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we're going to now welcome our next speaker william reese he's a human ecologist ecological economist former director and professor emeritus of the university of british columbia's
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school of community and regional planning his research focuses on the biophysical requirements for sustainable development and on the cognitive behavioral and socio-cultural barriers to change best known as originator and
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co-developer with his phd students of ecological footprint analysis preferee's work is widely recognized internationally his awards include a blue planet prize jointly with former
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student dr mattis wackernickel the bolding prize in ecological economics the hermann delhi award u.s society for ecological economics and an honorary doctorate from laval university
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from 2014 to 2019 dr reese served as a full member of the club of rome his talk today is entitled the enigma of climate and action on the human nature of policy failure
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welcome dr reese well thank you very much alexia it's a pleasure to be here and i appreciate everybody hanging on this long very happy you're here do you have a preferred way to take your questions either throughout or at the end of the
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talk whichever seems to suit if you judge that it's probably best to clear something up right now let's do it in the middle okay i'll interrupt you if needed and otherwise we'll be moderating the chat and keeping the questions for the end
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okay then shall we go yeah go ahead so the first thing i'd like to do is really say that i was hoping that i would have something completely different to say but unfortunately i'm going to be
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overlapping considerably with some of the other presenters but at the same time there will be something here that i don't think you've heard at all before in this conference my main messages are listed in this
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first slide so those of you who don't want to know the details can go out for coffee for the next hour or so the first thing is that it's complicated human behavior is an amazingly difficult thing to
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fathom and despite the years and decades of research humans really don't understand themselves i think it's important to understand that how people act out in life springs
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from a complex interplay of both who we are as biological beings and our cultural nurture so it's a nice play of nature and nurture a very important point from the point of
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view of this conference is that from the perspective the public good the overall well-being of society homo sapiens is not primarily a rational species
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we can say with certainty that public policy is strongly tainted by cognitive and behavioral traits that operate beneath consciousness and by that i mean we are influenced enormously and
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importantly by impulses instincts emotions that operate beneath our consciousness so by definition we cannot be aware of what is forming our decisions and our
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actions it's also important to realize that these very human traits confer great selective advantage early early in human evolution but they have become dangerously
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maladaptive in the complex world that we ourselves have created and so in some sense we've become obsolete and one result of this is that global society will miss the paris climate
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accord targets of limiting global warming to less than 1.5 celsius degrees and probably also 2.0 celsius degrees so let's get into explaining all of this
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in detail probably the commonest fallacy and one that many of the of the other speakers have talked about is that human beings are primarily rational most climate scientists in fact all
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scientists apply for grants on grounds that if we create better information and we communicate it better this will enable society the political process to make better decisions in the long term best interests of society at large and
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this is commonly known as the information deficit model if only we had more data more information we'd be better off there's very little to support this the evidence is that we don't act in our
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collective interest when it comes to climate change or any other aspect of our self-induced ecological and social crises despite decades indeed a century of better data and collective warnings
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global society remains 80 percent plus dependent on fossil fuels and limited to a developmental trajectory that guarantees at least one and a half degrees celsius mean global warming and
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potentially catastrophic climate change in fact we're currently on track for about three to four degrees celsius mean global warming there are many causes of this and in my introductory remarks i said it's a
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combination of nature and nurture we uh very rarely think of ourselves as biological entities as an evolved species as they were but the fact is that we have evolved just like all other organisms on the
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planet and we share with virtually every other organism two extremely important characteristics that are unconscious people aren't consciously thoughtful about this but it's true first of all human beings will
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expand to occupy all accessible habitats and secondly and this is more difficult for many people to swallow we will use all available resources and in particular it's important to recognize
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that in the case of humans and this does separate us from other species availability is constantly being redefined by technology so we share these qualities with other
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organisms but we are much better at them than any other species and we are therefore if you think about it no other species of advanced life except perhaps rats and mice that follow us around
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occupy all the planet of earth every accessible habitat and many that are almost inhospitable we've been there we live there we set up temporary bases there secondly
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we're scouring the bottom of the barrel when it comes to oil in bc we're confronting a crisis of consciousness over the depletion of our last old growth forests and on and on we are
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using up all the readily accessible resources and using technology to get at more and more of these as we go along we're currently mining ores for example that were completely impossible to think
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of mining only two decades ago but technology has now got us to the point where even the most dilute concentrations are accessible to humans and i want to emphasize that we've come
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on this trait um honestly and we share it with other species so there was a wonderful story uh very easily accessible in new scientists just a few years ago talking about how once this group of monkeys
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learned to use rocks to crack shells on the beaches which they had access they drove their local shellfish species virtually to extinction and that's what humans have done over and over again as we've
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i suppose colonized the entire planet the second root cause is nurture cultural nurture and in fact many of the previous speakers particularly the last one have emphasized this uh too extreme
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human beings socially construct our own realities we are storytellers we make it up as we go along now this is very hard for a lot of people to understand because they take take what they feel
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and then think about as real but the fact is it's a made-up vision of the nature of reality we don't actually construct reality of course we construct conceptual lenses uh containers through
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which we perceive reality we call these by different names every political ideology every religious doctrine every economic paradigm even scientific models and cultural
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narratives are made up stories that are burst first in language words are very important as has been emphasized and then massaged into a common accepted belief set uh by dialogue among the
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people who would adhere to that particular particular ideology and it's extremely important to realize that although this is a cultural process the predisposition the the idiosyncrasy as
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it were to make up future as we go along is a uniquely human characteristic okay there are two critical corollaries to this that most people of course are unconscious of but are extremely
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important to our discussions the first is that the conceptual lenses through which we perceive reality determines the nature of reality that we perceive why is this important because we live
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out of our socially constructive realities as if they were real and in fact they may have almost nothing to do with the world in which we find ourselves and they are constructs that we've made up
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and that raises this question what if our culturally constructed realities are fundamentally flawed now if we talk to cyberneticists systems modelers about this
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they have a maxim and i think stafford beer said it better than anyone else and that is that we cannot regulate our interaction with any aspect of reality that our model of reality does not include
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so we can think any way we like but if we're thinking about something that exists in the real world in ways that did not contain important aspects of that real world our thinking is dead wrong
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and so there are corollaries here to keep in mind and that is that any social construct such as a resource management scheme or an economic system is more likely to succeed the closer it maps to any
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external biophysical reality it purports to represent it's a model and good models are those things that resemble in their quality and behavior the things they purport to represent
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rosh aspie another cyberneticist coined the term the law of requisite variety and defined it as saying that the internal variety diversity complexity of a management system much
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must be comparable to the variety of the system being managed and we can flip that around to say in fact these are his words when the variety or complexity of the environment exceeds the capacity of
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a regulatory of a regulatory system whether natural or artificial the environment will dominate and ultimately destroy that system i i emphasize that last phrase the environment will
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dominate and ultimately destroy that system for reasons that i hope will become evident as we move forward and we can start right here our dominant social construction is a
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very bad map it does not map to reality and what i mean by dominant social construct here is neoliberal economics it's the form of economic theory that is currently
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running the world it's all about globalization the primacy of the free market the devaluation of a whole variety of other values that in fact should be highlighted in the context that we're discussing here
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but in particular in this framework we have to recognize that the economic narrative of our modern technical industrial society is simplistically reductionist and as such it contains no useful
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information whatever about the ecological or social systems with which the economy interacts in the real world some crucial assumptions of this model are as follows the economy is separate from and
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essentially independent of the biophysical environment see a social construct how real is that human ingenuity that is to say efficiency and technology can create
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substitutes for any potentially limiting natural resource another assumption ethical and moral considerations are irrelevant to economic analysis those are political considerations so that damages to
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ecosystems and communities have become mere externalities after all why do they matter if the economy operates independently of them so here's the model that shows up in virtually every economics textbook
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it's the called the circular flows model it's a counter current of goods and services moving in one direction and monetary resources in the form of wages and salaries or
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spending on goods and services moving in the other direction and what you will notice here is that this economy is isolated totally disconnected from anything outside of itself and if you look at this model you could
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neither anticipate or predict anything about the ecological crisis nor could you resolve any ecological problems from within the vision presented by this model it follows that i think again this is an
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extremely important idea if you accept the construct called neoliberal economics then economic growth can continue indefinitely propelled by boundless
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technological progress and one of the most i suppose vocal or ebullient uh proponents of this view was julian simer the late julian simon professor of management studies at
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maryland university we have in our hands now the technology to feed clothe and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next seven billion years ask me about that statement later
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this is probably the most arithmetically challenged assertion ever made by an economist anywhere okay so what's missing from our economic construct well
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i could spend all day just talking about it but the two important things are the realities imposed by the second law of the dynamic of thermodynamics and the law of conservation of mass
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in a nutshell all real events including all economic activity is dissipative this means that they permanently and irreversibly dissipate all of the energy
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involved in that transformation and a significant proportion of the material they necessarily create pollution and are potentially resource depleting so those are pretty important statements
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because it follows that the important flows in the economy are not the circular flows of abstract money value but rather the unidirectional flows of energy and matter and this is how we might modify that
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simplistic model here we see the economy but the flow of goods and services is entirely sustained by the extraction of energy and material from the environment and all of the
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goods rather energy and material that enters the economy exits the economy in a degraded form either initially as dissipated waste but even the final products eventually emerge and are
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dissipated into the environment as pollution and waste and this whole system that you see here is contained within the ecosphere so that all human economies regardless of whether it's this model or
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not are dependent subsystems of the ecosphere the modern techno-industrial economy is a parasite on nature a parasite can be
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defined as a organism or an entity that gains its vitality at the expense of the vitality of its host and what we see here is an economy growing indefinitely but utterly
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dependent for its growth on the on consuming and polluting the ecosphere its host from the inside out okay now in this context i want you to consider the following
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i think it's very important in the context of this conference to understand that climate change is not the greatest existential crisis or threat facing society that climate change is the problem
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is in fact a social construct it's something that we've made up and for a variety of reasons first of all we have to understand that thinking that climate change is the essential threat
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reflects our mechanistic linear cartesian reductionism at play this is kind of a something we've inherited from the the scientific revolution in the enlightenment and it also reflects that the modern
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human mind has a limited capacity to cope with real complexity well why is this problematic first of all the current obsession with climate change is a distraction from the real problem
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and that means that we can't solve climate change by focusing on climate change now those are very challenging assertions for a conference depend or rather focusing on climate change but i
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want to support them now climate change is only one of many critical assumptions of something that we call ecological overshoot we can define overshoot as a situation
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in which the human enterprise is using resources faster than ecosystems can regenerate and generating wastes faster than the assimilation capacities of the ecosphere can
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absorb and recycle them so that's overshoot it's endemic and it is the source of all of the current problems acidifying the oceans toxifying fresh waters overfishing the seas
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degrading landscapes and arable soils the expanding deserts the destruction of tropical forests it's the driver of biodiversity losses and we could have extended this list two
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or three stories below the floor here so the point is then that each of these is an independent symptom of a much greater problem called overshoot climate change is one of these symptoms
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but only a symptom and you can't fix climate change in isolation from these other symptoms of overshoot one of the ways that have come to light to reveal this problem is the model of the ecological
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footprint or the ecological footprint analysis which i developed over several decades with my various students it's the only i suppose sustainability indicator or tool
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that compares the supply of nature with human demand and we do that by reducing all energy and material flows to the area of land required to produce
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those materials or assimilate the wastes and what we find is that the last updated information because data comes in quite slowly it's for 2017 but if you look at 2017 on planet earth
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there were about 12 billion hectares of ecological productive land and water capable of producing bio resources and assimilating wastes but humans were using the earth as if there were about
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20.9 billion hectares so we can see that we are using the earth as if we're roughly 73 75 larger than it really is now how is that possible how can you be
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using a planet uh that's larger than the one you live on and the answer is because it's been an enormous accumulation of so-called natural capital resources over the course of geological time we're using
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oil and gas for example for example it took tens of millions of years to accumulate but what this really means what overshoot really means is that the human enterprise the population and our
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economies are growing by consuming dissipating and polluting the biophysical basis of its own existence it's actually a very very recent development on the time scale of human
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evolution if we take anatomically modern humans to have been around for about 350 000 years that's the extreme limit i think it took all of that time for us to reach
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a population of 1 billion in the early 1800s that's just 200 years ago but in the past 200 years which is one 1700th as much time we expanded an initial seven and a half
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fold so in one seventeen hundredth this much time we expanded seven and a half times longer than it took us to grow in the first billion years and during that period the last 200
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years real gross world product that is say the actual output of the economy increased by more than 100 fold and per capita incomes which really equates to consumption
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on average increase by a factor of 13 and as much as 25 in rich countries now all of this occurred on a planet which did not get any larger in fact will make the case later that it shrank
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this is what it looks like and in fact the x-axis could be extended to the left right back 250 000 years and what you would notice is that it's absolutely flat
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until just a couple of hundred years ago and what we have seen then in the last 200 years is an explosion of the human enterprise this continuous economic and popular
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population growth from this perspective is clearly an anomaly it's abnormal so the recent period of seven or eight or ten generations of people who have experienced growth take it to be the
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norm people today have socially constructed the idea of continuous growth to be normal when in fact we are residents of or denizens of the single most abnormal
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period in the history of the human species the second point to take from this is that it's all about oil and and fossil fuels generally what fossil fuels have done
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along with the advance of science is to enable humans to remove the negative feedback that kept us down below a billion people for most of our history so every species is controlled in its
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environment by negative feedback food shortages resource shortages diseases and so on and so forth but fossil fuel has given us the means by which we can acquire all the other resources need to grow the human
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enterprise we don't need fossil fuel per se we need the services it provides in giving us more food more resources pardon me resources of all kind enable
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us to grow and expand so two points we live in the most abnormal period in the history of humans kind and this abnormal period is a product
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of our extensive use of fossil fuel i want to keep the shape of this curve in mind as we go forward this just backs up the case i've just made
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this graph was provided to me by a friend david hughes who's a former energy analyst with the canadian government and from the period from 1850 to 2017
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the population increased six times our per capita consumption of energy in order to enable that to happen and for us to acquire all our goods and services energy per capita increased by nine fold
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but total consumption of energy has gone up 55-fold in that period of time so this is an extraordinary rate of exponential increase now i should have mentioned something
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way back here albert bartlett a very well-known physicist again the late albert bartlett at the university of colorado was famous for popularizing the statement that the greatest shortcoming
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of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function and i think these curves show it but this one in particular this is the expert the power of exponential growth is revealed by
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examining closely the growth in the use of fossil fuels the primary anthropogenic driver of climate change one half of all the fossil fuel ever used by human beings have been
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consumed in just the last 30 years 90 percent of all fossil fuels have been consumed since 1943 which just happens to be my birth year so 90 of all the fossil fuels
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ever used by humans have been used since i've been born and half of it since most of you in the audience have been born and we wonder why climate change might be accelerating keep in mind what exponential growth in
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means is that there's a constant doubling period however if we double then the numbers added in the course of the most recent doubling are equal to the sum
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of all the numbers added in all previous doublings which is why the curve accelerates steeply in this manner and it's not just fossil fuel of course i've made the point that it's given us
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access to everything else so just about everything that humans have to do with have increased exponentially as well and contrary to conventional wisdom another i suppose form of a social construct
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techno-efficiency promotes consumption the recent explosion and consumption and pollution of consumption and pollution has occurred during the period of unprecedented increases in technological
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and economic efficiency every major increase in efficiency encourages consumption we can talk about that later now i want to remind you of something i said way back at the beginning mainstream
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economic models contain no useful information about the structure or dynamic properties by that i mean the interdependencies the lags and thresholds the discontinuous or non-linear behaviors
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irreversibilities and limits of ecosystems or even social systems within which the economy operates in the real world so here we are driving the planet earth using an economic model that
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doesn't map in any significant way to the nature of the complex systems that it's supposedly managing this is like trying to drive the spaceship enterprise using a 1955
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volkswagen beetle driver's manual it's it's an insane proposition but yet we ask what could possibly go wrong and of course plenty and again i'm not putting climate change aside it's one of
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the most uh obvious symptoms of the problem the best known symptoms certainly and here we see a steady uptake in the output of carbon dioxide over the past uh what's 80 years or so
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you know 60 years and these measurements are taken at the top of the aunaloa observatory in hawaii at the top of a mountain they're so sensitive that you can see the annual
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cycle the upticks occur during the northern hemisphere winter when all the vegetation is shut down and carbon is not being absorbed from the atmosphere the downticks occur starting
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right now when summer or spring and summer that take hold photosynthesis is accelerating and actually taking carbon out of the atmosphere faster than we're adding it but each year
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the uptick is a little longer a little more severe than the downtick and the net effect is an exponential increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels so that we're now 45 above the pre-industrial level
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and keep in mind that carbon dioxide is the greatest single waste by weight of industrial society so this is no trivial observation in fact climate change in this perspective becomes a dissipative waste
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management issue okay of course temperature is linked to it now here are the graphs of temperature changes over roughly that same period 2020 that last full year of records tied
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with 2016 is the warmest year in the record in the past seven years of the warmest seven years on record but again and i really must emphasize this climate change is one symptom of a much
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bigger problem and i'll look at just one other symptom in detail and that's what i call the competitive displacement of non-human animals and plants from their habitats by human beings so
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if we look back ten thousand years ago there's now been two or three very good estimates of this and they're all plus or minus a percent or two within these numbers ten thousand years ago the
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dawn of agriculture wild mammals comprise 99 of the biomass the sheer weight of mammals on the planet humans were less than one percent now if we leave forward just 10 000 years to the
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present time well 2016 for these particular data human beings are now 32 percent of mammalian biomass and by the way the biomass itself has increased substantially because of human
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additions to productivity but humans and their various domesticated species now constitute 96 or better of the biomass of mammals and wild
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mammals are down to one and a half percent so humans have competitively displaced most of their mammalian species from their habitat and food resources now most of us are
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mesmerized by films of the vast herds of africa and so on but they're illusory because they're a fraction of what they used to be considered the bison in north america for example 200 years ago there were anywhere
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between 40 and 60 million bison that migrated and cruised through the great plains and into the boreal forest of north america they were reduced to a few hundreds by the turn of the last century
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and uh are simply no more i used to do a little exercise with one of my classes to estimate how many people are being supported by the product productivity of the great plains
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that used to sustain uh 60 million bison and you can figure out the energetic equivalent and we know how many people are now being supported by the habitat that used to sustain the
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bison but it's not just mammals bird populations are also tumbling domestic poultry constitutes 70 percent of the world's bird biomass the average populations of thousands of species that
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are regularly monitored have declined 60 since 1970. the populations of invertebrates including various pollinators are also in free fall butterflies are down by 50
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53 and so on so what i'm really saying is that the human kind by expanding indefinitely on a finite planet cannot help but to displace other species
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so this points out something very important that we just have to wrap our heads around many if not most of our social constructs are little more than shared illusions so the data i've just shown you and many
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other trends we could go on all day show that contrary to conventional political wisdom which is again a social construct there is an absolute conflict between the growth of the human enterprise and the protection and
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conservation of the environment i'm sure everyone here has heard politicians say there's no reason why we can't grow the economy and conserve the environment and i think what i've shown is there's many
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many reasons the reasons they don't see it is because the models we're using don't contain anything useful about the environment but as we have seen continuous population and material growth on a finite planet necessarily
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means the displacement of non-human species from their habitats and their food sources remember humans are just better than other species at expanding into all available habitats and using up
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all available resources climate change is an inevitable consequence of continuous fossil fuel growth on a finite planet that is already in overshoot and again for any one of the
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other symptoms i could i carry this on now what's going on here and i think one of the major problems is that we're caught in what i call the trap of self-reference
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mainstream technical industrial society is completely self-referencing we socially construct solutions to our problems from within the same set of previously constructed beliefs values facts and
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assumptions this just folds in on itself we don't live in the real world we make it up and then we try to make up solutions to the problems created because our first constructs were off base by referring to the same set of beliefs
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values and assumptions so that we have a predominant belief in perpetual economic growth through continuous technological advances and we keep referring to this to find new solutions and i can give you
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several examples but i'm just going to use two if we go back 50 years or so when i became interested in these questions population planning was the dominant policy lever being
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considered by international agencies and governments to address the problem of overpopulation but by 2018 it was the least researched approach out there
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so a recent paper finds that and this is a quote we find a strong and increasing focus on feeding the world through increasing food production via technology so again
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unlimited growth it's possible because we can do it through technology the second example well climate change again to avoid potentially catastrophic climate change the paris accord states
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that we must reduce carbon emissions by about 50 below 210 level or 2010 levels by 2030 that by the way seven percent per year beginning right now or we should achieve complete
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decarbonization by 2050. by the way some studies suggest that this should be 2030. so here we are a a whole global culture based on fossil fuel but we can't use any more of it
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after 10 or perhaps 30 years at the best okay but what are the politically so acceptable solutions to this problem paris gives us this direction this is what
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we're allowed to talk about any solution that is constructed in ways that help to maintain the growth-based economic order
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and this includes any capital intestine inves a capital-intensive investment that sometimes will stimulate growth job creation such as wind and solar power electronic vehicles
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electric vehicles non-existent carbon capture technologies geo-engineering we'd actually now depend for most of our so-called zero uh emissions by 2050 are non-existent
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technologies in the hope that they'll you know be invented in the next few years so in other words we're completely reliant given our current mindset the the world view that we have created on
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technological fixes that are designed to ensure the maintenance of the status quo and in fact one of the best analysts of the businesses is clive spash he has written several papers but i
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think this is a key quote disaster policy is being designed to serve the capitalist growth based economy so the latter becomes the solution to rather than the cause of the problem again you can see this kind of circularity
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throughout here sometimes editorial cartoonists say it all and i thought this was one of the most brilliant when you have in mind that the economy is all there is to be concerned about uh
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and the environment is a kind of externality then this is the net result so what's really going on here i well we've already talked about the fact that we're operating out of
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what is effectively uh i suppose a maladaptive social construct but it's really very convoluted and complex first of all raw power
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the corporate sector and other vested interests have an enormous hold on government policy there's a revolving door between major corporate entities and regulatory agencies for example it's
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called agency capture many of the government agencies that are supposed to regulate say the oil sector or the gas sector are now under direction of people who used to work in the oil and gas sector so that's
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just one example of the way raw power operates here to maintain the status quo another one is that business and money deletes people with power will not tolerate threats to the socioeconomic or
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the political status that's obvious and we're all complicit in this probably no one listening to this conference lives a sustainable lifestyle ordinary people certainly those of us
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enjoying the good life are seduced by the growth ethic which is cheap goods by a globalization and freer markets and we basically cheer the policymakers from the bleachers and we'll see in a moment why
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that's an important consideration but there's something else at play here you've all heard how renewable energy particularly solar and wind energy is about to blow fossil fuels out of the water it's not
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happening despite the investment hype and promotion by mainstream environmental organizations modern renewables wind turbines solar photovoltaics cannot quantitatively
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substitute for fossil fuels you can challenge me on that we can talk about it decisive action if governments took decisive action to reduce emissions this would require reducing fossil fuel
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use but in the absence of substitutes this would result in severe energy shortages massive job losses and economic disruption on a scale we've not imagined
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keep in mind that the entire system that we've built is built on fossil fuels so rather than risk certain political and economic chaos in the short term governments are willing to risk
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disastrous climate change in the longer term and that's when it will be somebody else's problem we're operating according to a four-year election cycle in canada for example so let's delay the decisions
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as long as possible so this is all about human nature it's not logical it's not reasonable it's not rational humans have an innate tendency this is
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something we're born with and which was very adapted 10 000 years ago for what even economists refer to as temporal spatial and social discounting we naturally value the our comfortable
00:40:10
present our home communities and close relatives and friends over any uncertain future threat distant places and complete strangers and if you look at how climate change is being characterized when it's uncertain
00:40:25
it's going to happen in the future and probably it'll affect the poor people far away more than it will affect us because we're rich and can insulate ourselves from the worst aspects of us well that just feeds
00:40:36
exactly into our natural tendency to discount and there's another factor here and it's that is when people it doesn't matter who you are a major leader or just an ordinary person feels that your social
00:40:49
status or political power is under threat we act defensively when we are threatened we act defensively in which case our passion and our instincts trump reason reason is not generally a major
00:41:01
factor in the kinds of decisions we're talking about so here's the problem we seek answers we seek simple but wrong answers and the result is partial solutions that favor
00:41:14
businesses unusual and in this i'm going to include the green new deal which is based on so-called renewable energy green growth the idea of the circular economy and so on all of these uh new
00:41:27
visions we can call them visions what did the previous speaker refer to them as imaginaries are really businesses as usual by alternative means
00:41:39
the status quo by alternative means keeping the present going but using a different form of energy what we really require to get out of this is something entirely different
00:41:51
and that is significant absolute reductions in energy and material throughput major lifestyle changes a planned socially just economic and population contraction which is to say a
00:42:04
whole new social construct in fact a whole new uh way of viewing the world which is not accessible from within the box that we are currently operating what was it einstein who said we cannot solve
00:42:17
our problems with the same level of thinking that created them and yet that's exactly what we are doing over and over and over again so we can't get here from
00:42:29
okay now in theory and this is again important because we all think of ourselves as unique in some way we should be able to avoid going over the cliff these are qualities that distinguish us
00:42:42
in quantity or or kind from other species high intelligence our capacity for logical analysis the ability to reason from the evidence here's one that's absolutely unique to humans the ability to plan ahead we're
00:42:55
the only species that can in detail undertake various measures that will change the future course of of our history we have the capacity to exercise moral judgment we have empathy or compassion
00:43:09
for other people and for other species or at least the potential for these things by the way so does some other species but again we have this in greater dimensions we have uniquely diverse forms and institutions for cooperative behavior
00:43:22
should we choose to use them so all of these things are on our side but if we look through history none of them come into play in in any significant way in directing
00:43:35
the main thrust of history and there's a wonderful book by pulitzer prize winning historian barbara tuchman they're called the march of folly in which she refers to wooden headedness
00:43:47
and it plays a remarkably large role in government it consists of assessing a situation in terms of preconceived notions such as ideology one of our many forms of social constructs while
00:44:01
ignoring contrary signs it is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts well that's the major governance dimension going forward today
00:44:14
derek jensen a popular writer but very wise in many respects said it this way for us to maintain our living we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves the lies are necessary
00:44:26
because without them we would have to recognize that many deplorable acts are really impossibilities now a couple of earlier speakers i think
00:44:38
ehrenfeld today actually talked about the human brain i'm going to refer to it too but but in a different way not left or right brain but in terms of the evolutionary sequence an idea that was originally developed in
00:44:50
the 50s i guess by paul mclean he argued that like human beings really have a brain structure that is common to other kinds of organisms we seem to have something similar to the reptilian
00:45:03
complex this is what we we call the old brain we have a limbic system a mammalian or midbrain and on top of that we've developed more than any other species a cerebrum
00:45:14
the neocortex for example and it's the seat of logic and reason it's forward thinking and planning technical manipulation language and speech but it operates on top of a limbic
00:45:27
system which is the seed of our emotions our feelings our responses a bonding and attachment in memory and that sits on top of the reptilian brain complex which is
00:45:39
concerned with physical survival the fight or flight response various hardwired rituals and instinctive responses now the point is that we live in consciousness in our cerebrum
00:45:52
but we're not aware of the impulses coming to us from the midbrain or even our instincts in many instances so the brain acts as an integrated whole but there are different circumstances in
00:46:04
with in which different parts of the brain are really in charge sometimes it is logic and reason other times we act almost entirely out of our emotional brain and other times it's instinct that
00:46:16
commands of the day the bottom line here is that human beings are a deeply convicted species or conflicted conflicted species and again editorial cartoons sometimes say it all so here's
00:46:29
a typical uh i don't know shareholders meeting or chamber of commerce meeting so while the end of the world scenario is rife with unimaginable horror we believe that the pre-end period is
00:46:41
filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit brilliant and here's a perfect example of exactly what this kind of mentality takes us to
00:46:53
again here's that replication of the uptick in carbon dioxide over the last um 60 years or so and what we see here is a an uptick that is actually accelerating
00:47:07
it's getting worse it's not getting better and someone added all of these different black arrows showing where the major conferences on climate changes or major agreements rather than climate changes have taken place so over the
00:47:20
past 50 or 60 years we've actually had 34 climate conferences a half a dozen major international climate agreements where we've agreed to stop this process from going forward
00:47:32
and we've heard dozens of scientists warning the first was the limits to growth perhaps then there's the world scientists warning to humanity back in 1991 and there's been two additional ones in the last couple of years but the
00:47:46
fact is none of these have succeeded in putting a dimple in the steady upward ticking of the carbon dioxide emissions so that assuming present trends continue the odds are quite good
00:48:00
that humankind will become the best informed extinct species on the planet we're simply not paying attention to the existing friends that threaten us and even when we agree to do so
00:48:13
we don't enforce or comply with our own agreements now brain science has moved forward so that we now have a an explanatory cognitive mechanism for this and i think this is really
00:48:25
important to understand because it bears very much on the last speaker's program for moving forward it turns out that during individual development as you age and mature your
00:48:37
sensory experiences and any oft repeated cultural constructs literally help to shape the synaptic circuits of your brain in patterns that reflect and embed those experiences
00:48:50
any musician knows this is how this is how we learn to play a musical instrument for example but it works also for routine thought patterns or for
00:49:01
frequently repeated ideological perceptions for example now once these synaptic circuits are in place we have a problem because remember i said people live out
00:49:12
of their social constructs so once we get these things embedded in our brains we seek out compatible experiences this by the way is known as confirmation bias we seek out people who think the way do we
00:49:26
do we think about events and conferences such as this one which conform or confirms which we think and more importantly when faced with information that does not agree with our preformed internal structures we deny
00:49:40
discredit reinterpret or forget that information so this becomes the neurological basis for climate denial and if you want a really good little summary of these kinds of this kind of thinking look for bruce wexler's little
00:49:53
book called brain and culture it's not by any means the only one but it's a nice summary well to put this more simply the problem with our reason solutions is that they don't fit society's
00:50:05
preconceived notions of the nature of the problem and so we don't implement them things get worse we're engaged or have been for some decades now
00:50:16
in the manufacturing of consent the population has literally been socially engineered to ignore reality if you want a good starting point to study this i i advise that you read or go into
00:50:29
the little url at the bottom of the page about the powell memorandum the lewis powell memorandum of 1971 in many ways was a landmark in getting underway
00:50:42
the capturing of public imagination in ways that enable us to in effect promote the corporate agenda the neoliberal economic agenda
00:50:54
and essentially suppress all other ways of thinking in any case politics is increasingly influenced these days by neoliberal ideology religious fundamentalism climate change denial
00:51:07
anti-intellectualism and many other forms of so-called magical thinking thinking that has no basis in reality in fact the situation is so bad that in 2016 the oxford dictionaries of the english language
00:51:20
uh chose as its word of the year post truth and defined it as relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion
00:51:34
than our appeals to emotion and personal belief so again we almost purposefully circumvent our rational capacities the power of the cerebellum or our cerebral hemispheres
00:51:45
rather and uh appeal to our emotions and instincts and that that of course is a path to destruction in the certain world we're in so we're entering a page of an age of unreason science denial and magical
00:51:59
thinking welcome to the enduring this is not the enlightenment obviously now the latest example of magical thinking just came out a couple of weeks ago you can look again to the url at the bottom of the page
00:52:13
it appeared as an article called climate scientists the concept of net zero is a dangerous trap it's written by three climate scientists who talk about the notion of net zero as a technological
00:52:26
impossibility hence a dangerous trap and they argue as i have for years that the only way to keep humanity safe is the immediate and sustained radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in a socially
00:52:39
just way this means abandoning fossil fuels current net zero policies will not keep warming to within one and a half degrees because they were never intended to they were and are still driven by the need to
00:52:52
protect business as usual not the climate a point i earlier made and has been supported by others in the literature if we want to keep people safe then large and sustained cuts to carbon emissions need to happen now now
00:53:06
they don't emphasize nearly enough that this means we have to simultaneously abandon fossil fuel and maintain society and intact so what i'm really arguing here at bottom
00:53:18
is that our modern techno-industrial industrial culture refuses to acknowledge that to act consistently with our best science not just climate science but our best understanding of
00:53:30
human relationships to the rest of nature as an embedded subsystem of the ecosphere to act consistently with this science requires a planned economic and population contraction the question
00:53:43
before us is not can we avoid climate change but can humanity live more equitably within the biophysical means of nature now i'm going to introduce one more
00:53:55
element of human biology and this time it's a warning and i'm going to make the case that as matters stand the expansion of the human enterprise resembles the plague phase of a one-off
00:54:07
population boom bust cycle this is straight out of a biology textbook it shows how many populations in nature grow rapidly under conditions of environmental when the environmental
00:54:20
conditions favor growth because we all have the potential for exponential expansion but then they bust they collapse when nutrients are depleted or disease becomes a factor or predation becomes a major element
00:54:33
so this is a normal occurrence in nature notice the shape of that curve in the boom phase it's exactly the curve that human beings have been on for the past 200 years the question is once we've reached that peak are we able to sustain
00:54:47
ourselves there having depleted the resource bases that got us there in the first place here's some real world examples a classic study of reindeer populations on some islands off the coast of alaska
00:54:58
introduced grew slowly then rapidly in an exponential way for some decades and then crashed when the lycans were overgrazed so if we go back to humans this is the curve that needs flattening
00:55:11
i'm kind of using the analysis of the pandemic but the red curve the overshoot curve is the path we're on we're in overshoot we've surpassed the carrying capacity of the planet and
00:55:24
as long as we remain in overshoot the carrying capacity is being depleted that's the dotted red line so we're losing carrying capacity because we're living by eroding the biophysical basis
00:55:36
of our own existence the green line is the line we should have followed rising toward carrying capacity and then leveling out our population and demands on nature
00:55:48
within the output of nature so that would be living on one planet we're living on 1.75 planets the inevitable consequences of overshoot are either systems collapse or a controlled slide
00:56:02
down that curve to where we follow the red dots here because we've already lost so much of our carrying capacity so here's the choice before us in my view the human enterprise is in critical
00:56:15
overshoot climate change is one symptom we may be near or beyond a crucial tipping point in coming years the human enterprise will contract no question as an
00:56:27
intelligent planned capable species we can theoretically choose between risking business as usual which means a potential chaotic implosion imposed by nature followed by
00:56:39
geopolitical turmoil and resource wars that's the cat tack we're on in my opinion or we can opt for a well-planned orderly and cooperative cooperative descent toward a
00:56:51
socially just sustainability for all there's a lot to this i invite you to request a copy of the slides but the main points are that we need to recognize the formal end of
00:57:06
material growth and the need to reduce the human eco footprint by 80 or so we need to admit the theoretical of practical difficulties in fact in possibility of an all green quantitatively equivalent energy
00:57:18
transition it's simply not in the cards we have to acknowledge that as long as we remain in overshoot unsustainable production consumption means less production and consumption pardon me that should be as long as we
00:57:32
are in overshoot then sustainability means less production and consumption we need to assist families we need to retrain the workforce we need new fiscal strategies we need policies to
00:57:44
restructure the global and national economies we need processes to remain allocate the remaining carbon budget to essential uses such as food production we can't afford to fly all over the planet any longer we need plans to
00:57:57
relocalize essential economic activity deglobalization we need to recognize the equitable sustainability requires fiscal mechanisms for income and wealth redistribution we need an ongoing program to ensure the restoration of
00:58:10
ecosystems and the integrity of the global life support systems that sustain us we need a global population strategy to enable a smooth descent to the one or two billion people that could live comfortably indefinitely within the
00:58:24
means of nature now there might be a lot of argument about these but that's where i think we have to go thank you very much thank you very much professor riso is an extremely insightful talk and
00:58:39
very comprehensive as well i think our audience was impressed and really appreciated you
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