Energy & Economics
The Importance of Systems Thinking
Scientists see that the earth is warming and the atmosphere is filling up with greenhouse gases, so they tell us about those events. If we ask, we can learn about patterns: how we are putting more carbon into the air than our system can absorb. If we study systems structure, we learn that our economy relies on fossil fuel extraction and externalized environmental costs to keep growing, that that capitalism depends on constant growth.
However, capitalism is all we know, so we need to build new mental models: read about other economic systems and ways of living, and how people organized successfully for systemic change in other places and times. We organize as well, looking for leverage.
All this sounds crazy to talk to people who don't choose to read articles about climate change, particularly when it's nice outside. When forest fire smoke fills our own air, or hurricanes flood our own fields and wash away our own roads, everyone is ready to learn more. Then the danger passes, stories vanish from our feeds, and our harried day-to-day lives return.
If we understand the depths of the climate problem, it is logical to keep reminding ourselves about it, and to keep asking what we should do about it, here and now.
Daniel Schmachtenberger, The Consilience Project
"A Vision for Betterment"
What are the value systems embedded in our institutions and policies, and how do they reinforce the need for ongoing growth at the expense of the natural world and human well-being?
How do we change these dynamics to form a new, holistic definition of progress that accounts for the connectedness of our planet to the health of our minds, bodies, and communities?
This episode offers a conceptual map of game theory, sociology, ecology, state capitalism and other underpinnings of our current crisis. It is not a feel-good episode but it is exhilaratingly clear.
Professor Steve Keen is Head of School of Economics, Politics and History at Kingston University London
Olivia Lazard, environmental peacemaker and research fellow at Carnegie Europe, joins me to discuss just how complex that task is, detailing the five steps of the Anthropocene and how violence increases at each step.
We discuss these legacy systems of extraction and violence and how they are embedded into decisions being made around A.I., creating security risks in a resource-scarce world. We also cover the dematerialisation of our economies, the myths that blind us to energy and materials, before discussing the balance of power tipping our planet and human systems further into crisis.
Warning: the reading/comic below uses slavery as a horrifying metaphor for how humans in the Global North have accustomed ourselves to drawing a thousand times our individual work capacity from millennia of solar radiation stored in fossil fuels. This connotation was deliberate on Fuller's part. However, he did not intend to refer to African American slavery in particular.
A comic by Stuart McMillen
... [T]oday's economy would be vastly smaller were it not for ... the fossil sunlight that we have tapped for the past three centuries in the form of fossil fuels like coal, gas and petroleum. "Bucky saw that coal, oil and gas were batteries for ancient sunshine that allowed civilization to, for the first, live beyond its solar income" available through daily sunshine, McMillen writes in the comic.
NY Times, 5/13/24 - Jonathan Mingle
[Earth-friendly solutions] include “virtual power plants” — when technologies such as home batteries, rooftop solar systems, smart water heaters and thermostats are linked together and managed via software to provide the same services as a conventional power plant. Utilities in Vermont, Colorado and Massachusetts are already using them, to quickly respond to rising demand at a much lower cost than operating natural gas combustion turbines.
Utilities could also accelerate efforts to replace outdated transmission lines with newer ones that can carry double the electric current and to bring more battery storage online. They can compensate customers for using less energy during times when demand is high and invest far more in energy efficiency, helping customers to adopt devices that use less electricity.