Don’t for­get your change…

Hi Folks ,

As you know I’ve been a bit ‘off the radar’ lately…I thought I’d touch base and let you know some of what I’ve been up to…

I’ve been check­ing out some stuff on Cli­mate Change…and some of it is heart­en­ing indeed.

Owing to my usual ten­dency of hav­ing a lot to say, I thought I’d spare one fella a dou­ble dose of dia­tribe and post my sec­ond com­ment here in response to his blog. Also I reck­oned my response was good and that you good folks might be inter­ested to get into a more tan­gi­ble dis­cus­sion about Cli­mate Change. Though I must say that just over the past cou­ple of weeks, some dis­cus­sions (like those referred to herein), have become more tan­gi­ble, rel­e­vant and potent.

That said, this is hardly doom and gloom…perhaps naively I credit folks with a bit more intel­li­gence than some would con­sider either rea­son­able or safe…but if folks are gunna panic and turn-​on each other, I reckon if we get that crap out of the way while we have some capac­ity to deal with it, rather than if/​when the pooh hits the fan, then we’ll have a bet­ter chance of grow­ing some flow­ers instead just hav­ing great piles of pooh…whadyareckon?

Ok! Wade in and see what ya think. As I said, I’m keen for a ‘real’ dis­cus­sion on this and I hope you are too…

That fella’s name is Cameron Reilly. He runs a site on The Pod­cast Net­work called No Illu­sions with Cameron Reilly (as far as I can tell, but I could be wrong. I’m sure Cameron will cor­rect me if I’m wrong ). He wrote an excel­lent piece called Ethics v Eco­nom­ics. Fol­low­ing my first com­ment on Cameron’s blog, he made a fine com­ment in response (included below), inspir­ing my reply which con­sti­tutes both the bulk of this arti­cle and it’s rai­son d’etre:

This is Cameron’s Com­ment in response to my first com­ment (I hope you guys are fol­low­ing this. It always sounds a lot more con­vo­luted when try­ing to explain stuff like this in writing…it’s buck­ets eas­ier if you just have a look ):

Cameron said:

“Okay, now that we’ve cleared up the nature of our famil­ial connections…

You fin­ish with “what hope have we really got of actu­ally imple­ment­ing any­thing mean­ing­ful and actu­ally use­ful in a timely manner?”

Human his­tory abounds with sto­ries of peo­ple doing amaz­ing things when they needed to. Even in the 20^th cen­tury, the peo­ples of the USSR, Ger­many and Japan some­how man­aged to re-​build their coun­tries after the most hor­rific of tragedy of WWII. I’m hop­ing it won’t take mas­sive scale tragedy before we get our heads out of the sand regard­ing cli­mate change and engi­neer a similar-​scale turn­around. It will take lead­er­ship, though. And that’s some­thing we are sorely lack­ing in Aus­tralia. Not just in the polit­i­cal scene – in the cor­po­rate and social are­nas also. We need a gen­er­a­tion of lead­ers to rise up and make the case for change on a national scale. And if WE do it, per­haps lead­ers will rise up in other coun­tries. We might say Al Gore has already taken that role in the USA. We need more lead­er­ship, though.”

I then posted a brief reply to Cameron’s excel­lent response, point­ing him here where I can waf­fle akimbo on my own turf :

And then I replied with this:

Re: “Human his­tory abounds with sto­ries of peo­ple doing amaz­ing things when they needed to.”:

Indeed, I whole heart­edly agree. Yet, as I see it, the oper­a­tive term here is ‘needed to’.

I have recently had the plea­sure of read­ing the work of and engag­ing with Mr. Paul Gild­ing & Pro­fes­sor Jor­gen Ran­ders. In their bold draft dis­cus­sion paper – ‘The One Degree War Plan’ (http://​paulgild​ing​.com/ )– they make the fol­low­ing observation:

“It is clear that soci­ety is capa­ble of respond­ing dra­mat­i­cally to major threats when there is accep­tance of a cri­sis. At that point, all pre­vi­ous argu­ments against action are con­signed to the dust­bin. Mod­ern history’s strongest exam­ple is WWII; oth­ers include ⁹⁄₁₁ and the recent finan­cial crisis.

This is how it will be on cli­mate change, but not yet. While the increas­ingly urgent sci­en­tific warn­ings are caus­ing rapid growth in the num­ber of peo­ple who believe, as we do, that we are already fac­ing a civilisation-​threatening cri­sis, it is not yet the dom­i­nant view.”

Re: “I’m hop­ing it won’t take mas­sive scale tragedy before we get our heads out of the sand regard­ing cli­mate change and engi­neer a similar-​scale turnaround.”:

I believe, as indi­cated by the above quote from “The One Degree War Plan’, “that we are already fac­ing a civilisation-​threatening crisis.”

There are rafts of rea­sons that our Cli­mate Mod­els are unable to accu­rately pre­dict impacts. Gener­i­cally it is attrib­uted to the num­ber of vari­ables. Our sci­en­tists have been say­ing for many, many years that ‘Cli­mate’ is not just about the weather.

If the cur­rent state of the planet is not a mas­sive scale tragedy I don’t know what is. I’m with you though…I’m hop­ing that the cur­rent mil­lions of deaths scat­tered across the planet as a result of hunger, war, home­less­ness, ‘good gov­ern­ment’ etc, doesn’t turn into bil­lions more deaths due to a sud­den cat­a­strophic event or series of events.

I’m also of the view that the loss of one life, or even a sin­gle depressed per­son, is a mas­sive scale tragedy. In a world where all is inter­con­nected, ‘Prox­im­ity’ is noth­ing more than a con­ve­nient disclaimer.

Re: “It will take lead­er­ship, though”:

Ah yes! Good ol’ lead­er­ship. I agree with you in prin­ci­ple. May I take it a step fur­ther by sug­gest­ing the term ‘Right Lead­er­ship’ (and no I don’t mean Right ‘Wing’ ). I mean that we would need the right leadership.

How can that hap­pen within the con­straints and mech­a­nisms of our cur­rent par­a­digms? With our cur­rent mind­sets, labyrinthine pro­to­cols, pro­ce­dures and cor­rup­tion (Oops! Sorry, I meant hon­our­ing of ‘Con­flicts of Inter­est’), what capac­ity do we have of even recog­nis­ing a ‘right leader’, let alone get­ting him or her into a posi­tion to lead or keep­ing them there (insert Jesus, J.F Kennedy, Ghandi, Man­dela, Gough Whit­lam & Lionel Mur­phy here)? You men­tioned Al Gore. Again, I agree…but is he a leader for the USA? He’s been at it for how long?…40 years? And still some coun­tries and many from the US Cor­po­rate Sec­tor espe­cially, won’t even talk to him…

Along with our shared long term con­cerns, I have some that are a lit­tle more short-​term. It would be great if sud­denly we got all of the right lead­ers in the right places…but how long would it take for their effect to be realised using cur­rent par­a­digms? How long would it take and under what con­di­tions would new par­a­digms be deemed accept­able to ‘the main­stream’? And what hap­pens in the interim?

Only last year the Pres­i­dent of the United States stated pub­licly that the Eco­nomic Par­a­digm that we have worked with for the past cen­tury has failed? What was our response? Busi­ness as usual? It would appear so.

I have no doubts about humanity’s resilience fol­low­ing a cri­sis. What I’m wor­ried about is the dam­age human­ity might inflict on itself as a cri­sis approaches…or in this case, as the con­di­tions of the cri­sis grad­u­ally intensify.

Even if the econ­omy does unravel (and in my view it started unrav­el­ling the moment we began releas­ing money into the mar­ket place as debt rather than credit), I have no doubt that human­ity will sur­vive; but how many peo­ple will be lost dur­ing the process? Or to put a pos­i­tive spin on it; how many peo­ple will live hap­pily through such a transition?

For me, your excel­lent blog arti­cle poses the ques­tion, are we hav­ing the right conversations?

Clearly we are not. But how long will it take to debate and come to a func­tional and effec­tive agree­ment from the end­less nuances of dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines, philoso­phies, terms, def­i­n­i­tions and vested inter­ests (given that it’s taken us this long to get to where we are)?

What is the goal of such debate? An agreed real­ity? Isn’t that what the ‘world’s best’ are sup­posed to be cre­at­ing in Copen­hagen? And on day one, what was the main bar­rier to nego­ti­at­ing an agree­ment? Who pays for what? And part of that still appears to hinge upon a con­tin­u­ing debate about whether or not the issues we face are attrib­ut­able to human activ­ity? That’s like being elec­tro­cuted in a power sta­tion dur­ing an elec­tri­cal storm and refus­ing treat­ment until the First Aid guy deter­mines whether the bolt of elec­tric­ity came from the sky or the station!

Now I don’t pre­tend to be an expert on Inter­na­tional Trade or any­thing like that, but if I was an investor from another planet and a bunch of Earth fel­las turned up and slapped ‘The His­tory of the World – 20^th Cen­tury’ on the table as a Busi­ness Plan in the hope that I would invest, my assess­ment would be some­thing like this:

You have a planet/​company that doesn’t even trade with any other planets/​companies and yet it is in extreme debt. Where has all the money gone? Its legal con­text is that of a non-​corporeal entity (there­fore either imag­i­nary or divine), that has full legal rights; so the man­age­ment bare lit­tle or no legal respon­si­bil­ity, account­abil­ity or con­se­quence. It’s insured by Insur­ance Com­pa­nies that it owns, and it inter­prets its own under­writ­ing against ref­er­ence points called ‘Acts of God’ (also inter­preted by the legally immune man­age­ment). The cur­rent con­di­tion of the site & infra­struc­ture pro­vides unas­sail­able phys­i­cal evi­dence (con­trary to the doc­u­men­ta­tion), that the man­age­ment has pre­tended to know what it was doing when clearly it didn’t, and has main­tained that pre­tence at the cost of it’s own peo­ple and cap­i­tal assets…and the man­age­ment change the terms and con­di­tions as it suits them. No, I think I’ll pass on that one thanks.

Is it pos­si­ble to end a cir­cu­lar argu­ment? Or does some­thing from the out­side have to break the cir­cle so that it can become some­thing else?

Cheers

Stephen G