0000

People have to make choices among many risks. Part of the skepticism towards climate change is based on fear that climate responses require global institutions and global management, and that is seen as high risk because “global management will be by elites that make big government and big corporations and screw us”.

Science has the same problem Christianity had when it became the official religion of the holy roman empire: it because self-serving by serving power, and taxed the population to extremes while building its own Rome. Islam filled the vacuum in the population in the ME as Christianity retreated to the centers of power.

I just read the dissertation by Josh Howe that is helpful in understanding these.

MAKING GLOBAL WARMING GREEN:

CLIMATE CHANGE AND AMERICAN

ENVIRONMENTALISM, 1957-1992 http://purl.stanford.edu/cp892qc1059

Recmommened by Lee. SchipperIn previous email (aug 22), not yet available at Stanford site “being processed”.

Problem of risk analysis

doug carmichael — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:06:08 +0000

Re the previous post, Rifkin quotes Steve schneider

“…To be risk averse is good policy in my VALUE SYSTEM–and we always must admit that how to take risk — with climate damages or costs of mitigation/adaptation — is not science but world views and risk aversion philosophy — and whether you fear more the type one error (wrong forecast so you wasted resources by acting on it) or type two error (right forecast but too uncertain so you didn’t act and it happened and you really got hurt by not hedging) is a value tradeoff…”

So any discussion of public views on climate MUST be about more than the science if it is aimed at examining what might, or might not, lead to traction.

The problem is That there are many scenarios of high risk: narchy, fascism, cultural collapse, failure of world economy, plagues, civil wars, So as theory of risk taking should take into account the perceptual field of individuals and societies: all the things they are worried about.

Andy Refkin: What if the Public Had Perfect Climate Information?

doug carmichael — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 14:55:02 +0000

What if the Public Had Perfect Climate Information?

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Not surprisingly, Joe Romm, “ America’s fiercest climate blogger,” has assaulted my piece examining ways in which scientists might make scientific information on issues like global warming more impactful. How could I write such a piece — he says — without also including a big dollop of blame for institutions and individuals doling out reams of scientific disinformation to complacent journalists?

Of course there’s disinformation on climate and energy, and The Times has long documented it, whatever the source. You can look back over the years through my work, that of John Cushman and plenty of others. But that’s a distraction from the real question.

The real question for Romm is, what if climate information were perfect?

He starts to address this question  in his post, but dribbles off and shifts the focus to a couple of surveys that show people deeply care about global warming — even when there’s abundant evidence that much of public attitude on climate is, as I’ve been saying, the equivalent of  water sloshing in a shallow pan — lots of fluctuations, little depth or commitment (particularly when money is involved).

[8:50 p.m. | Updated Romm answered the question tonight with quite an appealing word picture depicting how the energy quest would have begun 30 years ago and averted much of the danger the world faces now. I'll be exploring the climate communication challenge more on Thursday.]

The sociologists speak of “issue salience” (read Helen Ingram here) and global warming has little of this, no matter how many undistorted articles might be written. They also talk about humans’ “ finite pool of worry,” and it’s hard to fit global warming, in which the clearest risks are still  someday and somewhere, into that pool.

My impression is that this body of work is what Chris Mooney and the Academy of Arts and Sciences — the subject of my post — were determined to emphasize.

At one point, Romm seems to destroy his own media critique by acknowledging that communication isn’t the real issue:

The REAL problem isn’t so much science communication … as the fact that we have this 60 vote supermajority extra-constitutional ‘requirement.’ If the Senate only needed 50 votes (plus a VP tiebreaker) to act, we would have passed a climate bill last year, even in the face of the disinformation campaign and lousy media coverage. True, it would have been inadequate, but again, primarily because of the disinformation campaign and poor media coverage.

The bottom line is that anyone hoping to find substantive ways to integrate scientific information into policy-making (let alone personal choices) would do well to study what’s known about how people think and react — or don’t react — and why they hold beliefs of one sort or another. Hey, this is one reason I left daily journalism to join Pace University as  senior fellow for environmental understanding (I proposed the name).

The one part of Romm’s post that I readily embrace is the quote from the scientist-blogger with the moniker Evil Monkey. This neuroscientist largely echoes some of the points in Randy Olson’s book “ Don’t Be Such a Scientist” in calling for less thumb sucking and more personal action:

So what can scientists do? Well, we have to pull double-duty debunking misconceptions of the data and of scientists in general. Universities and especially tenure committees need to be more supportive of scientists devoting time to outreach, especially for those conducting the so-called “lightning rod” research. That means more settings where scientists take the practical side of their research and tell the public about it, before it becomes an issue (which admittedly is about the only thing Mooney lays out as a strategy, even though he doesn’t get into the nuts and bolts). Kids need to be made aware of how vaccines benefit them and the population as a whole. The general public needs to understand how evolution impacts their local ecosystems. We need to get out there and engage the public more, as scientists we’ve always fell short here. More scientists need to consider media-based careers, like Phil Plait. More scientists need to speak up in church…. More scientists need to sit on school boards. If you’re a scientist and you’re active in politics, find somebody like-minded in the opposing political party and organize a politics-free teachable moment where both sides of the aisle show up and see each other as human beings with common science-based problems that transcend their petty politics. Find ways to have teach-ins with legislators and staffers at the state and federal levels, if possible.

Now if Evil Monkey would just uncloak, that would be a step in the right direction, as well.

via dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com

the value of graphics

doug carmichael — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 23:29:59 +0000

via 1.bp.blogspot.com

today and digital capitalism

doug carmichael — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 02:52:07 +0000

Pasted from <http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=657>

Simon Glezos

Excerpts..

I want to challenge the conception of a hard break between an immaterial and material capitalism, arguing there might be more continuity between the two than first appears.

The question remains whether this might not be the latest incarnation of a similar transition that has happened often in the rise and fall of every global capitalist hegemony since capitalism’s inception — whether it be the Venetians, the Dutch, the English — that is, the shift from a manufacturing-based system of production during its rise, to a financialization phase during its decline (an argument developed by economic historians such as Giovanni Arrighi or Immauel Wallerstein).

Why then argue on behalf of a genuine shift in the nature of capitalism itself when what we are witnessing presently may be simply a decline of American capitalist manufacturing hegemony, requiring, in turn, the shift to various new fundamentally unsound strategies to cling to economic relevance?

a crisis of overaccumulation of capital, as developed by David Harvey? The scarcity of capital is thus a problem insofar as circulating immaterial capital, artificially inflated through speculative financial instruments, outpaces this actual concrete capital production.

Eventually the lack of a material productive base underlying the apparently infinite valuation of immaterial production will break through, eradicating the illusory successes. However, this suggests that there is not a sharp division between the material and immaterial economy. In effect, “bubbles” are best understood as immaterial episodes within a broader material economy.

And

Free markets with monopoly corporations. I’d love to be in that conversation.

News Corp. Donates $1 Million to Republicans

A spokesman for the Fox News parent company says “News Corporation believes in the power of free markets.”

today notes, capitalism and energy

doug carmichael — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 19:01:34 +0000

Thinking about paradoxes.

Large government not liked but situation increasingly complex. Best method of coping?

Goal quality of life but concentration of wealth causes problems, including excess of capital over investment opportunities, and the drive to go for financial instruments for high returns vs. the slow returns of investing in actual production.

We want entrepreneurial opportunity but also stability. We don’t like creative destruction.

Small business but against immigration which supports small businesses

How can small government cope with

Roads

Banks

Pollution

Pakistan. What led to the growth of those villages? New agriculture, medicine,

Two articles I’ll quote from in a minute.

http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=657

http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=658>

Interesting video’s on the future. Showing one of the points of view.

http://www.youtube.com/v/aqTdQHpwfdA?fs=1&hl=en_US”>

http://www.sustainablehawaiiisland.org/node/18

Core article excerpts.

Oil and the Regime of Capitalism:

Questions to Philosophers of the Future

Tere Vadén

Likewise, human psycho-social or biological environments can radically deteriorate without becoming impossible. More than once the last century demonstrated that the zero point of psycho-social conditions can be reached without provoking systemic breakdowns. ..

For the same reason, capitalism reaches a crisis point. It cannot continuously grow so that the proportions of different parts remain the same. The parts and the proportions of the parts must change. From this follows delicacy. ..

There is no limit after which the slum mother can no longer bear it because the option of not bearing it does not exist…

Is there a form of capitalism that does not need economic growth? ..

the electric motor and the combustion engine, oil and natural gas. The era of fossil fuels and the motors and machines that utilise them is inseparable from economic growth and the bottleneck of present capitalism.which also corresponded with the growth in population: these are depicted by the famous “hockey stick” graph, where the point where the handle reaches the blade represents, at the latest, the 1950s.

The era of fossil fuels and the motors and machines that utilise them is inseparable from economic growth and the bottleneck of present capitalism.The era of fossil fuels and the motors and machines that utilise them is inseparable from economic growth and the bottleneck of present capitalism…

This capitalism changes with the economy of coal and oil, like a mouse becomes a dog and a dog becomes an elephant. These metamorphoses are not the platonic phenomena of abstract capitalism but are instead directly attached to the movements of black raw materials. [ seems specious/ fudges the intrinsic logic of growth problem,]..

when does the sufficiently cheap, easy oil that can be pumped in large amounts, run out?

Fidel Castro makes the crucial observation: “Marx thought that the limit on the development of wealth lay in the social system, not in natural resources, as we know today.” ..

The history of contemporary capitalism is the history of both these branches: efficiency is increased by the division of labour, specialization, technology and automation.[dc. but part of that goes to machines, the division is not beftween people but between some people, other people, and machines.]..

Yet surprisingly little has been said precisely about the increase of non-human labour, and its morphological effects. ..

Which factors in this capitalist system depend upon the amount of easy and cheap non-human labour? Which of these dependencies are arbitrary, and which ones are necessary?

The calculations regarding availability and sufficiency of oil are, for many reasons, virtually secret…

In the same way as the stock market can act only under the circumstances of unfree and unbalanced information, the combustion engine of this capitalism can only keep running if the fuel gauge is unreliable. …

A good example is the UK, which thanks to the oil discovered in the North Sea in the 1970s became an important oil exporter in the 1980s, passed its peak in 1999, and after that slid into an oil importing country at the beginning of the 21st century…

In one year approximately one cubic mile of oil is used globally. [8]Correspondingly, in the 21st century global consumption has been about 85 million barrels per day. ..

It is estimated that the energy consumption of the entire world in 2005 was 15 terrawatts. ..

If in 2005 there were 6.5 billion people on the planet their total annual work efficiency (maximally) was 0.65 terawatts. Fossil fuel, in other words, gave each person a 20-fold work increase …

The oil of the high EROEI is the pulse of the economy but, to employ a different metaphor, it also produces a blind spot in the middle of the theoretical analysis of growth…

EROEI of the fields in present production is well under 100, under 50, if not even under 20.

The oil of the high EROEI is the pulse of the economy but, to employ a different metaphor, it also produces a blind spot in the middle of the theoretical analysis of growth. ..

From uniqueness follows, inevitably, further questions. If many generally applicable observations of political economy science are concerned not with abstract capitalism (or socialism) [13] but rather the uniquely oil-injected capitalism, then could the same category error be evident also in some critiques of modernism, technology or the Western lifestyle? What if the hegemony of the West was not, after all, defined by modern natural science and technology, enlightenment and individualism but by a one-time offering of coal, gas and oil? As is well known, natural science and technology, enlightenment and individualism cannot be exported — and have not once been exported — without also exporting and using coal, gas and oil. The Catholic faith needed only coal and wind. ..

particularly not nuclear energy, the EROEI calculation of which may be less than one. ..

The increase of energy no longer functioned as a motor for economic growth, as it had during the whole time since the 1860s, with the exception of the 1970s. From then onwards, US economic growth has been reliant on debt. The ending of the energy excess is one reason for the increase in the number of loans. And the waning of cheap oil is one reason for the increase in costs for the continuous taking of loans. The financial crisis and the oil crisis are closely linked; ..

It is possible that an important part of the specialization and technologization of the modern world is dependent on and caused by the magnificent, uniquely high EROEI of large oil wells. If this is the case, then the claim that modern prosperity is mainly the effect of improved technology and specialization, has to be revised. ..

if the EROEI of all known energy sources is considerably weaker than the EROEI of the oil fields that have already been used up or are now in production, then the future possibilities for an economy that continuously has to grow (in other words this capitalism) seem weak. ..

What does the continuous shrinking of the economy mean for science, technology, modernism and individualism? ..

Half empty in that not many philosophers, economists, critics of modernism or social thinkers have said a rational word about the future where the economy shrinks year after year. We have arrived in an uncharted region, where the unknown is fully equivocal. Half full: talk about the end of history and other cultural saturation should be forgotten. Even a large part of philosophy can be started again from the beginning. ..

GardenWorld Politics is a response to this possibility.

today notes, capitalism and energy

doug carmichael — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 18:59:44 +0000