A Controversial Assertion on Climate Change

I recently wrote a multi-part series about Turning Climate Change On Its Head.  In this post, I will try to reduce the essence of that series to 30 statements, and a controversial conclusion.  I am dispassionately following the facts where they lead.  You tell me where the logic might be questioned.

The Aanimad Assertion on Climate Change

[It seems that even a single blog post can run a little long for some, so I have added a three-statement summary of my assertion:

A.  Given that life is predicated on growth, biosustainability REQUIRES negative feedback.

B.  Fossil fuels and number-based value systems have resulted in humans neutralizing nature's usual negative feedback mechanisms.

C.  Climate Change IS the missing and required negative feedback.

What follows is the detailed derivation of this assertion.]

1. Climate Change is the process whereby the climate of the Earth is warming up due to the greenhouse effect, which is caused by megatons of greenhouse gases (primarily CO₂) being released into the atmosphere at rates exceeding the rates at which natural processes are able to re-assimilate them.

2. The vast majority of current human-generated CO₂ production is caused by the burning of fossil fuels, which has exponentially increased because of civilization’s exponentially increased use of fossil fuels to provide energy.

3. The energy from fossil fuels has been used to power massive leaps in human technology, survival, and standards of living, including the ability to live in relatively inhospitable climates and to provide food for a hugely growing population.

4. All living things are characterized by a drive for growth and propagation.  Without such imperatives, any species would soon disappear from the biosphere.  Humans are no different.

5. The natural control for unfettered exponential growth of any one species is negative feedback.  ["Negative" does not describe good or bad.  It is used in the scientific sense, as in "feedback in opposite phase with (i.e. decreasing) the input".]  Negative feedback is a necessity for sustainable systems.  [In this case, "sustainable systems" refers to the dynamic balance required to allow a species population to continue to exist.]

6. Negative feedback occurs in two forms: kind and unkind.  Kind negative feedback includes concepts of peak sufficiency, where the organism chooses to alter a behaviour.  ["Peak sufficiency" refers to the peak value, after which more would not be desirable.  It is a maximum, not a minimum.]   Unkind negative feedback includes impacts such as resource shortages, disease, and conflict, which almost invariably arise as a direct result of the growth itself.

7. While physiological concepts of peak sufficiency (as applied to food, sleep, warmth, etc.) have not changed for humans, our knowledge and understanding of science have progressed to the point where, combined with the awesome energy of fossil fuels, we are able to circumvent many of nature’s unkind negative feedback mechanisms, such as disease, food scarcity, and habitat limitations.

8. Having apparently bypassed nature’s unkind negative feedback for population control, humans have followed the natural drives of any species for growth, propagation, and maximal use of all available resources.

9. The rise of agriculture transformed our required food inputs from things found in nature to (mostly) things managed (and therefore ‘owned’) by humans.

10. Since humans no longer felt totally vulnerable to the influence of nature, and saw its resources as boundless, they developed human-centric economic paradigms, independent of natural linkages, consisting predominantly of producers and consumers, where nature’s bounty was simply a given.

11. It is suggested that the evolution of agriculture, trade, and ownership led to increasingly sophisticated numeracy skills, and societies where numbers were used to measure wealth.  For example, trade led to the introduction of some form of money, and ownership led to counting what is owned.  From this arose number-based values, which are different from our innate qualitative values.

12. Number-based values are measures where more is always worth more.  Since numbers are limitless, wealth measured by number is such that More is Always Better, and the negative feedback concept of peak sufficiency does not apply in number-based value calculations.

13. Having removed the concept of peak sufficiency from our predominant measure of wealth, humans eventually created entities (business corporations) who embodied number-based values exclusively, leveraging the intrinsic positive feedback loops of numbers, without being subject to the mortal filters of human qualitative values or even the limitations of human life spans.

14. Adopting value systems which have no concept of peak sufficiency (i.e. kind negative feedback), while bypassing nature’s unkind negative feedback, results in an unsustainable way of life for our species.  (See 5.)

15. Exponential growth of human population and technology transpired over a time that was not long enough for the natural world to evolve adaptations for the changes or processes to deal with the inevitable waste products of exponentially increasing economic activity.

16. As civilization is something that happens with physiological beings (who must live within nature’s complexity on a finite planet), any economic model that does not account for nature’s inputs and waste management is fatally flawed.   (See 10.)

17. One important fundamental need of economic activity and human survival is energy.  Fossil fuels continue to provide the vast majority of cheap energy, so their exponential consumption is tied to exponentially growing economic activity.

18. One impact of relentless economic activity expansion and population growth is (1) anthropogenic climate change.  Other direct impacts include (2) freshwater withdrawals, (3) nitrogen/phosphorus loading, (4) land conversion, and (5) biodiversity loss.

19. Being disconnected from nature, the neoliberal economic models did not effectively address waste management, resulting in (6) chemical pollution, (7) ocean acidification, (8) air pollution, and (9) ozone layer depletion.

20. The nine impacts listed above are collectively known as Ecological Overshoot.  Climate Change is only one of these serious threats to human civilization and the continuance of our species.  This combination of multiple looming disasters is where the term “polycrisis” originates.

21a. Human civilization got to this point because we adopted a predominant measure of wealth that had no concept of peak sufficiency (reducing the influence of natural kind negative feedback on our consumptive behaviours), and we circumvented nature’s typical unkind negative feedback (which controls population growth).   (See 8 and 12.)

21b.  This is not to say that we abandoned our core qualitative (human) values (like justice, compassion, beauty, joy, integrity, etc.).  Those are hardwired into our brains.  However, we have allowed those values be consistently trumped by number-based values, and created powerful entities (corporations) that do not recognize our human core values.   (See 13.)

22a. Our current economic model of More is Always Better, combined with the absence of integration with concepts of finite resource and waste management, can be directly tied to all nine components of Ecological Overshoot.

22b.  I refer to this situation (where one factor is a key cause of the polycrisis of Ecological Overshoot) as our Value Crisis.  The idea that one factor might be at the root of a polycrisis is where the term “metacrisis” originates.

23. Given that we are in a polycrisis, solving, mitigating, or adapting to Climate Change will likely have minimal impact on any of the other major threats of Ecological Overshoot.

24. However, addressing the metacrisis and correcting the basis of our economic values could indeed mitigate and potentially reverse all of these nine threats listed above.

25. Recent evidence suggests that humanity will not voluntarily comprehensively correct its current way of life and the economic values that underpin that.  I suggest that we are unable to solve the metacrisis on our own.  (See, for example, The Value Change Conundrum.)

26. Any serious attempt to correct our flawed economic values will be vigorously opposed by the massive forces that derive their wealth from those values.

27. Still, Climate Change poses a serious threat to our current way of life.  It is popularly the most pressing (and increasingly visible) threat to our economic activity.

28. Climate Change therefore constitutes one of nature’s most powerful negative feedback mechanisms to the economic values that caused it.

29. The other aspects of Ecological Overshoot will not be far behind, and will have similarly disastrous consequences for human civilization.

30. Unkind negative feedback is never desirable to the targeted species.  We are therefore highly motivated to resist it.  However, the negative outcomes of our poly/metacrisis for the human race are similar, whether Climate Change is ‘solved’ or not.

Concluding Assertion:

a)         The impulse to demand action on mitigating the effects of Climate Change is inevitable for human nature, but that action will not dramatically change the prospects for civilization and our species.   (See 26, 29, 22, 24, 25 and 28.)

b)         On the contrary, given that Climate Change could be the force needed to break humanity out of its flawed economic values, the sooner that happens the better, before the effects of the other aspects of Ecological Overshoot become irreversibly fatal.   (See 24, 27, 21, 23, and 28.)

c)         Climate Change could well be a major part of the solution to our metacrisis.  Our primary focus should be on restoring some precedence of qualitative values to be adopted after systems which rely exclusively on number-based values are no longer working for us, and how to minimize the damage from that transition.

d)         Rejecting the unquestioned precedence of number-based values, acknowledging our interrelationships with nature, and rethinking the definition and role of commercial corporations could be enough to redirect civilization towards a sustainable model.   (See 21, 16, 13, and 5.)

Disclaimer:

? - Am I opposed to citizens demanding action on Climate Change?

No, but only so long as there is a realization that the real challenge is the causal value system underpinning Climate Change.  Our compassionate instincts insist that we do our best to combat the destructive impact of fossil fuel burning, however, I do not accept that any significant gains will be made in the attempt.

If explicit by-products of any climate change action include an increased awareness of the root cause of our multi-part polycrisis (that being a flawed value system), and greater acceptance of our true role within the biosphere, then I have to support that.

If, on the other hand, the proposal is that we can somehow continue our current behaviours and economic model simply under an alternative energy source, then I oppose such delusional thinking.

I also oppose the demonization of the fossil fuel industry.  Those corporations, like all commercial corporations, are acting precisely in the manner that society programmed them and continues to demand them to.

Support for The Aanimad Assertion on Climate Change:

The following scientists and progressive thinkers have signed on as supporters of this Assertion:

John Maskell, PhD - Brockville, ON
Member, Canadian Association for the Club of Rome

Ruben F.W. Nelson - Calgary, AB
Executive Director, Foresight Canada
Member Emeritus, Association of Professional Futurists 

Mike Nickerson - Lanark, ON
Seventh Generation Initiative
Member, Canadian Association for the Club of Rome 
Author of Life, Money & Illusion

Andrew Welch - Alton, ON
Member, Canadian Association for the Club of Rome 
Author of The Value Crisis

A Human Behaviour Crisis?

In September, 2023, a group of authors, led by Joseph Merz, put out a peer-reviewed paper that captured significant interest in the world of ecological economics.  The paper is titled “World scientists’ warning: The behavioural crisis driving ecological overshoot”.

It immediately caught my attention because, in line with my own thinking, the paper proposed that looming disasters like climate change and the loss of biodiversity were just symptoms of a bigger problem.  Instead of trying to fix symptoms, a far more effective strategy for humanity is to track down the causes and explore solutions to those.  I hope that, by now, we can all accept that human behaviours are behind our most serious threats to species continuance.  This particular group of authors suggested that this human behaviour crisis was driven by the intentional manipulation of innate adaptive behaviours.  Specifically, Economic Growth, Marketing, and Pronatalism (encouraging population growth) were being used to exploit populations into behaving in ways that were ultimately not in humanity's best long-term interest.

[If you are curious about the details, I encourage you to read the paper for yourself.  For an academic work, it is a fairly easy read.  It also proposes a solution, which I found intriguing but less compelling.]

This short reactive exploration builds on the content of that paper, which asserts:

“While human behaviours were implicit in the various world scientists’ warnings, we believe they need explicit attention and concerted emergency action in order to avoid a ghastly future.”

I believe this is absolutely correct.  For decades, world scientists have stated that human behaviours had to change, but they insufficiently examined the driving source of the maladaptive behaviours in the first place.  My graphic image above summarizes the premise nicely.  I want to now take this exploration one step deeper.

Who is holding the hammer?

This post asks:  Who (or what) is behind that exploitation?  Why have those behaviours been exploited?  Obviously, a select fraction of the population profited from it, but can we really assume that some kind of all-trumping wealth-maximization motivation is innate in all humans?  Answers such as “greed”, “wealth”, or “power” might be implicitly assumed, however, I fear they are untested.  For all the same reasons behind the identification of a human behavioural crisis, the perpetrators and values driving that exploitation need explicit attention, and that may well lead to a different concerted emergency action.

The paper hints very slightly at a factor where my own personal research began:

“Like other species, H. sapiens is capable of exponential population growth (positive feedback) but until recently, major expansions of the human enterprise, including increases in consumption and waste, were held in check by negative feedback – e.g. resource shortages, competition and disease – which naturally curbed continued population growth.”

I accept that each and every species has an innate drive to increase their population and expand into as much territory as possible – to grow, occupy, and consume.  In a system of negative feedback where each life form is ultimately consumed by others, a drive to increase population is necessary to offset risk factors and ensure a continuance of presence.  (Any species that lacked sufficient capability for that would have disappeared long ago.)  The drive to occupy territory corresponds with the needs for an increased population.  As for consumption, it is one of the basic conditions (if not definitions) of life.

The critical element in all of this is the concept of sufficiency.  There are peak values for growth, territory, and consumption, after which benefits to the individual life form invariably cease, to be replaced by negative outcomes.  I suggest that there is nothing in the ‘natural’ world where More is ALWAYS Better.  There are peaks and limits.  Furthermore, it could be argued that energy is the ultimate expression of value, but energy cannot be created from nothing, and entropy takes its cut of every transaction.  We exist in a world subject to the laws of thermodynamics, on a planet of finite resources.  A never-endingly increasing value does not exist anywhere in nature.

The measure of any resource value to any life form therefore expresses a qualitative value – one that depends on context and marginal utility.  More is not always better.

And yet, what if a higher species created another kind of value for itself – one measured by number, where (within that value system) more is always better.  Such a quantitative value system has no concept of sufficiency.  This is what I propose humanity has done, with the creation of the concept of virtual (monetary) wealth.  Within a monetary system, more money is always worth more than less.  In 1926, Nobel-laureate chemist Frederick Soddy (in Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt) pointed out that money is not subject to the laws of thermodynamics, even though all of the material things exchanged for it are.  Monetary wealth can be created from absolutely nothing (and is – as debt), and does not lose numeric value in transactions.  Being just a number, the potential value expressed is theoretically limitless, and it can exist virtually – it does not require material objects to back up that value.

This takes us back to the two significant questions that the paper raised for me:

a)      Who (or what) is behind that exploitation of behaviours?

b)      Why have those behaviours been exploited?

I suggest that the driving forces behind this exploitation would not be possible, or at least anywhere near as influential, without humanity’s adoption of an overwhelming precedence of number-based (quantitative) values.  The predominant overarching goal of the entities (be they individuals or corporations) is an increase in monetary wealth.  This is not a ‘natural’ value.

Contrast this goal, for example, with the human impulses listed in the paper – the ones that those entities are leveraging for their own gain:

• seek pleasure and avoid pain;
• acquire, amass and defend resources from competitors;
• display dominance, status or sex appeal through size, beauty, physicality, aggression and/or ornamentation;
• procrastinate rather than act whenever action does not have an immediate survival benefit particularly for ourselves, close relatives and our home territories (humans are innate temporal, social and spatial discounters).

I suggest that all of these are qualitative values, subject to peaks, sufficiency, and negative feedback loops.  Also consider the simple imperative of procreation.  The mathematics of population growth often produces exponential curves, but that is never the whole story.  Steep curves are brought down with equal speed by overcrowding, disease, food shortages, and increased predatory populations.  In nature, explosive growth always creates the circumstances required for that growth to collapse.  The same mathematics can be applied to unfettered economic growth – the major differences being that there is no limit to the potential monetary wealth, and there is no inherent negative feedback built-in to that growth.  (Most importantly, what if climate change is the negative feedback that has been inevitable from the beginning?)

According to the paper:

“Fossil fuels enabled us to reduce negative feedback (e.g. food shortages) and thus delay and evade the consequences of surpassing natural limits.”

This is quite true, and there is no question that the Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) civilization that followed has been a major contributor to our exponential population growth and the resulting ecological overshoot.  However, I propose that our ability to reek havoc upon our environment is due to more than just the capability of our technology to outpace human evolution.  Something is still amplifying the incentives for that technology and defining the destructive principles used for its implementation.  Moreover, humans are not alone at the pinnacle of the pyramid.  There is another significant player in this narrative that hardly gets a mention in the paper – corporations.

I propose that, from economic, ecological, and sociological perspectives, corporations must be considered as a separate species and treated as such for the kind of work that we do.  They have full status as legal persons and increasingly claim rights created for humans, and they operate indepen­dently of their creators in almost all respects.  Furthermore, this is a species that is not subject to any natural laws of sufficiency, that can grow to any size, and has a theoretically unlimited lifespan.  Most importantly, this species is entirely based on a quantitative value system that is not subject to the laws of thermodynamics, so they can create ‘tangible’ value from nothing.  And even though this value system is man-made, it is unhindered by human morals or ethics.  We programmed them this way!  This, I believe, is an accurate description of the public-traded commercial corporation.

It is impossible to state with certainty that the technologies that we have today would have eventually appeared, regardless of the participation of corporations in an MTI society.  Still, I argue that the pace of technology, the uses of technology, and the impact of technology on our ecological overshoot is inextricably tied to the singular quantitative value systems of commercial corporations.  To push civilization to the brink that we currently teeter on, it is necessary to have blinders to a great deal of evidence of self-destructive behaviours – evidence and warnings that go back hundreds of years.  The ability of monetary wealth to trump all other human and ethical values is the just the thing to provide those blinders.  After all, “it’s nothing personal – it’s just business”.

This is why, 20 years ago, when I asked the same “Why?” questions as did the researchers for this human behaviour crisis paper, I concluded that human behaviours were based on values, and what civilization was experiencing is a value crisis.

Human Behaviour Crisis or Value Crisis?

This is not just a rewording of exactly the same concept.  Good and bad behaviours can be difficult to empirically identify, but the difference between measuring success by quality or measuring it by quantity (where more is always worth more) is crystal clear.  It is not that one value system is good and the other is bad.  The point is that if society gives number-based values practically unlimited power to trump every qualitative human value, we are headed for a guaranteed disaster – and ecological overshoot.

For example, when you can translate limited resources into a limitless value, impervious to decay, and do so in such a way that the resulting scarcity drives the value of additional consumption even higher, that is a positive feedback recipe for resource annihilation.  If we’re looking for clues as to how humans circumvented natural negative feedback mechanisms, it seems to me that basing much of society on value systems that freely create and leverage exponential curves without any hindrance from natural laws and limitations would be a great place to start.

In addition, it is imperative that the role of corporations be included as an integral part of any search for solutions to the human behavioural crisis.  This is not just because of their phenomenal impact, but because, in the words of Yuval Noah Harari, public corporations are myths – they exist only on paper, and operate under arbitrary values and laws that we established in their entirety.  That proves that theoretically we could change any of those factors, and thus change those entities overnight. Such changes might not seem practical or likely right now, but those probabilities will change if/when we accept that civilization, as we know it, might be on the line.

Yes, I agree that human behaviour has been meticulously, psychologically (and mathematically) exploited.  This has been so effective and well-established that we are not only dealing with entrenched flawed perspectives – we also have gross examples of hedonic adaptation on a cultural scale.  Despite unprecedented population numbers, a large portion of the planet also consumes more energy, more materials, and more residential square footage per capita than ever before.  How can generations of people living this lifestyle ever be expected to voluntarily scale back?

I used to believe that the only mechanism possible to provide a paradigm shift of sufficient significance would be some kind of catastrophic system collapse.  I now believe that there is great potential in (re-)emerging policies like a Universal Basic Income, which severs the umbilical that our MTI society instituted between survival and the job-imperative, allowing people to view money, time, and lives in an altered light.

Turning Climate Change on its Head

Inspired by the work of Bill Rees (video), David Korten, and other thought leaders, I am moved to present a clear chain of thought, in six steps, leading inescapably (for me) to a surprising conclusion about Climate Change.  If widely accepted, this would turn the Climate Change Movement on its head.  I don't kid myself that this blog will have the viral impact needed to inspire real change, however, I challenge you, the reader, to choose any of the steps below and show me where my conclusion is problematic.

I present all six in summary here and have prepared a separate blog entry for each one, going into details and more explicitly presenting my case for the validity of my surprising conclusion.

#1 - The Law of Propagation and Consumption

All living species are programmed at their core to propagate and make maximum use of available resources.  Evolution has consistently selected for these properties.  When these biological imperatives are unchecked, they lead inevitably to exponential growth and resource depletion.  (Read more)

#2 - The Law of Negative Feedback

Paradoxically, exponential growth and non-stop resource depletion are entirely unsustainable on a finite planet.  Nature controls for these imperatives by providing negative feedback mechanisms.  Evolution balances these two forces.  However, if the negative feedback is too great, the species will disappear.  On the other hand, the negative feedback can’t fail, because if it did, the unsustainability of exponential growth will be its own demise - it’s the ultimate negative feedback. (Read more)

#3 - The Myth of Self-Control and Immunity

Humans are unlike any other species in the knowable history of our planet.  Our self-consciousness and incredible mastery of knowledge and collaboration collectively power a myth that the first two laws don't apply to us - that we can control our propagation and resource consumption, and that we are immune from nature’s feedback mechanisms.  This turns out to be false under our current paradigm.  (Read more)

#4 - The Complex Crises of Current Reality

Human ingenuity and technology, combined with our unnatural quantitative value system (where More is Always Better), have ultimately led to multiple complex crises that directly threaten civilization as we know it.  They include climate change, the Sixth mass extinction, resource scarcity, global poisoning, food insecurity, pandemic diseases, uncontrolled technologies, nuclear arms, overpopulation, and untenable social inequity.  These have been collectively described as ecological overshoot.  While there is no question that these crises are connected, solving any one of them will not solve the others.  (Read more)

#5a - Impossibility of Effective Climate Change Action?

Either effective action to halt or mitigate climate change is possible, or it’s not.  Let’s consider both options, starting with the second.

Climate Change is already well underway.  There’s a belief that what’s needed is serious political or corporate will, but I suggest the reality is that our predominant societal value system simply cannot accommodate the required actions.  If we also accept the inevitability of the law of consumption, and the fact that immunity from consequences is a myth, climate change WILL be in our future.  (Read more)

#5b - Consequences of Effective Climate Change Action?

It’s even more interesting when we explore what happens if halting or mitigating climate change IS possible - and we do it.  Yes, the effort would be huge beyond belief, but imagine we could actually do it.  So what about the other complex crises currently looming over us?  Even if effective action on Climate Change were possible, we are still subject to all the other crises.  Indeed, while solving Climate Change would probably help with some of them (e.g. the Sixth mass extinction and food insecurity), it would merely allow every other complex crisis - the ones without the present stature and focus of Climate Change - to worsen.  We'd be putting society back on track to its own destruction!  (Read more)

#6 - The Conclusion for an Altered Perception of Climate Change

Putting all of the preceding Laws, Myth, Reality, and Possibilities together, I propose the following conclusion:

Climate Change is negative feedback that nature is imposing on our exponential growth and out-of-control consumption.  As awful as it will be, that negative feedback shuts down our suicidal behaviours and gives us precisely the opportunity we need right now to survive into the distant future.  Climate Change is therefore a critical part of the solution for the continuance of the human species - a force strong enough to cause us to question our value systems and change course with whatever is left of civilization.

(Read more) 

Of course, the obvious cap to all of this is a ninth post, being A Discussion of Our Best Strategy Right Now.

(Continue to Part 2 of 9)