The starting point – as always – was the Keeling curve, which shows that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is rising faster than ever before. In other words, three decades of UN-led climate negotiations have gotten us nowhere.

The complete and utter failure of global climate politics poses three questions:

1. How dangerous is it?

2. Why did we fail?

3. What do we do now?

Since most of my readers will know the answer to the first question, I want to focus on the other two. Answering the second question requires us to accept that we have been lied to and brainwashed by the ruling class for at least five decades, especially with regards to the economy. As it turns out, sustainable growth was simply a new name for the perpetual motion machine, but nobody dared admit it. We were essentially being told the lies we wanted to hear.

So, what do we do now? The first part of that question is simple: Global Climate Compensation (which coincidentally is the title of this blog). The introduction of global carbon tax with an equitable redistribution scheme would not only lead to rapid decarbonization but would also solve the problem of global poverty. If you do not believe me, just listen to the words of Darren Woods, the CEO of ExxonMobil:

Honestly, I do not think the oil industry would mind a carbon tax if properly implemented. Furthermore, as 80% of the world’s population would benefit from the redistribution scheme, the main opposition will come from consumers and oligarchs in the Global North. This is the problem with the polluter pays principle: if implemented, it means that the polluters (i.e., consumers in rich countries) will have to pay.

Today, we are facing the same problem as Germany and Italy did in the 1930s: when times get rough, the capitalists will always side with the fascists. They are prepared to do anything to prevent their wealth from being redistributed, including limiting education, banning science, censoring media, interfering with elections, or committing bloody murder.

In contrast to the 1930s, modern capitalism has an Achilles’ Heel that can be exploited to get out of this mess. As J. K. Galbraith, Daniel Boorstein, and Guy Debord pointed out more than half a century ago, the whole point of capitalism and industrialization is to enable mass production. The problem is that mass production requires mass consumption and that people’s actual needs are limited. In other words, today’s capitalist are dependent on us buying things we do not need, as Toni Morrison realized in 2006.

She is absolutely right. Consumer spending accounts for 50-60% of total GDP in many developed countries. To maintain this level of consumption, people need to be enticed into buying a lot of stuff they do not need, which is why the most powerful companies today are advertising firms, such as Alphabet, Meta, or X.

I reserved the domain www.consumer-strike.org when Trump was first elected. Today, an increasing number of people seem to realize the need for it:

Degrowth is the Answer

Are You a Consumer or a Person?

Photo by Hana Oliver on Unsplash…

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a year ago · 24 likes · 8 comments · Matt Orsagh

Robert Reich

Boycott tomorrow!

Friends…

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a year ago · 6931 likes · 388 comments · Robert Reich

The price of a product is the sum of many parts. You pay for materials, energy, labor, and development costs. However, in an affluent capitalist society, you also pay capital costs to investors, marketing costs to advertising companies such as Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X, and transaction costs to VISA, Mastercard, or American Express.

It is almost impossible to spend money today without Trump and his minions profiting one way or another. Fortunately, the opposite is also true: if enough people reduce their spending, our financial system would collapse.

How to implement a consumer strike? One of the simplest methods is to cancel your credit cards. This has immediate benefits:

1. You do a lot less unnecessary shopping online.

2. You never get another credit card invoice at the end of the month.

3. The subscriptions you signed up for online without needing them are cancelled.

So stop shopping! It will save you money, protect the environment, and make Trump and Musk miserable.

If you think about it, the short movie contains a lot of relevant and accurate information:

1. The Oil Companies know that they are killing us.

2. They took control in the 1970s.

3. Climate scientists do not have a message that appeals to the people in power.

4. The latter are more afraid of climate activism than of climate change.

This is the enemy we face: Big Oil keeps the politicians in power, and politicians keep Big Oil in business. Chris Hedges recently wrote a piece on this:

The Chris Hedges Report

Burn the Planet and Lock Up the Dissidents - Read by Eunice Wong

Text originally published Oct. 06, 2024…

Listen now

2 years ago · 304 likes · 18 comments · Chris Hedges

We will fail unless we manage to break the bond between politicians and big business. It is as simple as that.

This is an improved and extended version of my lecture at the 3rd International Summer School on Sustainability at Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences in September 2024.

A PDF file of the presentation with working links can be found here: Lecture Global Climate Compensation September 2024.

The motivation for the lecture is simple. More than three decades after the nations of the world decided to stabilize the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it is rising faster than ever. We are driving toward a brick wall, and we are still accelerating. The suggestion to take the foot off the accelerator is considered radical, and applying the brakes is considered out of the question. We desperately need an effective measure that can be implemented on a global scale.

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Forty years ago, Neil Postman warned that modern media discourages critical thinking and makes people stupid (Amusing Ourselves to Death). Since the internet and social media had not yet been invented, his analysis was limited to American television, but his conclusions are even more relevant today. Postman’s main point was that to appeal to the masses, news reporting has to be simplified to the point of trivialization: a story has to be short, easily comprehensible, and not too upsetting. Any topic – war, genocide, or natural disasters – is given the same 45-second time slot and is immediately followed by advertising and celebrity news. Viewers are never asked to pause and reflect, and news stories are selected and consumed for their entertainment value rather than their relevance. The problem is “not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience.” The result is a society that always expects to be amused and becomes incapable of engaging in serious political discourse. In particular, it is unable to separate the relevant from the irrelevant.

As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984 […] people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Today, we know that Postman was right. A recent study by Mertens et al. (The rise and fall of rationality in language | PNAS) concludes that written language started to change during the late 1970s. An unbroken trend of increasing rationality that had lasted for 120 years was suddenly reversed (see figure below). For the last four decades, written language has become increasingly emotional and irrational. Note that the change happened before the introduction of the World Wide Web or social networks and cannot be blamed on the Russians or the Chinese. We are looking at a problem of our own making and need to understand what went wrong.

The 1970s was a transformative decade with a promising beginning and a disastrous end. Greenpeace was founded in 1971, the Club of Rome published Limits to Growth in 1972, and the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment was held in Stockholm the same year. Climate modeling progressed significantly, and the causes and effects of Global Warming were well understood by the end of the decade. Consequently, the only habitable planet in the known universe, aka the Earth, could have been easily saved.

This was not to be, however. Instead, we got Margret Thatcher (elected 1979), Ronald Reagan (elected 1980), climate denialism, and neoliberalism. The evil empire of entrenched capital struck back and achieved an overwhelming victory. The Scientific Counter-Revolution of the late 20th century was so successful that it managed not only to end the Age of Enlightenment but to wipe out any memory of it ever happening. Had it not been for the abovementioned study, it would have been a perfect crime.

Neoliberalism

To understand what happened, we need to remember that many Western nations were struggling during the 1970s. They had recently lost control over most of their colonies, and the remaining colonial wars – such as the one in Vietnam – were not going well. In addition, the US had just run out of cheap oil, leading to an oil crisis with a massive increase in global energy prices. This, combined with the cost of the Vietnam War, forced the US to abandon its gold-based currency and leave the Bretton Woods agreement in 1973. This was the era of stagflation, i.e., a combination of inflation, sluggish economic growth, and unemployment.

The decade was also characterized by the anti-war movement and a number of important social developments, but describing these would be outside both the scope of this article and the range of my knowledge. It suffices to say that the economy was doing poorly, and public trust in governments was declining (cf. figure below). Several cracks had appeared in the old patriarchal world order.

At this point, the capitalist class came up with a brilliant plan: Rather than trying to restore people’s faith in governments, they decided to undermine it completely. Neoliberalism is the idea that the free market can do no wrong and governments can do no right. Since the latter had messed up, it was time to “shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub” (Grover Norquist).

Neoliberalism can best be described as the deification of the “free market.” It replaces the invisible God with the invisible hand of the market and introduces a set of dogmas that must not be questioned. Like all religions, it is not evidence-based. Its basic tenet — that capitalist free markets produce optimal outcomes — is not supported by empirical evidence. Neoliberalism is also anti-democratic and full of contradictions. What happens to my right to vote when the elected officials are essentially powerless? Why do politicians who profess to believe in free markets and small government still want to maintain enormous armies and engage in murderous crusades?

Above all, neoliberalism is the “extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.” It does nothing to address the problems of pollution and resource scarcity on a finite planet because these problems do not have a solution within a capitalist framework that requires growth.

Since many people — especially economists — seem confused about how the economy works, let me offer some hints. First, we must understand that money is simply a medium of exchange. If you have one ton of steel, you can use it to build wind turbines or airplanes. The choice is political and should be based on what is best for society. No financial magic in the world will allow you to build both a wind turbine and an aircraft from the same piece of steel. Likewise, the workers and engineers needed to construct things can only work on one project at a time. Thus, somebody has to decide how to allocate the available resources.

A market economy is controlled through money. If you want to build wind turbines, you allocate money for this purpose and use it to buy the steel and pay the workers. Obviously, this means that people with a lot of money have a lot of power and can dictate how to use the scarce resources of our planet. If there are enough billionaires, a lot of steel and manpower will be devoted to building luxury yachts.

Capitalism is based on the societal decision to treat money as a scarce resource. This creates a market for money, allowing people with lots of it to engage in usury. The money lenders do not only want to get their money back but also demand interest, which is referred to as capital income or return on investment (ROI). For this to work, the total money supply has to increase, meaning that central banks need to continuously print more money. This would lead to inflation unless there is also more stuff to buy. If the economy does not grow, the supply of money (adjusted for inflation) does not increase, and capital income ceases to be relevant. When the economy stops growing, the financial sector will vanish. It is as simple as that.

BTW, Aristoteles was against capital income 2400 years ago. His sentiment was shared by Christianity, Islam, and other major religions.

Limits to Growth argued that unlimited growth is impossible on a finite planet. Since this is obviously true, the neoliberals had no way of countering the conclusion using factual arguments. Instead, they launched a dirty campaign to discredit the report and its authors. For more details, I refer you to the excellent podcast by Katy Shields.

The Propaganda Model

Note that the neoliberals never answered the question of how unlimited could be possible on a finite planet. Rather, they banned the question from the political discourse. The mantra that there was no alternative to capitalism and economic growth was drilled into our heads through constant repetition, and anyone who dared to question this was ridiculed or taken off the air. TINA – There Is No Alternative – became an article of faith, and only the faithful were given access to the media.

Today, this approach is all too well known. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was justified by Saddam Hussein’s secret weapons program that did not exist. People who dared to question the sanity of the war were quickly silenced. Chris Hedges was fired from the New York Times, and Phil Donahue was taken off air by MSNBC.

The biggest lesson, I think, is how corporate media shapes our opinions and our coverage. The decision to release me came from far above. This was not an associate program director who decided to separate me from MSNBC. They were terrified of the anti-war voice, and that is not an exaggeration.

Phil Donahue, Democracy Now

If you have an hour to spare, I encourage you to watch The War You Don’t See by the legendary Australian journalist John Pilger. It details how corporate media were complicit in creating a pro-war narrative in “the defense of the indefensible” (George Orwell). An essential source for understanding the process is Manufacturing Consent by Herman and Chomsky, which introduces the Propaganda Model.

I leave it as an exercise for the interested reader to apply the propaganda model to the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Hint: the stories you hear on mainstream media might not be correct.

Peter Turchin is right when he argues that Western democracies are plutocracies. A small number of wealthy people have all the power, and they are prepared to commit murder to keep it that way. The parallels to the outbreak of the First World War are uncanny (cf. The Mendacity of the Elites). In 1914, an obsolete aristocracy held on to power and considered war preferable to social reforms. What better way of preventing the workers of the world from uniting than to have them kill each other? In the minds of the powerful, human lives are expendable. Madeleine Albright famously argued that 500’000 dead children in Iraq was a price worth paying. We still have to figure out what the purpose was.

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.

Bernays, Edward. Propaganda (1928)

To Edward Bernays, propaganda (or marketing) was simply a tool. It did not matter whether the purpose was to sell a product or to promote a political idea, or whether the cause was good or evil. He even complained that politicians were too sluggish in applying the latest techniques of mass manipulation invented by the private sector. I guess he would have been fascinated by the power of social networks but would have been bemused by the debate on whether various political organizations “abuse” Twitter or Facebook to spread disinformation. If you develop a tool for the “conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses,” you should not be surprised when it is used for precisely this purpose.

If we combine the insights of Edward Bernays (1928) about the need for the elites to control the masses using propaganda, the conclusion from Limits to Growth (1972), and the observation from Neil Postman (1982) that television can be used to make people stupid, we understand what happened to written language at the end of the 1970s: the people in power had both the motivation and the tools required to turn the population of the Western world into mindless consumers. The accomplishments of the Enlightenment were sacrificed at the altar of Neoliberalism and Consumerism. In a way, the study by Mertens quoted above is direct empirical evidence that the propaganda model works.

The Society of Spectacles

The approach was so successful because we were essentially told what we wanted to hear. The narrative presented to us by the plutocrats was “bread and circuses” on steroids and the ultimate Faustian bargain: if we give the capitalists a license to destroy the world, they will provide us with a pleasing pseudo-reality of material abundance. We designed a Potemkin society to satisfy our desires without requiring us to interact with the real world or to understand the consequences of our actions.

IN THIS BOOK I describe the world of our making, how we have used our wealth, our literacy, our technology, and our progress, to create the thicket of unreality which stands between us and the facts of life.

Boorstin, Daniel J.. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962)

To some extent, this is not new. The advanced lifestyle of ancient Rome was made possible by a constant influx of food, treasures, exotic animals, and slaves from all corners of the Roman Empire. If you travel to any of the capitals of former colonial powers – London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, St Petersburg – you can still allow yourself to be awestruck by all the stolen goods on display. Empires exist because they manage to subdue other countries and steal their resources. There has never been a sustainable empire, nor will there ever be one. And yet, the people living in the imperial capitals were encouraged to ignore the atrocities necessary to acquire the wealth and focus on trivialities related to affluent life. We do not know whether Marie Antoinette responded to the news that the people did not have bread with “let them eat cake,” but it is a good story.

Today, the role of the Roman Empire is played by the United States of America. It is the only nation with a truly global military presence, with hundreds of bases in some 80 countries (cf. Infographic), and it regularly uses its military to ensure access to valuable resources and to suppress any opposition. An excellent overview is given in The Churning of the Global Order by the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

If we divide the world’s nations into three groups – Global North, BRICS, and the rest – and use data from the World Bank (from 2022), we can create the following three pie charts.

The Global North has less than 14% of the world’s population, 56% of global GDP, and almost two-thirds of all military spending. The excessive consumption of the rich countries not only destroys the planet but also requires a massive inflow of natural resources from all over the world and an outflow of waste that is either disposed of in poorer countries or in the atmosphere through waste incineration. The large military spending is necessary to force poorer countries to hand over their resources and labor without asking too much in return. Even if we were to believe that the purpose of NATO is to “ensure peace and stability,” we ought to fire its leadership for incompetence anyway. Should we not expect more peace and stability for $1341 billion per year (SIPRI)? Anyone who believes the Global North is fighting for “freedom and democracy” rather than protecting the business interests of large corporations has watched too many Hollywood movies. “War is a Racket” was the conclusion of Smedley D. Butler, the most decorated Marine ever to have served.

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Major General Smedley Darlington Butler

Episode CD269 of Congressional Dish by Jennifer Briney gives an excellent introduction to the politics of corruption and war profiteering.

Allegedly, Mahatma Gandhi was once asked what he thought about Western civilization. “I think that would be an excellent idea,” he quipped, and this answer is still valid. The data on population, GDP, and military spending in the charts above blow a massive hole in the myth of Western liberalism: we live in a society built on colonialism, slavery, genocide, and fossil fuels. The combination of modern technology and industrialized mass production made European armies invincible from the middle of the 19th century onwards. This allowed the Global North (aka the colonial powers) to engage in Extractivism on an unprecedented scale, gobbling up natural resources and exploiting people all over the world. This was never going to end well. Firstly, as the planet is finite, we will either run out of resources or poison ourselves within the foreseeable future, just as predicted by Limits to Growth. Secondly, “those who live by the sword, die by the sword.” In a world of increasing resource scarcity, the fact that a small part of the population is consuming far too much becomes unacceptable and leads to violence and war.

In Christa Wolf’s magnificent novel, Cassandra wonders how the pre-war – the conditions making war inevitable – can be prevented. Her most important rule is “don’t allow yourself to be deceived by your own.” Today, the world is again marching down the road to Armageddon. Military spending is exploding, and many Western nations are discussing reintroducing compulsory military service. The major powers are again investing in nuclear arms (ICAN). Why? If nuclear weapons were only considered a deterrent, we have more than enough of them. Are some people crazy enough to believe that nuclear wars can be won?

Our Pseudo-Reality

More importantly, do we actually believe that governments who are prepared to introduce mandatory military service and spend trillions on weapons of mass destruction to protect corporate interests really care about biodiversity and the future of our children? If they are fine with sending young people off to die in needless wars, they are probably fine with allowing them to die of heat stroke.

Governments lie all the time. They have to lie, as they do not represent the people who elect them.

Howard Zinn (You Can’t Be Neutral On a Moving Train)

Propaganda is not only about disinformation. It is about creating a narrative or an illusion that is more appealing to our senses than the truth. Juvenal got it right some 2000 years ago when he coined the term “bread and circuses.” Today, the “circuses” consist of modern media, starting with television and continuing with the internet, streaming services, and social networks, whereas the “bread” is provided by industrialized mass production, allowing us to live in a world of unprecedented material affluence.

The problem with mass production is that it also requires mass consumption. As soon as the fundamental material demands of the population have been met, the economy can only grow by convincing people to buy things they do not need. In the affluent society, companies do not develop products to meet existing demand. Instead, they first have to create the demand using clever marketing strategies. As J. K. Galbraith pointed out in The Affluent Society (1958), this breaks the classical model of the market as an equilibrium of supply and demand since the same corporations are responsible for providing both. Unfortunately, classical economic theory has failed to take this into account:

The shortcomings of economics are not original error but uncorrected obsolescence. The obsolescence has occurred because what is convenient has become sacrosanct.

Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Affluent Society (1958)

Sticking to the old model was simply more convenient than adapting it to reality. Galileo would have understood Galbraith’s frustration.

Daniel J. Boorstin was more concerned with the psychological consequences of affluence. In his remarkable book The Image (1962), he talks about how exuberance has created an illusion or a pseudo-reality designed to satisfy our desires. It is the difference between encountering a wild animal while walking through a forest and paying to see the same animal in a cage at the zoo. The former case is a real event resulting from our interaction with the physical world. The latter is an example of a pseudo-event, because the animal was put in the cage to be seen by us.

The pseudo-reality is designed to satisfy our desires, thereby creating a culture of “exaggerated expectations.” Or, to turn the above metaphor on its head, we have become lazy zoo animals that do not have to use their brains anymore. There are interesting studies showing that domesticated animals are stupider than their relatives in the wild. Stop using your brain, and it will deteriorate.

Guy Debord (The Society of the Spectacle,1967) offered an even more profound analysis, considering the political and social consequences of “the spectacle.” He concluded that:

The first stage of the economy’s domination of social life brought about an evident degradation of being into having—human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle . Bureau of Public Secrets.

and

Behind the glitter of spectacular distractions, a tendency toward banalization dominates modern society the world over, even where the more advanced forms of commodity consumption have seemingly multiplied the variety of roles and objects to choose from.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle . Bureau of Public Secrets.

The economist, the psychologist, and the Marxist philosopher agree on one thing: mass production requires mass consumption, which in turn requires mass marketing (aka propaganda). To keep the economy going, corporations got a license to appeal to our basest desires and make people greedy and stupid. Once this process was completed, constructive political discourse was no longer possible. After all, people who believe unlimited economic growth to be possible on a finite planet have a very loose grip on reality. It is not surprising that they are confused on other issues. They have all become Marie Antoinette — spoiled, pampered, and clueless.

The problem is that this process has been going on for at least 50 years, meaning that the current generation of politicians and business leaders were brainwashed already as children. The people in suits and ties who like to complain about the misguided youth are at least as confused themselves.

Wherever abundant consumption is established, one particular spectacular opposition is always in the forefront of illusory roles: the antagonism between youth and adults. But real adults—people who are masters of their own lives—are in fact nowhere to be found.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle . Bureau of Public Secrets.

Politicians have always lied to the people, but I have a strong feeling that Bismarck or Churchill knew when they were lying. The same might still be true for Putin and Xi Jinping. I am not so sure about Western politicians.

Perhaps we need to introduce a Bullshit Index (BSI) to describe societies. A BSI of zero means that people are not being lied to. If the BSI is 1, people are being lied to by politicians who know that they are lying. We currently live in a society with a very large BSI. Generations of politicians and business leaders have been mired in bullshit for so long that they have lost touch with reality. It will be difficult to make them see the light.

How do we know what is true?

To get out of this mess, we must accept that we have been lied to — even though it is painful — and start reconstructing the truth. I know it sounds horribly old-fashioned to quote Karl Popper, but that is precisely the problem. Just ask your friends, colleagues, or students how they know that something is true, and most of them will have absolutely no idea. People tend to believe that something is true because it has been published in a peer-reviewed journal or because it has been stated by a person of authority. Both answers are wrong.

Karl Popper made a serious effort to establish the limits of knowledge in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959). The main idea was that a hypothesis becomes an established theory once it has been tested often enough and passed all the tests, i.e., when many independent groups have failed to falsify it. In other words, what Popper refers to as scientific knowledge is what we today call the scientific consensus. When two scientists disagree on something, they are supposed to collaborate on designing an experiment to find out who is wrong. Otherwise, no knowledge is generated.

Unfortunately, this does not seem to happen anymore. When it comes to the energy transition, some scientists are convinced that it will be possible to replace fossil fuels with renewables, while others argue that this will not work because we are running out of raw materials. Both sides publish in peer-reviewed journals, but their views do not seem to converge. Thus, no knowledge is generated, and we simply do not know to what extent the energy transition is possible. Likewise, whenever there is a recession, some economists argue for austerity and others for deficit spending. Again, no consensus can be found, as they simply do not know.

If you do not know, you either have to conduct an experiment or play it safe. Climate scientists fell into a trap of their own making by overselling the accuracy of their models. This created the impression that climate change is a manageable problem. However, some scientists — such as James Hansen — argue that the climate models severely underestimate the consequences of climate change. I am not saying that James Hansen is right. The point is that since we only have one planet and there are uncertainties in the models, we must play it safe and reduce emissions as quickly as possible.

Let me summarize what we do know regarding the climate crisis:

1. We need one carbon atom to create one carbon dioxide (CO2) or methane (CH4) molecule. If this atom is part of the natural carbon cycle, it will be reabsorbed by vegetation within a year and will not contribute to global warming. Thus, the only way to increase the greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere is by extracting carbon from fossil reserves.

2. The opposite is also true: if we stop extracting fossil fuels, no carbon will be available to produce greenhouse gases, meaning global warming will be halted. There is a one-to-one correspondence between fossil fuel extraction and global warming.

3. Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) was invented to counter the two points above. However, we do not know if carbon capture will ever work. Thus, arguing that CCS will stop climate change is propaganda, as it is not based on evidence.

4. There is already too much carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. Therefore, carbon budgets are irrelevant; we need to stop emitting greenhouse gases as soon as possible.

5. The most efficient way to reduce the demand for fossil fuels is to impose a carbon tax. This is not rocket science: if all products and services that rely on fossil fuels become more expensive, people will have to buy less of them, whether they like it or not.

6. Since only a couple of hundred corporations in the world engage in fossil fuel extraction, it would be trivial to introduce a global carbon tax. These corporations would simply have to pay a fee proportional to their production.

7. If the revenue from this tax were distributed equitably, most of the world’s population would benefit.

8. The tax could be increased annually until the carbon emissions decrease fast enough. This corresponds to a negative feedback loop to stabilize the world’s climate.

I do not claim to know how high this tax would have to be, but neither does anybody else. And if you do not know, you conduct an experiment. The great advantage of Global Climate Compensation is that the system can be set up in a couple of days, as it only involves transactions between a small number of large corporations and governments. We are currently conducting an uncontrollable, irreversible, high-risk experiment with the only habitable planet in the known universe, even though we know that the consequences will be disastrous. What is the problem with conducting a controllable, reversible, low-risk experiment with the economy?

You cannot have your planet and eat it

If it is that simple, why did we not introduce a global carbon tax long ago? Let us assume the we introduce a global carbon tax of $100 per ton of CO2 and distribute the revenue equally among the people of the world. The total revenue would be $3800 billion, which compares favorably to global military spending of $2400 billion. This is enough money to give every person on the planet a universal income of $478 per year, alleviating hunger and poverty in many poorer countries.

Next, we look at the global money flows using the data from the World Bank. Every country would have to cope with higher energy prices but also receive money from the fund. If we assume the carbon footprint of a country to be proportional to the GDP, we can produce the following table for the contributions to the global fund:

The Global North would be the net contributor to the fund, with $1619 billion per year. All other countries in the world would benefit, as the payouts from the fund would easily cover the higher energy costs.

Remember that the Global North has roughly 14% of the world’s population. If the world were a democracy, 86% of the voters would favor Global Carbon Compensation. The plutocrats of the Global North would not be happy, as they expect the money to flow in the other direction, but what about the rest of us? I hope to have convinced you that most people in the Global North would also be better off if energy were more expensive. This is particularly true for men, who have been emasculated by the invention of the combustion engine. When my father was a child, there were still lots of jobs that required muscle power. Since men are typically larger and stronger, they had a competitive advantage on the labor market. Automation based on the combustion engine destroyed many blue-collar jobs, just as AI will render many white-collar jobs superfluous. Automation and AI use fossil fuel to replace humans, but only if we let the plutocrats get away with it.

There will be no healing without remorse. The Global North has wrecked the planet and gotten rich and powerful in the process. Now it refuses to pay for the damage done. Unless this changes, we will have to cope with the destruction from countless wars in addition to the droughts, heat waves, and severe weather resulting from climate change.

In 1992, when the US was the world’s only superpower, President George H.W. Bush arrived at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro with a simple message: “The American lifestyle is non-negotiable.” With this mindset, it will be impossible to save the world.

We must first awake before we can walk in the right direction. We must discover our illusions before we can even realize that we have been sleepwalking. The least and the most we can hope for is that each of us may penetrate the unknown jungle of images in which we live our daily lives. That we may discover anew where dreams end and where illusions begin. This is enough. Then we may know where we are, and each of us may decide for himself where he wants to go.

Boorstin, Daniel J.. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.

Many years ago, I was interviewed by the Boston Consulting Group for a position in Chicago that I did not get. The interviewer had the impression that I thought before I spoke, which is apparently not allowed if you want to work in consulting.

Personally, I believe it is helpful to think before speaking. I also believe in listening, reading, and thinking before writing. There are many excellent blogs and websites on climate change and the environment, and I was always determined not to add another one unless I had something important to say. After spending the last six months researching and thinking about the planetary crisis, I have decided to continue writing for a simple reason: humanity is still accelerating toward the abyss, and I do not see any political initiatives that give me hope, apart from Global Climate Compensation.

To explain this point, let me start with Vera Brittain’s famous observation on the League of Nations:

The Assemblies of those early years were worth attending, for the Foreign Ministers of the Great Powers had not yet realised how easily, by means of a little tact and some elegant camouflage, the League might be used as a stage on which they could play the skilled game of the Old Diplomacy circumspectly dressed up in international costume. Before 1925, perhaps as many as fifty per cent of the delegates who went to Geneva honestly believed that the organisation of international peace was a workable proposition.

The League of Nations was created after the First World War to prevent future wars, and it failed. Likewise, the United Nations was created after the Second World War, and has also not been terribly successful. The problem with international organizations is that they depend on the goodwill of the Great Powers to function.

I do not know how many people still believe that the United Nations or the IPCC have any role to play in solving the climate crisis, but I do not belong to this group. It is possible to argue that the IPCC was a planned failure from the outset.

Global Climate Compensation

COP is a Planned Failure

One of the things I learned when working for the engineering company ABB was that many projects fail by design. They start from a rudimentary and slightly naïve understanding of the task at hand and stick to the original project plan long after it has become obvious that it will never work. The problem is that most of the people on the project are satis…

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3 years ago · 10 likes · 8 comments · Henrik Nordborg

We are not going to solve the climate crisis by debating over whether the non-binding declaration from COP26 in Glasgow – the so-called Glasgow Climate Pact – should talk about the need for a “phaseout” or “phasedown” of unabated coal power. The last-minute demand from India to choose the weaker formulation created a straightforward narrative for the media, and they swallowed the bait. Nobody thought it worth mentioning that the complete statement read “accelerating efforts towards the phasedown of unabated coal power and phase-out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies,” leaving enough legal loopholes to let nations continue to burn coal and subsidize the fossil fuel industry for years to come.

In the meantime, the concentrations of greenhouse gases are increasing faster than ever before, global warming is accelerating, and we are already experiencing extraordinary heat waves, shattering all previous records. Everyone understands that responding to these challenges would require unprecedented global cooperation, as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has stated repeatedly. Yet, we learned from the COVID pandemic that international collaboration does not work. Today, the Great Powers seem more likely to annihilate each other with nukes than to negotiate over climate protection. To say that the world does not have a plan to halt climate change would be an understatement. We do not even have the international political structures to develop such a plan.

One thing is clear: we will not end the climate crisis by talking about it. George Clooney came to a similar conclusion when trying to help the people in South Sudan many years ago:

Shining a light on the problem does not work because the people who need to know have known everything for decades. The fundamental tragedy of the climate crisis is that the people in power, who could have solved the problem, did not want to. And the people who want to stop the destruction of the only habitable planet in the known universe do not know what to do. Venting our outrage on social media will not save us, nor will public protest. Revolutions and uprisings rarely succeed, as evidenced by the Arab Spring, the protests in Belorussia in 2020, and the recent protests in Iran. As the Washington Post put it:

In the end, the leaderless movement, clustered in pockets across the country, was no match for the keepers of Iran’s authoritarian system.

There are two main reasons for the failure of revolutions. The most common is that the ruling class is simply too strong and manages to stay in power through repression and intimidation. In the words of George Orwell:

A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable.

There are indications that this is already happening in large parts of the world, with governments becoming increasingly heavy-handed in their treatment of climate protesters.

If, on the other hand, the revolution succeeds in eliminating the elite, there is nobody left who knows how to run the country, and chaos ensues. The trick is to divide and conquer. We must convince or coerce at least a part of the elite to join in the effort to save the planet. This is the question of moral philosophy that I have alluded to previously.

Global Climate Compensation

A Problem of Moral Philosophy

This post will be special because I am looking for a solution to a moral dilemma and would be very grateful for your thoughts. So forget about climate change for a while and consider the following situation: Let us assume we are all on board a ship taking in water. It might be possible to save it, but only if we all work…

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4 years ago · 1 like · 9 comments · Henrik Nordborg

The American actress Lily Tomlin allegedly said that “no matter how cynical you get, it is impossible to keep up.” I disagree, because I believe it is possible. The advantage of getting older is that you become more experienced. During my career, I have worked as a theoretical physicist, with large engineering companies, in technical sales, and as a professor of energy technology. I have negotiated with businesspeople in Japan, Russia, Sweden, Germany, Switzerland, France, the UK, Brazil, and the United States. I have given dozens of public climate lectures, and I have marched down the Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich together with climate activists dressed in suit and tie. After all, if you want to abolish capitalism, you had better do it in style.

I have no illusions about humans being good-natured or altruistic, but many are reasonably rational. If they disagree with you, they typically have good reasons for doing so. Progress is only possible if you are prepared to listen to people and understand their thoughts and concerns. After all, as Upton Sinclair pointed out, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

People in powerful positions are neither evil nor particularly selfish. However, they are very good at choosing how to invest their time and effort and are only prepared to work on projects with a reasonable chance of success. And so far, fighting planetary destruction did not belong to this category.

The purpose of Global Climate Compensation is to sidestep the failed political process and create a system that makes the private sector adapt to a world without fossil fuels. It is simple, effective, easy to implement, enforceable, and does not require people to agree on everything.

Solving the climate crisis will require collaboration that is ultimately based on trust. The only way to build trust is to define tangible targets and demonstrate that can be reached by working together. John F. Kennedy made the same point when trying to end the Cold War in 1963:

So let us not be blind to our differences, but let us also direct attention to our common interests and the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal.

Less than half a year later, JFK was murdered. Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, but that is the road we must take.

In the next couple of weeks, I will explain the idea of Global Climate Compensation in a series of posts. Among other things, I will cover the following topics:

• Climate Destruction: It is 90 seconds to midnight.

• The reasons for our systemic failure: politics, money, and science.

• The two algorithms running the world: market economy and capitalism.

• Improving the algorithm: Global Climate Compensation.

• Where and how to get started.

As always, I will be very interested in your feedback and comments.

Apparently, the thought of women having better things to do than washing or cooking or that men might help with household chores was beyond his imagination. There is no indication that he was trying to be funny, but his idea of innovation was strictly limited to technology. When trying to “think outside the box,” he was immediately trapped in a slightly larger box.

I am often reminded of this story when attending sustainability conferences sponsored by the private sector. They typically begin with a high-profile keynote speaker raving about how there is no contradiction between getting rich and saving the planet and how sustainable solutions can be profitable. This is when you know that the conference will ignore 99% of all effective climate solutions and only deal with the 1% compatible with current business models. Or, to put it differently, the focus of the conference will be to maintain capitalism rather than to save humanity.

Climate destruction represents an unprecedented threat to the survival of human civilization and the most significant challenge our societies have ever faced. And yet, most people seem to assume that we will be able to fix the problem without essentially changing anything. This is incredibly frustrating.

Shareholder capitalism requires corporations to focus on short-term profits, even when this harms their business in the long run. Science has become so specialized and competitive that researchers are writing papers rather than thinking about the real challenges facing humanity. In particular, no scientist dares to point out the obvious: innovations take decades to be turned into viable solutions that can be efficiently mass-produced. New technologies will have essentially zero impact on the level of carbon emissions in 2030. If we want to survive, we will have to make do with the tools we have and consume less. There is no realistic alternative to Degrowth.

This is why I am delighted that we managed to convince Rachel Donald to give a talk during the Sustainability Week at our university. For over two years, she has been doing what many business leaders, politicians, and scientists did not: asking the right questions. Rather than starting from a fixed set of ideas, she has invited a wide range of people – scientists, philosophers, economists, climate activists, and authors – and asked them about the state of the world and possible solutions. In doing so, she has developed a keen sense of what is rotten in the state of the world.

The planetary crisis poses a unique challenge to educational institutions, as the teachers are perhaps more clueless than the students about how to respond. Furthermore, the students are the ones whose lives will be impacted. The least we can do as teachers is to be open to their demands and show that we care.

And I do care. Consider the two diagrams below. The first shows the carbon concentration in the atmosphere. It has increased by roughly 50% since the beginning of the industrial revolution – every third CO2 molecule is now of anthropogenic origin – and is rising faster than ever. This decade will decide whether it will be possible to limit global warming to less than +2.0°C, and things do not look good.

The second plot shows the global temperature anomaly. The Earth has already warmed by roughly 1.2°C, and the temperature is increasing by more than +0.2°C per decade. This is approximately 100 times faster than before the industrial revolution.

This semester, I will be lecturing in front of more than 100 students. Most of them are in their early to mid 20s, meaning they can expect to live for another six decades. Many children in the world today will still be alive in the year 2100. Try extrapolating the temperature curve above another 80 years into the future. How am I supposed to explain this to my students?

On March 22, Rachel will be joined by Graeme Maxton, Irmi Seidel, Rolf Wüstenhagen, and Elimar Frank in what I hope will be an open, frank, and lively debate on the future of human civilization. Audience participation will be strongly encouraged. If you are in the Zurich area, this will be an excellent opportunity to connect, discuss, and share ideas. Registration and further information can be found here: Planet Critical live at OST.

BTW, the CO2 and temperature plots are based on publicly available data and were generated using Matlab. I would be happy to send the code if anyone is interested. Otherwise, the sources are here:

• SCRIPPS Center for Oceanography.

• GISS Surface Temperature Analysis.

Among the many insane inventions from Mr. Adams’ five-part trilogy, the peril-sensitive sunglasses stand out. They are designed to keep the wearer relaxed by blocking out any signs of danger and are an almost perfect metaphor for the society we live in today.

They were a double pair of Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses, which had been specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. At the first hint of trouble, they turn totally black and thus prevent you from seeing anything that might alarm you.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Increasingly, our world seems governed by people oblivious to the dangers of climate change and ecological destruction. A cynic could argue that this is a natural development: given the magnitude of the challenges facing humanity, only opportunists and crooks run for political office. To them, political power is about getting rich and reserving a seat in the lifeboats. Decent people, on the other hand, find running for political office about as appealing as being appointed the captain of the Titanic.

Even though there are many indications that the cynics are right, I refuse to believe that all the people meeting at the WEF in Davos are evil. Most of them – like Bill Gates – seem genuinely convinced that the paradigm of free-market capitalism can solve all our problems. They have replaced the belief in an invisible God with an equally solid but irrational belief in the invisible hand of the market. As I will discuss in an upcoming post, capital income is a faith-based concept without any rational justification. However, the idea is powerful enough to justify the erection of temples built out of marble.

Otto von Bismarck once observed that it is wrong to assume that everyone who disagrees with us is either evil or stupid. Reality is not a Disney movie with clearly defined good and evil and a guaranteed happy ending. Instead, we must come to terms with the fact that different groups of perfectly decent, respectable, intelligent, and well-educated people have opposing views on how to deal with the climate crisis. This is not new in human history, but it is still somewhat annoying because it was not supposed to happen in an enlightened society.

My take on the story is that both the Scientific Revolution and The Enlightenment have been misrepresented. Our society never developed a profound appreciation for science, and there are few indications that people are more rational today than in the Dark Ages. Science succeeded because it was useful! However, the fact that people like vaccines, the internet, and smartphones, does not imply that they understand and appreciate the scientific method. On the contrary, we now routinely use technologies without having the slightest idea of how they work. For all we care, they might as well have been a gift from the Gods.

I just reread Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” and the analysis below borrows heavily from his book. Accordingly, every human has a worldview consisting of a set of paradigms we use to interpret the world. Since we want our paradigms to be “true,” we invest significant mental effort in looking for facts that validate them. This is often referred to as confirmation bias; nobody actively seeks information that will invalidate their worldview. The expression cognitive dissonance describes what happens when people are confronted with facts contradicting their accepted paradigms.

Note that this behavior has nothing to do with intelligence or level of education. Ordinary science, to borrow another expression from Mr. Kuhn’s book, is the systematic endeavor to validate paradigms. Scientists perform experiments because they believe that they know the outcome, which is why so many important discoveries happen by accident. We often learn more from failed experiments than from successful ones.

Max Planck famously pointed out that science does not progress because professors change their minds but because old professors die and are replaced by new ones. If we think of the brain as a neural network, we can see the truth in this statement: it is easier to train a fresh brain than to retrain an old one. Once specific cultural thinking patterns have been established, it is very difficult to change them. Jeremy Lent has also made this point in The Patterning Instinct.

The consequences of these insights are profound. First, we realize that there is truth to the statement that “people are born ignorant, but not stupid. Stupidity requires an education” (Russell, History of Western Philosophy). It is possible to fill a brain with so much irrelevant information that it loses its ability to function. Authoritarian regimes and religious organizations understood this long ago. If you force children to memorize religious or political texts, they will have little capacity left for independent thought. Conversely, good education should strive to keep the neural network agile rather than simply filling the brain with facts. I am fascinated by how different people seem to be in this respect. Whereas some people retain an agile brain to an advanced age (Noam Chomsky being the prime example), others seem to be locked in already in their 20s. Neurologists should probably investigate this if they have not done so already.

We need to accept that the people disagreeing with us are neither stupid nor evil. They understand the world too, but their understanding is based on a different paradigm. In the 14th century, the Catholic Church appointed a panel of experts to decide whether the visions experienced by Birgitta of Sweden were from God (Oppenheimer et al., Discerning Experts). By all accounts, they took their job seriously. Likewise, a medieval doctor had no problems explaining the causes of illness. He just struggled to provide a cure.

This also explains why the internet and social networks have been bad for political discourse. Not only do they saturate our stone-age brains with irrelevant information, but the search algorithms have been carefully designed to deliver confirmation bias on steroids. On the internet, everyone is provided with a personalized reality.

When people first became aware of anthropogenic climate change in the 1970s, they obviously began to look for solutions within the existing paradigm of science, technology, and capital (the STC paradigm): we solve all problems through investments in science and technology. There is absolutely nothing wrong with believing in science. However, the belief that science can solve all problems is unscientific. No matter how much money we invest, we will not be able to invent the perpetual motion machine or travel faster than the velocity of light.

When the study Limits to Growth was published in 1972, the global population was 3.8 bn, the carbon concentration was 330 ppm, and human energy demand was at 225 EJ (exajoule). Today, the population has increased by 110%, the carbon concentration by 28% to 420 ppm, and energy demand by 160%. Consequently, we are now in the midst of the Sixth Extinction under climatic conditions unprecedented in human history. And things are deteriorating fast; humanity is driving off a cliff just like the oil companies predicted we would in the 1970s.

Why did the world not respond to the threat in 1972? Because the warnings were in stark contradiction with the existing worldview of a world constantly getting healthier and wealthier through science, technology, and economic growth. Any evidence to the contrary was ignored. The cognitive dissonance was resolved by putting on peril-sensitive sunglasses and ignoring the obvious. Note that hoping for technology to solve our problems is deeply irrational. This is why I find the statement by Bill Gates that “we need an energy miracle to prevent catastrophic climate change” so remarkable. You know that you have a problem when the Pope demands action and Bill Gates hopes for divine intervention. The sentence “we need a miracle” should only be used as a joke or an expression of despair in a rational society.

The climate crisis is thus also a crisis of science, technology, and capitalism. Even though an increasing number of people realize that the old paradigms are useless, far too many people are stuck in the old way of thinking. How can we change this? Again, Kuhn offers several important insights:

1. People are not prepared to change their paradigms unless there is a crisis. It must be abundantly clear that the old paradigms do not work anymore.

2. A new and better paradigm must be available, as people cannot live without a worldview.

3. Individuals are not always able to change their paradigms. There will always be people who will refuse to change their minds until the end of their days.

4. Therefore, paradigm change is a societal process that takes time.

The classic example of a paradigm change was the switch from the Ptolemean to the Copernican worldview in the 16th century. Compared to the climate crisis, it had several advantages. First, it had little impact on everyday life, meaning that only a small group of people needed to change their minds. Second, the discovery was immediately valuable as it led to better astronomy, navigation, and technology. It is no coincidence that the scientific revolution coincided with the European expansion and colonization of the world, as navigation and mapmaking required modern astronomy. Furthermore, the combination of calculus with Newtonian mechanics revolutionized technology. Both subjects have been taught to engineering students for the last 300 years with only minor modifications. And third, even though the Catholic Church tried to prevent scientific progress, there were enough influential people who wanted to break the power of the church. Most of the scientific hotspots in the 17th century were in protestant countries, beyond the reach of the Holy Inquisition.

Unfortunately, things are not so easy today. The magnitude of the challenge can be understood easily:

1. Getting rid of fossil fuels will have a massive impact on everyday life, meaning we need to convince billions of people of the need for a new paradigm.

2. The discovery that greenhouse gases destroy the atmosphere is not useful. It will always be easier to emit exhaust gases into the atmosphere than to capture or clean them.

3. Fossil fuels are cheap and practical. Since technology and innovation will hardly make them more expensive, governments need to step in with legislation.

4. All countries depend on fossil fuels, and greenhouse gases cannot be stopped at the border. Nations, or blocks of nations, that implement strong restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions will experience higher costs while still suffering the same consequences from climate change as the others. Therefore, they are more likely to invest in climate adaptation than mitigation.

5. There is no generally accepted alternative to growth and technological progress. Socialism is an alternative to capitalism but still requires economic growth. Other options, such as Degrowth or Doughnut Economics, are exciting ideas for new paradigms but are far from generally accepted in mainstream politics.

6. Oil is still the elixir of power that is needed to power armies.

So how do we get out of this mess? Since it is unlikely that a paradigm change will happen fast enough to prevent Climate Armageddon, we must narrow down the discussion to a small number of ideas that are acceptable to as many people as possible:

1. We need to stop the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from increasing. If we fail, human civilization is doomed.

2. There is no guarantee that fanciful technologies like carbon capture or geoengineering will ever work. Thus, we need to phase out the extraction of fossil fuels as soon as possible. Curiously enough, the Paris Agreement forgets to mention this.

3. There is no agreement on how fast this can happen or the societal impact. Thus, it is pointless to define emission targets. A much better alternative is to implement a global carbon tax and increase it gradually until it has the desired effect.

4. For such a tax to work, it must be enforceable and coupled with a redistribution scheme to ensure Climate Justice.

5. The system must encourage peace and international collaboration.

This is the idea behind Global Climate Compensation. I have a strong feeling that a vast majority of the world’s population agrees on these points.

Think of paradigms as Venn diagrams. Whereas few people agree on everything (the intersection of all paradigms), most people share some common beliefs. I am not interested in the political views, sexual orientation, or religious beliefs of the electrician who recently installed my solar panels. However, we agreed that I would pay him accordingly if he did a good job. I have negotiated contracts with companies in Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, the USA, Russia, Brazil, and Japan during my professional life. The cultures are different, but we always succeeded because we focused on the essentials.

The plot below showing the carbon dioxide concentration of the atmosphere says it all. While we were talking, discussing, and arguing, the CO2 concentration was rising faster and faster. We will soon hit the point of no return.

To borrow from an Honest Government Ad: If humanity wants to continue with its favorite pastime, i.e., continuing to live on this planet, we need to act fast and focus on the main issue: rapidly reducing fossil fuel extraction. GCC accomplishes this by invalidating any business model dependent on fossil fuels. If we fail to do so, we will need a lot of peril-sensitive sunglasses. And don’t forget to bring your towel.

The starting point was my post “COP is a planned failure” and why humanity has failed to respond to what increasingly looks like the collapse of the entire global ecosystem.

Global Climate Compensation

COP is a Planned Failure

One of the things I learned when working for the engineering company ABB was that many projects fail by design. They start from a rudimentary and slightly naïve understanding of the task at hand and stick to the original project plan long after it has become obvious that it will never work. The problem is that most of the people on the project are satis…

Read more

3 years ago · 7 likes · 8 comments · Henrik Nordborg

We also discussed why fossil fuels are like the magic rings of power and whether Global Climate Compensation could work. The full interview can be found here:

Let’s act as if the survival of the only habitable planet in the known universe matters in 2023.

I have two slightly longer posts in the pipeline, but I realized that I would not be able to finish them before the holidays and therefore decided to turn to ChatGPT for help.

The question I asked was “how do we prevent climate change?” Here is the answer:

Preventing climate change requires taking actions to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, which are the main drivers of global warming. Some of the ways we can do this include:

1. Transitioning to clean, renewable energy sources: Burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas releases large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. By shifting to clean energy sources like solar, wind, and hydroelectric power, we can greatly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

2. Improving energy efficiency: Using energy more efficiently in our homes, buildings, and industries can help reduce the amount of energy we need, and therefore the amount of greenhouse gases we emit. This can be achieved through measures such as using energy-efficient appliances and building materials, and implementing energy-saving building design practices.

3. Planting trees and other vegetation: Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in their wood, leaves, and roots. Planting trees and other vegetation can help remove carbon dioxide from the air, offsetting some of the greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activities.

4. Reducing deforestation and promoting reforestation: Deforestation, or the removal of forests, is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. Protecting and restoring forests can help absorb and store carbon dioxide, offsetting some of the emissions caused by human activities.

5. Promoting sustainable agriculture and land use practices: Many agricultural and land use practices, such as the use of synthetic fertilizers and the conversion of natural habitats into cropland or pasture, can contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. We can reduce these emissions by adopting sustainable practices, such as using organic fertilizers and planting cover crops.

6. Encouraging individual and collective action: Individual actions, such as driving a fuel-efficient car or using public transportation, can also help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Collective action, such as supporting politicians who prioritize climate action, can also help drive change at a larger scale.

In other words, nothing new. ChatGPT synthesizes a lot of available information and returns it in well-formed sentences. The response is not worse than that provided by many “experts” in the field, but it ultimately fails to answer the question. Note the conspicuous absence of the word Degrowth.

The danger from computers is not that they will eventually get as smart as humans, but we will meanwhile agree to meet them halfway.

Bernhard Avishai

The greatest danger from Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is that it threatens to replace many people — teachers, authors, researchers, and journalists — whose job is to synthesize and communicate information and facts. This is problematic, as progress has always been driven by the few people who connect the dots differently and come up with new ideas that have not been written down before. These people will be missing in a world where everyone simply consumes pre-processed information.

Suppose you train 100 children to play the violin. Some will achieve a decent level of proficiency, a small number will become good professional musicians, and a tiny fraction will become virtuosos and musical innovators. The problem is that unless you train the 100 children, you will never find the virtuoso. The same is true in science.

I believe Mr. Avishai was overly optimistic. The more effort we spend on training artificial neural networks, the fewer chances there will be to train the neural networks already available in our brains. The human body has a remarkable ability to switch off parts that are not used. If we stop working out, our muscles will wither. Likewise, our brain requires constant mental workouts to stay fit.

Here is a delightful movie that I recommend to anyone interested in how humans interact with the world around them. It is a couple of years old, but it still raises many important questions about AI.

I wish all my subscribers relaxing and stimulating holidays and look forward to interacting with you next year.

Yours truly,
Henrik

PS. If you are located close to Zurich, there is an excellent opportunity to meet in person in March 2023 at www.ost.ch/planetcritical.

Quick update: Here is an article from the WEF explaining how ChatGPT works and whether it could be the new trend in journalism and teaching.

The important lesson is that having a bad plan is often worse than having no plan at all. The only way to break the vicious cycle is to admit failure and act accordingly.

The Conference of the Parties (aka COP) is a perfect example of a Planned Failure. It keeps many people and organizations busy, retains the illusion of progress, and prevents the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that would be necessary to save humanity. It started out with a couple of naïve assumptions:

• Climate Change is a problem that can be fixed by technology.

• There is no conflict between the size of the economy and climate protection.

• Countries are willing to collaborate.

Today, we know these assumptions are wrong, so we need to stop beating the dead horse and go back to the drawing board. There currently is no plan for stopping climate change. We need to change that.

Technology is not enough

The plot above shows global carbon dioxide emissions (solid blue) and global GDP (solid red) since 1970 and current climate policies (dashed lines). When I show in my climate lectures, the audience typically erupts in laughter. Yet, this is not a joke. The G20 nations have agreed on a global growth target of at least 2%. Simultaneously, they want to half CO2 emissions within a decade. The idea is absurd. Strong decoupling does not work, as pointed out by an increasing number of researchers.

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How can we be sure that it does not work? Just think of the expected lifespan of most of our fossil infrastructure. Airplanes, cars, and ships are built to last for 20 years or more, and power plants have an even longer lifespan. This means that most of the infrastructure that will be burning fossil fuels in 2030 is already in use today. Furthermore, since the world is currently running on fossil fuels and manufacturing wind turbines and photovoltaics requires energy, a massive expansion of renewables would initially lead to increased carbon emissions. Rapid reduction of carbon emissions can only be achieved by pulling the economic emergency brake. It does not take a Ph.D. to understand that.

Of course, we need new technologies and renewable energies to create a sustainable world. However, they will not help us unless we are prepared to significantly reduce consumption. The thinking behind the current climate policies is that people will consume less as they get richer. Anyone who believes that has a pretty loose grip on reality.

Stop extracting fossil fuels

The idea that some new technology will eventually replace fossil fuels might have been inspired by the famous quote of former Saudi oil minister Yamani that “the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones, and the age of oil won’t end because we run out of oil.” Unfortunately, the first part of the quote is entirely wrong, as the Stone Age never ended. Today, we are using more stone than during the Stone Age, more copper and tin than during the Bronze Age, and more iron than during the Iron Age, in addition to enormous quantities of oil, gas, coal, and other non-renewable resources. However, the second part of the quote might be true. The Fossil Fuel Age will not end because we run out of oil but because the exhaust gases will turn our planet into an unsurvivable hellscape.

The figure above shows the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (as measured by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography). The data are publicly available, and anyone with access to the internet and a plotting program can reproduce this plot.

The blue curve shows the weekly measurements with the oscillations corresponding to the breathing of the planet due to the shifting seasons. We are currently at roughly 420 ppm, which is 50% higher than before the industrial revolution. Today, one out of three CO2 molecules in the atmosphere is anthropogenic, and the rate of increase is accelerating. When prof. Keeling began measuring carbon dioxide in 1958, the increase was roughly 0.85 ppm per year. Today, the concentration is increasing three times faster, or by 2.57 ppm. Nothing that we have done during the last 60 years – including the oil crisis in 1973 or the COVID-19 pandemic – has had any impact on this rising trend.

The shaded red area in the plot above represents the danger zone; if we reach 450 ppm, we can forget the Paris agreement. However, since we are adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere at an accelerating rate, it does not matter where we put this boundary. The dashed curve is a polynomial fit to the data that can be used to compute the annual increase of the concentration, which is closely related to anthropogenic emissions, as shown in the plot below.

There is a good correlation between carbon emissions and the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. Adding 17 Gt CO2 to the atmosphere increases the concentration by roughly 1 ppm. Since we are approximately 30 ppm away from disaster, this gives us a carbon budget of about 510 Gt CO2. The exact value is unimportant, since every ton of CO2 escaping into the atmosphere adds to the misery of humanity.

The message is simple: to prevent the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere from increasing, we need to stop extracting fossil fuels from the crust of the Earth. Doing so will be difficult. Not doing so will be suicidal.

What COP misses

Thirty years ago, the United States was the only global superpower. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, and the emissions from China were justly considered irrelevant. Unfortunately, the US also made its participation in COP dependent on one condition: “The American way of life is not up for negotiation. Period.”

The starting point of COP was that preventing climate change would not involve any tough choices. Today, we know this was wishful thinking without any basis in reality. However, rather than admitting this fundamental flaw and stopping the project, we continued to muddle on hoping for a miracle, just like the generals of WW1 continued to send soldiers out of the trenches to walk toward the enemy machine guns. Continuing to insist on economic growth is just as stupid and will kill many more people.

The problem is that our societies are entirely dependent on fossil fuels. Not only do they provide most of the energy we use, but they also serve as raw materials for the petrochemical industry, and they power our armies. The last point is essential. Since the beginning of the 20th century, wars have generally been won by the countries with the most advanced technology and access to enough oil to power their ships, tanks, and warplanes. This has created the ultimate vicious circle: nations need oil to fuel their armies, and they need armies to secure their access to oil. The fact that the emblem of the United States Central Command is an eagle guarding the Persian Gulf says it all: we kill for oil.

Thus, oil has become like the “Ring of Power” in Tolkien (or Wagner). It is the weapon that bestows unlimited power on its owner but will ultimately destroy him. In a world of conflict, nobody will let go of such a weapon because the slow death from climate change seems less threatening than the risk of being defeated in a war.

The declaration from COP27 does not mention words like “oil,” “gas,” “growth,” “conflict,” “war,” or “refugee” even once. It does, however, “express deep concern towards the significant financial costs associated with loss and damage for developing countries, resulting in increasing the burden of indebtedness and impairing the realization of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.” The fact that people are already dying from climate change is nowhere to be found. On the other hand, the word “invest” appears eight and “finance” eighteen times.

If any question why we died,
tell them, because our fathers lied.

Rudyard Kipling

COP is an endless cycle of planned failures. It is the wrong people trying to solve the wrong problem with the wrong approach.

Global Climate Compensation

Let us conduct a small thought experiment. We want to draw up a plan to stop the destruction of our planet based on current knowledge. Obviously, the first priority must be to end the extraction of fossil fuels, and the only question is how to accomplish this, as human society is almost entirely dependent on fossil fuels.

Here is a list of problems with the current approach

1. Since the power of nations depends on fossil fuels, it is meaningless to discuss voluntary commitments. Any perceived threat will immediately lead to countries reneging on their promises. This is happening right now as Europe is firing up old coal-fired power plants to compensate for the lack of Russian gas.

2. As we do not know how fast we can reduce our fossil fuel dependence, it makes little sense to specify reduction targets because they will always be wrong. Regulating the price makes a lot more sense.

3. National or regional efforts to reduce fossil fuel consumption will lead to lower prices on the world market, benefiting countries still relying on fossil fuels.

4. The cost of decarbonization needs to be distributed fairly.

In other words, we need a global, fool-proof way of introducing a carbon tax in such a way that poorer countries do not suffer. This is precisely what Global Carbon Compensation accomplishes:

1. All fossil fuel producers pay a fee proportional to their production to a global fund.

2. The money from the fund is distributed among the world’s nations on a per capita basis.

The first part of the plan introduces a global carbon tax without loopholes in the simplest way possible. The second part can be thought of as an automatic loss-and-damage scheme, where the amount paid to poorer countries is directly proportional to the consumption of the rich.

The main advantage of Global Climate Compensation, which makes it superior to all other plans, is that it is testable. Since the implementation is trivial, we could try with a reasonably low carbon fee and see what happens. We are currently conducting a dangerous, uncontrolled, and irreversible experiment with the Earth’s biosphere. Would it not be better to perform a risk-free, controlled, and reversible experiment with the global economy? Any sane person knows the answer to this question.

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The Assemblies of those early years were worth attending, for the Foreign Ministers of the Great Powers had not yet realised how easily, by means of a little tact and some elegant camouflage, the League might be used as a stage on which they could play the skilled game of the Old Diplomacy circumspectly dressed up in international costume. Before 1925, perhaps as many as fifty per cent of the delegates who went to Geneva honestly believed that the organisation of international peace was a workable proposition.

— Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth

Obviously, Mrs. Brittain was not writing about COP but the League of Nations. However, the same logic applies. There is no reason for the Great Powers to agree to anything that could threaten their power. Thus, COP was designed as a stage on which the Great Powers could pretend to be concerned about climate change while continuing to plunder the planet.

In a world powered by oil, asking powerful countries to decarbonize makes about as much sense as if the Roman senate had required the legions to switch to stone axes to protect the environment. We are trapped in the ultimate vicious circle: As long as oil is strategically important, we need armies to ensure the supply. And as long as we need armies, oil will be strategically important. Catch-22!

Several people have asked me to provide a short description of Global Climate Compensation ahead of COP27. First, I did not see the point, as I have little hope that this conference will be more productive than the previous 26. On the other hand, the meetings of the COP attract some media attention, and we might as well try to benefit from that.

Here is my first attempt to present Global Carbon Compensation as a way to cut through the Gordian knot of international climate politics. The video is a bit longer than intended, as I wanted to explain the futility of previous attempts to address the climate crisis. If you want to cut to the chase, the introduction to Global Climate Compensation starts at 33:14. There is also a very quick summary at 1:02:20.

As always, I am looking forward to your feedback.

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The fossil fuel producers have always been playing for time. It is a reasonable strategy, given that they make around three billion dollars per day as long as they are allowed to continue to operate. The strategies used to block or delay meaningful climate policies have been well documented, e.g., in the book “Merchants of Doubt” by Oreskes and Conway. The key ingredient was doubt: rather than denying the conclusions from climate science outright, they emphasized uncertainties of climate models and suggested other explanations for why the world was warming.

Today, the focus of the debate has shifted from climate science to policies. Most politicians and business leaders publicly accept the realities of climate change and the need to do something. However, as their stakeholders (i.e., constituents and customers) do not accept higher costs or lifestyle changes, they resort to greenwashing and pretend to be doing something while preventing any real progress. As David Wallace Wells puts it, “in the quest for sustainable development, the only thing more dangerous than the absence of progress is the illusion of it.” Climate hypocrisy is now a larger problem than climate change denial.

For greenwashing to be effective, people must be confused about what constitutes realistic and effective solutions to the climate crisis. Many new technologies are important not because they help limit global warming but because they divert attention from the simple truth: if we want to prevent greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere from rising even further, we need to stop extracting carbon from the Earth’s crust. All oil and gas fields and all coal mines must be closed as quickly as possible. It is not the message Big Oil wants to hear.

Are we really going to fall for the same trick again? Perhaps there is only one realistic way to phase out fossil fuels, and the debate over different policies is a smoke screen intended to protect not only the profits of the oil companies but an entire value chain based on fossil fuels.

As usual, I do not want to tell you what to think but to present the reasoning behind Global Climate Compensation. I look forward to your feedback.

There are three ways to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels: we can limit demand, limit supply, or increase the price. Let us look at the pros and cons of each approach.

Limit Demand

So far, our response to the climate crisis has mainly consisted of investments in new technologies. The idea was that if renewable energy becomes affordable and technology more energy efficient, the demand for fossil fuels will decrease automatically. The obvious problem with this approach is that it did not work. It could never have worked because of the rebound effect. Most of the world is still in a state of energy poverty, where an increase in energy consumption results in a significant rise in living standards. Reduced demand in one part of the world will lead to lower prices on the world market, higher economic growth, and increased demand elsewhere. As a result, total energy demand has grown faster than renewable energy sources, as shown in the figure below.

In addition, even if we stop using oil as fuel, Big Oil already has a plan B involving a massive increase in the production of plastic. Whatever happens, they will try to sell their oil.

Limit Supply

Another option is to limit supply by simply closing down coal mines, oil refineries, and pipelines. This is the goal of a number of activist campaigns such as Just Stop Oil or Ende Gelände. If they succeed, it will have the same consequences as the sanctions imposed on and by Russia at the moment: energy scarcity, inflation, windfall profits for the remaining producers, and much suffering for the poor. Fossil fuel consumption will decrease, but the political price will be high.

It is a common misconception that Big Oil wants to sell a lot of oil. The truth is that they do not care, as it is much easier to sell one barrel of oil for $1000 than ten barrels for $100 each. It is the politicians who want to keep the oil flowing to avoid political unrest.

Increase the Price

A carbon tax is the only way to increase the price of energy while simultaneously limiting of profits of the fossil fuel companies. If they are forced to pay a fee proportional to the amount of carbon they produce, their profits will decrease even though energy prices increase. This will make both the production and the use of fossil fuels less profitable, impacting both supply and demand. In other words, a sufficiently high carbon tax will ultimately destroy the entire fossil-fuel-based value chain. Any business model dependent on fossil fuels will be invalidated.

In addition, the tax revenue can be used to protect the vulnerable from the effects of increasing energy prices and for investments in new technologies. Obviously, both the tax and the redistribution have to be implemented globally to avoid market distortions.

Based on this reasoning, Global Climate Compensation seems like the only rational response to the climate crisis. Many other approaches have probably been designed to fail.

According to the study by Prof Aviel Verbruggen, the oil and gas industry has made an annual profit of roughly $1tn since 1970. Note that this is only the direct profit. A lot of oil and gas is bought by companies that use it for profit-making. We have shipping companies, airlines, plastic manufacturers, etc., meaning that the total profit is much higher. As long as it is possible to make that much money from the use of fossil fuels, any voluntary agreement to decarbonize will be completely meaningless.

The idea behind Global Carbon Compensation is to invalidate any business model that depends on fossil fuels. It does not ban the extraction of oil, gas, and coal, but it forces the producers to pay a fee to a global fund. With $100 per ton of CO2, the fund would receive $3.6tn per year. The oil, gas, and coal companies would pass on parts of the higher costs to their customers, meaning that all businesses that are heavily dependent on fossil fuels would see their profits suffer.

The money would be paid out to governments that could use the money to invest in new infrastructure and protect the poor. If we divide $3.6tn by the world population, every county receives roughly $460 per capita and year. The table below shows the payout to various countries:

The third column (GCC) shows the annual payments to nations from the global climate fund in billion USD, the second their GDP in billion USD, the fourth column shows the GDP per capita in USD, and the last column is the payout from the fund as a percentage of GDP. The payout would have an enormous impact on poor and populous countries but would be insignificant to rich countries. In total, the plan would redistribute 3.7% of global GDP from the fossil-fuel-driven sector of the economy to governments.

It is not rocket science: the decarbonization of the economy will require a lot of resources (labor and materials), and this has to be paid for by the people who got rich from using fossil fuels. Firstly, because they have a moral obligation to do so, and secondly, because they have all the money. As long as they (or we, if you live in a rich country) refuse to pay up, the climate crisis will never be resolved.

Global Climate Compensation offers a direct way of taking the profits out of fossil fuels while implementing Climate Justice. It is effective, fair, and risk-free, and could be implemented immediately. More details can be found in the post below.

Global Climate Compensation

Ending profits from fossil fuels

The challenge facing humanity can be summarized as follows: Our current economic system requires everlasting growth. We live on a planet that cannot support further growth. It follows that we need immediate and fundamental system change. Note the words…

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4 years ago · 2 likes · Henrik Nordborg

Looking at the world today, we see that both these groups are alive and well. On the one hand, we have authoritarian leaders like Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and others who are prepared to kill to achieve their political goals. They can only be described as evil.

On the other hand, we have the collaborators who could have prevented their rise to power but decided to look the other way out of political or economic expedience. This group includes everyone living in the Global North, aka the former colonial powers. We are the people profiting from affordable oil and gas from authoritarian regimes, cheap minerals extracted under horrific conditions in Africa, and cheap consumer products manufactured in various parts of Asia and Latin America. Colonialism is alive and well; only the name has changed.

Climate Change is often referred to as a market failure, but it could equally well be described as a failure of science, ethics, and courage. We have the climate scientists who agreed not to be too alarmist to secure their research funding, the engineering scientists who pretended that technical innovation could solve our problems, and the economists who agreed to perpetuate the myth of indefinite growth to satisfy their masters. There are the business leaders who optimized their supply chains by moving production to countries with lower standards of labor rights and environmental protection. And there are western consumers who bought a lot of unnecessary stuff because it was cheap.

As a result of our failures, the global world order is unraveling:

1. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a disaster for humanity, the environment, and climate politics. It is also likely to cause a global food shortage and mass starvation.

2. China is sounding increasingly belligerent and is openly stating its intention to reclaim Taiwan by force, using the same toxic mix of nationalistic rhetoric and a perverted interpretation of history as Vladimir Putin.

3. The damage from Climate Change is progressing much faster than expected by scientists, and there is no indication that the world will reduce the consumption of fossil fuels anytime soon.

4. The fragility of American democracy is becoming increasingly evident. We now know that the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2020, was essentially a Beer Hall Putsch. It intended to end American democracy and mainly failed because of the incompetence of the people involved. To make matters worse, the United States Supreme Court has morphed into a Guardian Council of medieval thinking.

Yet, I insist on remaining hopeful. The fact that the world's three superpowers (Russia, China, and the USA) have failed politically and that a small number of madmen govern the world should serve as a wake-up call for everyone. It will not be the environmentalists that take us back to the Dark Ages, but authoritarian leaders. The comfortable lifestyle we have gotten used to in the Global North will not exist in the future! The choice is between a reasonably sustainable society based on a participatory political system or life under an autocratic regime with the power to kill you and your family if you say anything wrong. Since there is no reverse button on history, we must decide now which future we want for ourselves and our children.

So get off your butts and act! I will continue to promote Global Climate Compensation, as I see this as the best hope we have at the moment. However, I am more than happy to learn about other ideas and network with anyone with a positive vision for the future.

I had the honor and great pleasure to talk to Rachel Donald about Global Climate Compensation. The full interview is available as a podcast on Planet: Critical. Her excellent summary and commentary on the idea can be found here: We Need Climate Reparations, Not Carbon Credits.

If you want to understand the multiple crises we are facing (capitalism, climate, biodiversity, sustainability), I strongly encourage you to subscribe to Planet: Critical.

Planet: Critical

The podcast for a world in crisis.

By Rachel Donald

Let us assume we are all on board a ship taking in water. It might be possible to save it, but only if we all work together. We know there are not enough lifeboats, meaning many people will die if the ship sinks. The lifeboats are conveniently located on the upper decks, close to the first- and second-class cabins. The people traveling third class will probably not make it. To make things more interesting, we also assume that the people on the upper decks have essential skills and knowledge that would be needed to save the ship. The captain, the engineer who designed the vessel, some experts on maritime disasters, and a couple of retired admirals are all traveling first class.

If you believe the ship can be saved, it makes sense to stay and help operate the water pumps. On the other hand, if you think the ship is going down anyway, it is better to run to the lifeboats as quickly as possible to secure a space. Both choices are perfectly rational, and the decision only depends on how you assess the situation. It is not about good or evil because staying behind to pump water, even though you know that the ship is going to sink, will only remove you from the gene pool of humanity.

The best outcome is if we all work together and manage to save the ship. This way, we lose neither lives nor property. The problem is that the pessimists’ view is self-fulfilling: if everyone runs to the lifeboats, nobody will be left to pump water, and the ship will sink. Thus, we lose the ship and human lives for no good reason. This is the worst possible but also the most likely outcome.

What do we do?

One solution is the authoritarian approach. The captain gets up on deck with a gun and announces that anyone trying to enter a lifeboat without his permission will be shot. Suddenly, jumping the line for lifeboats is no longer rational. This is essentially the method used in most armies of the world: soldiers who refuse to obey orders are shot on the spot or at least severely punished. The problem with this approach is that it requires the captain to have absolute authority.

Another approach is based on the idea of mutually assured destruction (MAD). If we destroy all the lifeboats, the only option will be to remain on board. Unfortunately, this approach is not optimal as it could lead to everyone dying. Thus, the worst outcome has suddenly gotten a lot worse. Furthermore, as many people see the lifeboats as the only hope, they are likely to oppose their destruction.

The neo-liberal approach is to privatize the lifeboats and sell seats to the highest bidder. This does not solve any problem but ensures that wealthy people survive.

The revolutionary approach would be to rise up against the privileged upper class. The problem is that we need them to save the ship, and throwing them into the sea will only increase the total body count.

As far as I can see, the optimal approach is as follows:

1. We change the narrative and convince people that getting into the lifeboats will not save them because we are far out at sea, and they will probably starve or freeze to death before being picked up.

2. We agree that the lifeboats are reserved for the privileged if the ship goes down.

With this approach, everybody has much to gain and nothing to lose from remaining on the ship and trying to keep it afloat. This significantly increases the probability of the best possible outcome. If the ship sinks, on the other hand, the same number of people will drown as with most other scenarios. The only difference is that we have preselected the people who will survive.

The logic seems pretty straightforward. Please let me know if you have a better idea.

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Otto von Bismarck once warned that it is an error to believe that anyone who does not agree with you is either stupid or evil. More often than not, people have perfectly rational reasons for their behavior, and you must try to understand their thinking if you want to negotiate with them. Telling the oil lobby to “listen to the scientists” is pointless because Big Oil knew about climate destruction more than 40 years ago. As Naomi Klein pointed out in her book This Changes Everything, oil companies probably understand the magnitude of the problem better than anyone else. They are definitely not stupid. They are also not necessarily evil. They see themselves as providers of an essential product to human society. Criticism of their behavior is brushed aside with the argument that “if you don’t like oil, don’t buy it,” which is simplistic but not entirely wrong.

The oil companies are right about one thing: modern society is almost entirely dependent on fossil fuels. Changing this will be challenging. One problem is that we do not know what a sustainable society will look like, which is why many scientists have devoted their time to this question. It is a comfortable topic to work on, as it allows you to write scientific papers and participate in conferences, thereby furthering your career.

The second problem is how to break the political gridlock preventing any meaningful sustainable policies from ever being implemented. Working on this topic requires analyzing and criticizing existing power structures and is likely to get you killed if you are successful. It is not surprising that most of the scientific community has decided to rather work on problems considered harmless by the people in power. Especially since governments pay their salaries.

We live in a society characterized by an unprecedented concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a small group of people, and I do not care whether you refer to them as the oligarchy, the global elite, or the Davos crowd. These people honestly believe that their power and wealth are going to save them from the effects of climate change. Asking them to surrender this advantage to help save the world will not work. They are simply too afraid to lose their space in the lifeboats.

Whether we like it or not, this means that we have to negotiate with the oligarchs and offer them something in return for their acquiescence. Please do not get me wrong: I dislike the oligarchy as much as anyone. I also do not believe that the capitalist free market will solve our problems, nor that the global elite is interested in doing so. I am only making the point – as was recently done by Noam Chomsky – that there are two ways of resolving conflicts. Either you achieve complete victory, thereby forcing your opponent to accept unconditional surrender, or you negotiate a deal. There are no other ways, and it looks unlikely that we will be able to crush the oligarchy during the next couple of years, especially as they seem to be winning at the moment.

Realpolitik is not about moral superiority but about results. Perhaps the time has come to swallow our pride and replace outrage with creative thinking. Many conservative voters are convinced that environmentalism is only a pretext for introducing socialism and taking their money away. The Swiss Peoples’ Party even made a helpful animated GIF to illustrate this point: the red devil hiding behind a green leaf.

In this political landscape, it is madness to call for eco-socialism. We will never be able to convince the financial sector that socialism is a good idea, but we might be able to convince the fossil fuel companies to act as tax collectors for a global carbon tax if it allows them to continue to operate and prevents the unraveling of the international order. If the tax is high enough, the financial sector will soon become irrelevant.

This is the idea behind Global Climate Compensation. It makes a very specific and reasonable demand to a small number of corporations. If they agree, they will be allowed to continue doing business more or less as usual. If not, they will have publicly declared themselves enemies of humanity, and no amount of greenwashing will save them. With sufficient societal pressure, the rational choice for them will be to join the plan.

I am not arguing that Global Climate Compensation will solve all of humanity’s problems, but we must not allow perfect to be the enemy of good. The plan would at least establish a global price on carbon emissions, invalidate any business models built on fossil fuels, end global poverty, and encourage international collaboration. Since it could be implemented immediately and is risk-free, we could simply try it out. If it works, we will have cut through the Gordian knot of climate politics. If not, we will still have learned a lot about the correlation between fossil fuel demand and the size of the economy.

Many people like to talk about the “need for unprecedented global cooperation” to solve the climate crisis but seem to forget that the oligarchs are people too. Not only that, but they also have all the power, all the money, and most of the guns, meaning that they could actually accomplish something if they wanted to. They already know about the problem. Now we must convince them that the cure is better than the disease.

Looking at the recent series of unprecedented heat waves all over the world, I am glad that I still own a house in Sweden. Climate change is very noticeable there too, but the new normal will at least be survivable. As a matter of fact, wine production in Sweden is on the rise, illustrating people’s uncanny ability to adapt to new realities. Would it not be easier to get used to expensive fossil fuels rather than catastrophic storms, heat waves, and wars?

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It is important to remember that knowing about something does not change it. You do not make the world a better place by constantly reading and thinking about the climate crisis and sharing information on social media. Unless you intend to do something about it, knowing too much about the state of our planet is likely to ruin your mental health. It is tough to live with the knowledge that we are destroying the planet for our children, but there is nothing we can do to prevent it. Many people resort to denial and deliberate ignorance to avoid this cognitive dissonance.

A better approach is to take action. Once you have decided what you want to do, you can select the information relevant to achieving your goals. My motivation for getting involved was that I spend a lot of time with young people – as a teacher and as a father – and I could not keep telling them to be hopeful when everything we have tried so far has failed. Despite all the political efforts since the Earth Summit in 1992 – UNFCCC, IPCC, COP, SDG – the planet is in a much worse state today than 30 years ago. As George Clooney said, this does not mean that you stop. But you have to be honest with yourself and acknowledge your failures.

You cannot solve a problem unless you recognize that you have one. Unfortunately, most people are in complete denial of the magnitude of the challenge we face. There are at least three huge elephants that continue to be ignored in the climate debate:

1. Elixir of Power: Fossil fuels, particularly oil, still constitute an elixir of power in global politics. Not only is the GDP strongly correlated to carbon emissions, but we also use oil to power tanks, warships, and military aircraft. A country that takes sustainability seriously will become less powerful, at least in the short run. In case of immediate military threats, the national defense will always be considered more important than decarbonization.

2. Overshoot: Human society is currently in a state of overshoot, where we are already using far more resources than would be allowed in a sustainable world. Economic growth is not the problem but the size of the economy and the population. We simply do not know whether it is possible to feed eight billion people without fossil fuels. Stopping climate change will require a system change.

3. Peter Principle: A well-known phenomenon is that people are often promoted for obeying orders and doing everything according to the book. These people perform well as long as external circumstances do not change dramatically. When faced with unprecedented challenges and emergencies, they are typically not the right people to lead. Note that this problem is not limited to politics. It occurs in any large organization, such as corporations, the military, and research institutes. Creating a sustainable world will involve a lot of change management and the people currently in charge are probably not ideally suited for initiating the necessary transformation of society.

Global Climate Compensation was designed to address all these issues. The idea is simple:

• All fossil fuel producers pay a fee proportional to their production to a global fund.

• The money from the fund is distributed among the world’s nations on a per capita basis.

Once implemented, the system would make fossil fuels less valuable as a natural resource because nations that use a lot of them would have to share their profits with the rest of us. Furthermore, a system of regular payments from a global fund to national governments would hopefully encourage international collaboration.

Global Climate Compensation does not assume that decarbonization is possible or that degrowth is necessary. It only increases the cost price of fossil fuels while making sure that the poor do not suffer. If the optimists are correct, this will accelerate the energy transition. If not, it will lead to inflation. Either way, it would ensure more efficient use of energy.

The plan is simple to implement. Governments would have to introduce legislation that makes it illegal for any non-participating fossil fuel company to do business. The system would be easy to monitor, and cheating would not be possible.

A further advantage is that it is testable. Given that we are currently conducting an irreversible, uncontrolled, and dangerous experiment with the biosphere of the only habitable planet available, performing a reversible, controlled, and risk-free experiment with the economy does not seem like a crazy idea.

Global Climate Compensation is my plan for getting out of the mess. Others could probably be devised. However, unless we are prepared to address the three elephants mentioned above, we will never prevent the collapse of human civilization.

When it comes to climate change, this metaphor is too close for comfort. The greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are rising at an accelerating rate, and unless we break this trend, any discussion over carbon budgets is pointless. The only reason for the increase is that we have drilled holes in the crust of the Earth, from which we extract coal, oil, and gas. We know that the fossil fuels in the ground and the oxygen in the air were both created by the same process – almost a billion years of photosynthesis – but we have reversed it to enable economic growth. Somehow, capitalism and short-term profits are still considered more important than the future of humanity and the global ecosystem. We keep arguing over technologies rather than focusing on the most important task: phasing out gas, coal, and oil as quickly as possible. How can anyone believe that we will prevent the climate crisis when fossil fuel extraction is still the world’s most lucrative business? Why does anyone think that governments are serious about stopping climate change when they continue to subsidize fossil fuels and spend twice as much money on protecting their borders as on protecting the climate?

The problem is that the governments of the Global North have decided that climate change cannot be prevented at a reasonable cost and are now preparing for the inevitable climate disaster by strengthening their defenses to keep the huddled masses out. As their armies require large quantities of oil to operate, they are essentially “feeding the crocodile, hoping that it will eat them last.” They cannot openly admit this and therefore resort to the kind of political language brilliantly described by George Orwell in 1946:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

If you are looking for modern examples of this phenomenon, the mission statement of Frontex is an excellent place to start: The European Area of Freedom, Security and Justice. There are good reasons for keeping climate refugees out of Europe, but they are hardly compatible with the notion of universal human rights and the avowed aims of our political parties.

We live in faux democracies, where the public is encouraged to participate in the political process on irrelevant issues but is kept in the dark on important matters. We saw this during the financial crisis of 2008, and we see it today with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Fundamental decisions about saving the global financial system and rewriting national defense and security policies are made behind closed doors without any involvement of the public. Germany, a country that has spent decades arguing over speed limits on the Autobahn, was prepared to change its entire post-war approach to foreign policy and massively boost defense spending without any political debate. Whether this decision was correct or not is irrelevant. The point is that a major crisis was used to ram through political decisions that would otherwise have been difficult. This is Disaster Capitalism at its best.

The rich and the powerful who run the show are not stupid but rather rational, unscrupulous, greedy, and power-hungry. They realized a long time ago that their lifestyle is incompatible with a finite planet and that the kind of global collaboration and solidarity required to prevent climate disaster is extremely unlikely. However, they are delighted to hear that the poorest and most vulnerable will suffer the worst consequences, especially in the Global South. The choice between sacrificing power and wealth or letting poor people die is easy.

As long as you continue to drill holes in the hull, you are not really trying to salvage the ship. Likewise, saving the only habitable planet in the known universe does not involve extracting non-renewable natural resources and destroying ecosystems at an accelerating rate. Stating that we never tried to stop climate change would be too polite. The truth is that the people in charge decided that it was not worthwhile. And as usual with significant decisions, they did not bother to consult the rest of us.

The people running the show always knew that they were wrecking the planet, which is why additional research was never going to change anything. For them, climate protection was simply a “cure worse than the disease.” In the short run, they are probably right. And in the long run, we are all dead.

How do we get out of this mess? Appealing to the sense of altruism of the global elite is not going to work. On the other hand, launching a popular uprising to abolish capitalism is also likely to fail, as the global elite is too powerful, and we do not have a generally accepted alternative to the existing system. Because of this, revolutions in the past have typically been chaotic and bloody affairs with disappointing outcomes.

To defeat the people in power, we need to divide and conquer. The introduction of a global carbon tax would deal a major blow to global capitalism by invalidating any business models dependent on fossil fuels. Without access to cheap fossil fuels, most large corporations would not be able to operate. If the tax revenue were fairly distributed, the poor would not have to suffer. Oil companies do not care whether they generate their profits from destroying the planet or taking money from the rich, as long as they make a profit. After all, it is easier to sell one barrel of oil for $1000 than ten barrels for $100 each. But the impact on the environment is a lot smaller with one barrel.

Rather than attacking the fossil fuel companies directly, Global Climate Compensation uses them as tax collectors. They are allowed to continue to operate as long as they take money from the rich and give it to the poor. In the short run, this would solve their image problem without significantly hurting their bottom line. And we know that they do not care about long-term consequences.

Unfortunately, we are all guilty of a certain amount of denial and wishful thinking. Ralph Hertwig and Christoph Engel refer to this as deliberate ignorance. To avoid cognitive dissonance, we carefully choose what we want to know. Arguably, the situation has gotten worse with the internet and social media, which do not only provide a buffet of information, facts, alternate facts, and fake news, but also constantly adapts this menu to our preferences using sophisticated algorithms. As Jonathan Haidt pointed out in this brilliant article in The Atlantic, rather than becoming more intelligent, humanity might have entered a phase of unprecedented stupidity.

How do we know what is true? Answering this question is not easy, as was pointed out by Josh Fox in The Truth Has Changed.

I am reminded of this every time I attend an event about the climate crisis and what to do about it. Whereas there is universal agreement that anthropogenic climate change with disastrous repercussions (aka climate destruction) is a reality, there is considerably less agreement about the solutions. There is progress: many people now accept that sustainable growth is impossible. To save humanity, with have to abolish the growth paradigm and look for a better way to live. However, I believe that most people, even proponents of degrowth, are in denial over the consequences of this realization.

The problem is that there are many reasons for our desire to grow, such as:

1. We have a capitalist system that requires growth to generate capital income

2. The population is still growing, demanding more resources.

3. We want to improve our well-being and live more comfortably. In many countries, this is still related to owning more stuff.

4. Arguably, humans have a natural desire to compete. Most people are driven by a desire to be better off than their neighbors.

5. Advancement of technology. Our industrial society has been very good at producing many technologies that turned out to be very useful in killing other people.

This is not a comprehensive list, but it does show the complexity of the problem. If sustainable growth were possible, we could ignore it and continue with business as usual. If not, we need to address all the points above and probably some others. Many people try to deny this fact.

Unfortunately, the last point on the list might be the most difficult one. What is the point of building a green utopia if you are going to be overrun by a belligerent army the next day? We are stuck in a vicious circle: wars require oil, and access to oil requires wars. And the climate crisis and resource scarcity will further destabilize the global world order.

Any solution to the climate crisis will require addressing this issue too. We need to find a global solution that reduces the strategic importance of fossil fuels, encourages international collaboration, and makes it impossible for countries, corporations, and individuals to cheat.

In his remarkable book The Affluent Society (published in 1958?), J. K. Galbraith talks about the conventional wisdom. Our perception of the world is not only based on facts but also on a set of generally accepted beliefs that we hold out of convenience. In the famous story of H.C. Andersen, the conventional wisdom was the Emperor was dressed in beautiful clothes. Only the uninitiated were prepared to admit the obvious.

“The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.” The majority of people do not change their views because of rational arguments. They change because they have to. Global Climate Compensation would invalidate any business model heavily dependent on fossil fuels. I do not believe people have a problem with higher fossil fuel prices, as long as the burden is shared equally. What they do not accept is a world where some people get rich by destroying the environment whereas other people have to work to earn a living.

I honestly believe that Global Carbon Compensation would address most of the points in the list above. The Paris agreement does not address a single one of them. I am looking forward to your comments.

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