Main Messages
- How people act out in life are influenced by our nature and nurture
- Public policy is tainted by cognitive and behavioural traits that operate beneath consciousness. Human behaviour is influenced by impulses, instincts, emotions, etc. We cannot be aware of them.
- These traits were advantageous in early human evolution but are dangerous in this complex techno-industrial environment.
Common Fallacy
- Most climate scientists, mainstream media, and people assume that Homo Sapiens are a rational species.
- Better information, better communicated, will enable society to make better decisions (information deficit model).
- Despite decades of better data, global society remains 80%+ dependent on fossil fuels.
Root Cause 1
- Humans will expand to occupy all accessible habitats.
- Use all available resources - in the case of humans "availability" is being redefined by technology.
- Humans have evolved to survive just like all other species.
Root Cause 2
- Cultural nurture - human beings "socially construct" our realities.
- We construct conceptual lenses through which we perceive reality (political ideologies, religious doctrines, economic paradigm, scientific models, cultural narratives)
Corollaries
- The conceptual lenses through which we perceive reality determine the kind of reality we perceive.
- People live out of their socially constructed realities as if they are real.
What if our socially constructed realities are flawed?
- A social construct is more likely to succeed the close it maps to any reality it purports to represent.
Current dominant social construct
- Neoliberal economics contains no useful information about the ecological or social systems with which the economy interacts in the real world.
- The economy is is independent of the biophysical environment.
- Efficiency and technology can create substitutes for any potentially limiting natural resource.
- Ethical and moral considerations are irrelevant to economic analysis.
Economic growth can continue indefinitely, propelled by boundless technological progress
Missing biophysical realities
- All real events, including economic activities are dissipative. They permanently dissipate all of the energy and a significant proportion of the material involved. They necessarily create pollution and are resource depleting.
Ecological Overshoot
- Using resources and generating wastes in excess of the regenerative capacities of the ecosphere.
- The human enterprise grows by consuming, dissipating, and polluting the biophysical basis of its own existence.
Exponential growth of the human enterprise: fueled by fossil fuels
- Continuous economic and population growth is an anomaly.
Competitive displacement of non-human species
- 10,000 years ago - 99% wild mammals, 1% humans
- Now - 1.5% wild mammals, 35% humans,
Politically acceptable solutions
- Has to maintain the existing growth-based economic order.
- Any capital-intensive investment or techno-fixes that serve the status quo.
What is happening?
- Corprations have power in government to pressure the status quo.
- Modern renewables cannot quantitatively substitute for fossil fuels.
- Decisive action to reduce emissions results in energy shortages, job losses, economic disruptions, etc.
- Rather than risk economic and political turmoil, governments are willing to risk disastrous climate change in the long term.