Lecture on Global Climate Compensation
We are heading for a wall and we are still accelerating!
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.
I really love the St. Augustine quote because it embraces anger as an epistemological tool that, when paired with the virtue of courage, leads to meaningful action.
This stands in stark contrast to stoicism, which denies anger's epistemological, ontological, and ethical value, telling us to accept what we cannot change. For this reason, I see stoicism as a philosophy of resignation rather than empowerment.
Interestingly, stoicism has seen a massive resurgence in our culture since around 2010—coinciding with the alarming acceleration of climate change. It's important to remind people that we do hold the keys to our material reality, and that the Stoic way of life, rather than fostering ethical courage, promotes a form of resignation that borders on cowardice. True ethical responsibility lies in recognizing our role in this material unfolding.
Henrik I just have one question, and I think I need to preface it with saying this is not a question about justice, fairness or morality, all incredibly important things, and all felt strongly by all humans.
But: isn’t the problem with your suggestions exactly what you write: that it may work? If the world’s wealth is redistributed to the poor (however it is done), the poor will use it to improve their standards of living, ie consumption, exasperating the entire problem.
The globe needs to degrow and lower resource use. This is only achieved by lowering consumption (obviously in the North). The lower, the better. We almost can’t imagine how low we should go, but it’s probably below living like the Amish, or Bangladeshians.
Looking at that from any angle - behaviorally, sytemicallly (economics, societally), geopolitically, game theoretically or historically - all make it clear: we ain’t gonna do it. We flatly refuse. And also, even if we wanted to, we can’t even imagine how to without having capitalism crash, pulling us all down with it. We basically can’t and won’t stop using fossil fuels, and we can’t continue using them.
The solutions are WAY outside the Overton window. Way, way, way outside. Such as encouraging senicide: altruistic self-sacrifice to relieve society from the burden of an old person. The paradigm shifts in consciousness we need are, quite frankly, so huge that it is naive to ever imagine them happening fast enough to mitigate much of the impending collapse.