Let’s get to work!
Let’s get to work!
Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, but that is the road we must take.
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.
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.
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.