Loss Aversion and Global Climate Destabilization

Behavioral Economist George Loewenstein describes loss aversion in Discover (Jan/Feb 2010, p 33): “In a lot of competitive situations, people look at others whom they perceive to be at a higher level, which forms their reference. They feel themselves to be in the domain of losses, and they are desperate to get out. Much cheating, it seems, occurs not because people just want more but because they feel ‘in a hole’ that they can get out of only by cheating.”

Here we are, plunging headlong into a “hole” so terrifying and permanent that to most people it’s literally unthinkable, destabilizing Earth, making our planet incapable of supporting civilization. Yet because our fear systems are “not very good at dealing with gradually unfolding threats”, as he says on page 32, our prospects are bleak.

Why aren’t we reframing Earth’s danger in terms of getting into a terrifying hole? Why can’t we present it in feelings a gambler or an underprivileged child understands?

This brought to mind the story of an African poacher, an ordinary nice guy trapped in self-perpetuating poverty. He felt his only option was to do illegal poaching, just this once, to get out of the hole.

Thing is, there’s no cheating Nature. This time self-perpetuation is the climate change mechanisms we start by default (do-nothing-different is the easy option) and we can’t ever stop. The default effect, he says, is that people tend to be lazy decision makers, taking the path of least resistance.


moar funny pictures

Hatreds conceal nieve hope

ALISSA J. RUBIN, a New York Times correspondent shared her lessons learned from the Iraq war, reminding me of the difficulties humanity face in coping with global climate destabilization.

“Americans wanted to believe that their version of democracy was just waiting to spring to life in Iraq — a peaceful multiethnic, multireligious society adhering to the rule of law. That longing to find in another country a mirror of ourselves trumped cold analysis and led to years of denial…” “…turning away from the inconvenient realities of ethnic and religious differences, the depth of animosities, of struggles for power and territory.” [emphasis mine]


Isn’t a peaceful multiethnic, multireligious society adhering to the rule of law a prerequisite for achieving sustainability, and humanity’s coping with climate crisis? If we can’t believe in that global possibility, if believing in it is just denial and turning away from inconvenient realities, *sigh* what hope is there?

“So the lesson I take away is never to underestimate hatred or history or the complexity of alien places.”

Eventually, I realized that the key to overcoming all of this hatred is educating people, raising their consciousness, that this hatred is premised on a beautiful lie. All of the historical animosity presumes that Earth will be here for us. It takes for granted that disputed territory will be liveable and productive as it had been.

In other words terrorists springing from ethnic and religious histories, rather than being the embodiment of evil, are nieve hopeful people wearing rose colored glasses. They’re two year olds fighting over a bowl of cereal, in a burning house.

Those who cling to ethnic hatred are the ones in denial or ignorance of inconvenient realities.

US needs to cut carbon emissions 100% by 2020!

Hans Joachim Schnellnhuber is among the world's half-dozen most eminent climate scientists according to The Nation (editorial Oct 26,09). His study indicates that we have a two out of three chance of limiting temperature increase to 2 degrees C if the US cuts carbon emissions by 100 percent by 2020, and the whole world is carbon-free by 2050. To have a 75% chance of only a 2 degree rise we'd have to quit carbon even sooner. If we wait another decade or so, the odds of only 2 degree rise become 50-50. The study applies the per capita principle to the world population of 7 billion, and arrives at an annual emissions quota of 2.7 tons of carbon dioxide per person annually. Americans currently emit an average of 20 tons annually, that's why we have to reduce our consumption faster than other countries.

Schnellnhuber is a physicist specializing in chaos theory. He says he was terrified when he saw the numbers emerging from the study. Me too. Thing is, there's no way we can do this, even if everybody took the science seriously.

Separate functions for social structures

Fred W. Riggs's 1964 Administration in Developing Countries: The Theory of Prismatic Society maintained that developed countries operated efficiently by having separate structures for each function. Politics, religion, finance, manufacturing, entertainment, news, etc. were distinct. So an elected leader couldn't just waltz into a bank and demand money, or into a religious institution and tell them what to worship. By not comingling functions within one structure, each function could be performed most efficiently. A manufacturer taken over by powerful politicians would have its corporate officers replaced by political friends and relatives. Incompetent, they'd soon bring bankruptcy. Because private property was protected from those with religious or political power, the society was stable and more prosperous.

Now the US government has been taken hostage by corporations, who also control mass media news and the entertainment industry. Government financially supports banks, who pay lobbyists to influence government.

All of those formerly distinct functions intermingle. Nation states pale in comparison to interlocked international corporations. Is Globalization emerging on the basis of which interlocked corporate entities most efficiently externalize costs? How this be more efficient, even in the short term?

Adrian Bejan's Constructal Theory is the most advanced approach I've seen to modelling change. Corporations are structures designed to maximize efficiency of flows - of money, goods, information, and people. His disciples don't seem to notice the corporate assumptions that people are goods whose value is determined by the free market and the environment is a free commons. If the first assembly line is analogous to the first street, to what is the first corporate interlock analogous?

All flows converge to one common destination, money in the stock market. Everything can be converted, one way or another, into this corpporate lifeblood stream. Hence the erosion of separate functions for structures.

The American right’s political strategy

“It takes considerable skill to convince people that something that is clearly good for them – like universal healthcare – is not.” (Gary Young, “A Method to Their Madness” The Nation, 09/28/09) The base lives “in a political parallel world where everyone they know believes the same as they do. They don’t like established facts, so they come armed with their own.”

Patricia Williams says that the key to understanding the right’s base is that their “sense of identity has been premised on a raced, masculinist, conservative Christian hierarchy” so that “the world must seem even more terrifying than any actual facts would indicate.” “… it’s the expressive angst of people whose felt power relations have been turned upside down.” (Patricia J. Williams, “Reverse Nazism and the War on Universal Healthcare” The Nation, 09/14/09)

What astonishes me is not that the right has disrupted and disoriented the national conversation not only among the “35 percent of the country … with whom there is no real means of engagement” but the entire nation. The Sept 28th editorial “The Ambush of Van Jones” says “… somehow a man working to help Americans invest in an alternative energy future ends us being branded an untouchable radical while a hysterical extremist’s delusions are validated.” (speaking of Glenn Beck’s fabricated controversy).

Yes, Young says, “Today the Internet distributes these slurs faster, and cable TV gives them more outlets.” But such media changes can’t account for the national political conversation’s plunge into paranoid lies. Nor is his facile accusation of “a vacuum of leadership and the absence of good alternatives” convincing. As the face of America twists into a surreal insanity, I struggle to comprehend how escalating feedback of corruption and media effects could be countered.

Visually Rich Communication

We’ve entered a universe of visual language memes, integrating emotive images with text. No longer are we limited to our own body language and facial expression. Anthropomorphized animal faces have invaded my self as surely as the automobile is an extension of the foot.

When Icanhascheezburger malfunctioned for two days, it was as if I had aphasia. I’d begun to think in this language, conjuring up LOLs to illustrate feelings as I composed posts.

Yesterday I saw a mobile computer called sixth sense, worn around the neck. It projects an interactive screen on any surface, and reads hand position to take commands. Baratunde was literally an image emitter. In meatspace, five years from now, we’ll be able to project images manually, to counterpoint our words.

A bigger picture of Global Warming

Sobering news from Bo Nordell and Bruno Gervet of Sweden. They "have calculated the total energy emissions from the start of the industrial revolution in the 1880s to the modern day."
"They point out that net heat emissions between the industrial revolution circa 1880 and the modern era at 2000 correspond to almost three quarters of the accumulated heat, i.e., global warming, during that period."

"using the increase in average global air temperature as a measure of global warming is an inadequate measure of climate change"

Net heat emissions blows carbon sequestration and nuclear energy out of the water as solutions to global warming. We can't use so-called clean coal. We have to stop using fossil fuel all together. Because, whether it takes 100 years or 1000 years to burn it all, the net heat released will overheat the planet and make it uninhabitable.

It's like a choice between boiling ourselves alive over low heat or high heat; our only sustainable choice is to turn off that heat.

"Although nuclear power does not produce carbon dioxide emissions in the same way as burning fossil fuels it does produce heat emissions equivalent to three times the energy of the electricity it generates and so contributes to global warming significantly, Nordell adds."

Realizing that net heat emissions is the real problem means there will never be a long-term solution using fusion or fission power. To prevent civilization collapse, we'll have to redesign to depend entirely on renewables such as solar power, wind, tides, and geothermal ... methods that merely redistribute the earth's heat instead of increasing it absolutely. It also becomes clear that overpopulation is a REAL limiting factor, not merely a technological challenge.http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090713085248.htm

Aagh!