Speaker 1: 0:44

Welcome to another Climate Tech podcast Conversations with the People Trying to Save Us from Ourselves. Today, i had the great pleasure of speaking with Richard Heimberg, senior Fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute and author of Power Limits and Prospects for Human Survival, a book that Bloomberg described as mind-blowing. He's a self-described victim of a lifelong obsession with exploring the human sustainability predicament, and I reached him at home in Santa Rosa, california. Richard. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you, ryan, it's good to be with you. The Post-Carbon Institute turned 20 this year, so congratulations. You've been working on this for a while. Can you talk a little bit about what problem the Institute exists to solve and what your role is there?

Speaker 2: 1:29

Sure, well, as the name of the Institute suggests, we're focused around the impact of fossil fuels in the largest sense, not just the impacts of fossil fuel production, fossil fuel combustion, but the whole shebang, i mean. The reality is the last couple of hundred years, and especially the last 75 years, have seen tremendous growth in the whole human enterprise as a result of having an enormous amount of energy available from fossil fuels. So our population has grown more rapidly than at any other time in human history. Per capita consumption of just about everything has grown again the fastest in all of human history, and this has lots of repercussions. And so getting off of fossil fuels is not so simple. It's a complex situation and we want to be able to help folks understand that and analyze the whole process as it happens and describe that. So that's what the Institute's about.

Speaker 2: 2:39

My role is basically as a writer. That's basically what I bring to the table. I have a gift for organizing information in an understandable way and I'm a generalist. I haven't specialized in a particular field, and that seems to be helpful in looking at a problem that's this broad and that affects so many aspects of human society. So that's who we are and what we do.

Speaker 1: 3:09

And you're a really good writer, if I may say so. That's one of the reasons I reached out to you recently is because you just launched a report with a rather inauspicious title, called Welcome to the Great Unraveling Navigating the Polycrisis of Environmental and Social Breakdown, and it kind of reads like a thriller, which is not a good sign for us. unfortunately, It's the first time I saw the term polycrisis and I looked it up. So the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report from 2023 defines it as a cluster of interdependent global risks that create a compounding effect such that their overall impact exceeds the sum of their individual parts. One of the things you say in this report is that this crisis, this polycrisis, was inevitable. Can you give us a bit of color on how we got to this point and why it's inevitable?

Speaker 2: 4:01

Sure? Well, human societies have always had problems. So what we're talking about is problems on a different scale from what human societies have faced in the past. And why are we looking at problems on a different scale? It's because the scale of everything has increased so much. It really comes back largely to fossil fuels not entirely, but we were able to start using fossil fuels at increasing rates because some other things had happened in society previously that enabled that. We had an early technological revolution that included metallurgy, you know, inventing things like gears and engines and so on, and that paved the way it made it possible to use fossil fuels. We also had capitalism private ownership of natural resources or the means of production, as Karl Marx famously said. So capitalism set us on a path of continual economic growth. If we hadn't had capitalism, it's very unlikely that the fossil fuel revolution would have happened in the same way or at the same scale. But because we had capitalism and fossil fuels, this really set the stage for an explosive growth in human consumption, resource extraction, waste dumping, the whole show, and that has set us up for a whole bunch of problems.

Speaker 2: 5:41

Ecologists have been looking at this for decades and saying, hey look, you can't continue growing your consumption of resources and extracting them from the earth and turning them in the waste at an exponential rate. You can't continue doing that forever. Sooner or later, you run into huge problems of resource depletion, pollution and so on, and so that's what we're seeing. Surprise. We shouldn't be at all surprised, actually. I mean, it's intuitively obvious that this is what would happen, given the circumstances. But we've been educated to think that economic growth is the greatest thing in the world. We've got to have more of it. And so, given that it's really hard to solve these problems, because we're educated to avoid questioning the very things that create the problems- Yeah, at a certain point, GDP became the unquestioned North Star for everyone, and this is basically what it's led to.

Speaker 2: 6:49

Right. It's an interesting story historically how this all happened. A lot of it came into being in the 1930s and 1950s in the wake of the Great Depression. Now, the Great Depression was partially caused by a problem of overproduction. With fossil fuels, it was possible to extract resources, turn them into manufactured goods faster than people were accustomed to wanting and buying them. So how do you deal with the problem of overproduction? Well, one way is to stimulate consumption, and that was the solution that the managers of industry and government planners hit upon, and they called the system consumerism. So it's a whole economic system that's designed to incentivize more consumption on the part of ordinary households. And again, we take that for granted, and it seems like a good thing because it's solving a problem right, the problem of overproduction. It gives people jobs, investors get more returns on their investment, corporations make more profits. What's not to like? Well, we're starting to see that.

Speaker 1: 8:07

In the discussion about climate change, you mentioned that we seem very laser focused on emissions specifically, but that there are other what I would call civilization busters at play topsoil depletion and degradation, loss of habitat and biodiversity, chemicals everywhere in the environment that are disrupting reproduction in both humans and other animals. My sense is that the reason we're focused on CO2 is because it's easier, relative to some of these other issues, to put a price on and to create markets for. So people see potentially and maybe this is being cynical, but see just the market opportunity, whereas talking about issues of biodiversity, that's a much harder issue to monetize. Is this? am I getting close with this?

Speaker 2: 8:57

Oh yeah, absolutely. That's a good first take, but it does go deeper than that. And, by the way, my colleagues and I and I don't just include post-carbon institute, but other environmental organizations that look at the more systemic view of the human situation. Now, i have other names for this. Some of us call it carbon fundamentalism and others call it carbon tunnel vision.

Speaker 2: 9:25

It's this tendency to see all of our environmental problems just in light of climate change, and to look at climate change just in light of excess carbon emissions, and to refuse to see it in a larger systemic context. So why is this happening? Part of it is just that we are conditioned to a kind of binary view of the world that looks at problems and solutions. If there's a problem, there must be a solution. Well, climate change is a big problem In many ways, it's the biggest environmental problem human beings have ever created by far And so there must be a solution.

Speaker 2: 10:10

What's the solution? Well, if the problem can be isolated down to excess carbon emissions, well then the solution is change your energy source to something that doesn't produce carbon emissions, or build machines to suck the excess carbon out of the atmosphere and store it somewhere. But if you start looking at this whole panoply of crises that we talk about in the report, you realize that it doesn't all just boil down to excess carbon emissions, and if we just focus on carbon emissions, we miss all these other aspects of the polycrisis that are converging on us. So what we really need to do is look at the situation not as a problem with simple, discrete solution, but as a predicament, and a predicament is different from a problem. You don't solve a predicament. You deal with it. You navigate your way through it. You look for the best case scenarios and try to navigate toward those, but predicaments don't have easy solutions And unfortunately, that's what we have facing us in the 21st century as a predicament rather than just a single problem.

Speaker 1: 12:26

I had on an earlier episode the great climate tech VC, melina Sanchez, talking about climate bros and how they were really focused on things like CO2 and kind of look at, almost the idea is kind of like it's a basketball game and whoever gets the most points and most gigatons, you know offset, wins, and that the problem, one of the problems with the sort of climate bros out there, is that they only want to hear optimism and they only want to hear about how technology is the, you know, the savior for this problem. When I mean, i think it's, as you say, it's a predicament And, as is often the case, it's not just about technology, it's a lot about human mindsets and kind of what, what our limitations are as human animals, i would say as well.

Speaker 2: 13:17

Right, yeah, it's our mindsets and it's our behavior more than anything else, and of course those are the things that we really don't want to change or it's difficult to change. It's so much easier to just build new machines. You know somebody makes money on them and so that's a big incentive. And you know machines do everything for us already, so a few more of them isn't going to cause any problems, it just makes the future brighter. You know more machines, more happiness, more wealth, everything you know. But again, you know it's not that simple. It's a much more complex situation.

Speaker 1: 13:54

Yeah, and I want to talk in a minute about this new age of AI that we've entered as well. But let's take a couple of the topics as well that beyond emissions, so things like biodiversity and soil health. Not long ago, i told someone that in the past in the past, i forget what it is about 30 or 40 years we've lost 70% of the insect population globally, and her reaction really surprised me. She said good, and I thought, oh God, we're doomed. Why? what is it about biodiversity? that's challenging, or you know, i sort of get the sense that people think of this very much as a nice to have and think of, like you know, these visions of Bambi running in the forest when they think of biodiversity. But biodiversity is a really crucial element of planetary health. What are your thoughts on that? What do you cover in the report around biodiversity?

Speaker 2: 14:52

Well, in the report we talk about the grim statistics. You mentioned one regarding insects, but this is true almost across the board. Whether we're looking at fish species and amphibians, birds, mammals, microbial biodiversity in the topsoil, across the board we're seeing declines not just in the numbers of species but in the abundance of individuals within each of those species. So the average, for example, bird or mammalian species has lost about 70% of its population. The numbers of finches, for example, down 70%. So, as you say, what does this mean? Why is it a problem? Well, the very fact that we don't see it as a problem is extraordinary. You know, how can we look at, you know, changing the earth in a catastrophic way, like we've seen this happen in the previous eras of earth history, and we call it a mass extinction, and in the worst instance, of something like 90, 95% of species disappeared And then it took millions of years for life to diversify again after these extinction periods. Well, we're doing the same thing now. And why don't we see that as a problem? Well, it's because we've isolated ourselves so much from nature And, you know, we started to think, centuries ago, really, of nature as being kind of this wild thing that we had to tame, right, and we did it by living in houses and providing ourselves with sources of heat, and clothes and tools and all these things. They're good things, great. But if you just look at nature as something to be tamed and conquered, then you're missing out on the big picture. The big picture is this is where we live, this is our bigger house, right? Okay, we may live in houses with TVs and central heating and so on, but the big house is the earth itself. And if your little house is doing just fine and it's all comfy, but the big house is collapsing around you, you got a problem And that's what's happening The big house is collapsing.

Speaker 2: 17:27

I, a few years ago, i was at a conference in I think it was Norway or something, and one of the other presenters of the conference was the great oceanographer Sylvia Earle, and I just I was so lucky to have a seat on an airplane next to her flying out of the conference, and so you know, i enjoyed hearing from her firsthand, you know, just kind of conversationally, and she said to me point blank the oceans are dying. Okay, this woman knows more about the oceans than maybe any other living person, and so that's a stunning statement. If that's true, what are the implications? You know, 70% of the Earth's surface is ocean and the immense biodiversity there that creates the most of the oxygen in the atmosphere, that keeps the balance of the Earth's heat, and so on.

Speaker 1: 18:29

What are we?

Speaker 2: 18:30

humans doing.

Speaker 1: 18:31

Yeah, about 10 years ago the UN came out with a report I forget which agency of the UN that the oceans would be effectively dead or marine life would be effectively extinct by 2053. The one time I saw that they updated as they moved that date forward And I mean so? you know this. This is a leaving aside topics like carbon sinks, i mean. It's also the food source of the human population to a large extent.

Speaker 2: 18:54

Yeah, i mean, how does agriculture work without nature? I mean, we can imagine growing all our food in laboratories and greenhouses and so on. But once again, you know, if? how can you keep your your little artificial house working if the, if the big house around you is collapsing upon it? That's, that's how we need to be thinking about this.

Speaker 1: 19:17

One of the approaches to agriculture that's gained some traction, certainly here in Europe, is regenerative agriculture, and I'm always interested to get views on this because they they've very widely, i think you know, it's generally accepted that regenerative agriculture, which is, you know, basically the opposite of monoculture and ways of taking care of the soil, planting crops on rotations, not using harmful chemicals, but whether that's actually scalable. Also, one of the famous proponents of this is King Charles of England And you know, and there are some memes and videos out there of kind of his gardeners hanging from the back of a land rover cutting some weeds out by with scissors.

Speaker 1: 20:07

And so things like this are generally probably not not completely scalable to feed a population that will soon hit 10 billion people. Is regenerative agriculture part of this story? Is it part of the solution?

Speaker 2: 20:19

Yes, in short, it is. We have to think very differently about how we produce food, and there are a lot of fine minds that have been working on this problem for for decades now. The whole field of organic agriculture is part of it. Permaculture is a big contributor. There's something called carbon farming now, which is OK. How do you use agriculture to capture carbon from the atmosphere and store it in healthy, regenerated soils? So all of this is part of the solution And, that said, the reality is that if we fully pursue forms of food production that are more biodiverse, that capture carbon that creates hopsoil rather than destroying it, if we do that, it's going to take more people.

Speaker 2: 21:13

All of this isn't going to happen just through machines doing everything for us.

Speaker 2: 21:19

We're talking about knowledge intensive place, specific kinds of agriculture, and so we're going to need more people doing it, with more knowledge about their local regions, with more skills at how to apply this knowledge, more systems, knowledge about how climate is affecting growing seasons and what kinds of species will thrive in different places as growing zones change, and so on.

Speaker 2: 21:54

So I wrote a piece a few years ago called 50 million farmers. That was just looking at the US situation, and 50 million is just a guesstimate, just a number to throw out there, but it used to be that 70 to 90% of the population was engaged in agriculture and food production In order to grow enough surplus so that 10% of the population could live in cities and work as bankers and lawyers and doctors and all these other things. Today, it's like one or 2% of the population grow all the food for everybody else And they do it using fossil fuels and machines. Now, great, that gives us a lot of opportunities for other occupations and diversity of interests and so on, but I don't think this is a path we can continue on much longer. I think we're going to have to reverse that trend And more of us are going to have to be engaged in food production, maybe not full time, but growing more of our own food, growing it locally and growing food in ways that take advantage of ecosystem services rather than chemicals and machines.

Speaker 1: 23:54

Today. so much of the conversation in current affairs is about how there will be no jobs left because of AI, so I'll put this in the good news column that people will have something to do. There will be more people working in agriculture. hopefully, you talk about AI as well. You mentioned that there's a lot of talk, especially in the climate tech space, about how AI can be used as part of the solution to this crisis, but you make the point that it's just as likely to accelerate this crisis poly crisis. Why is that?

Speaker 2: 24:31

Right, i wrote a piece on this just a couple of weeks ago, kind of a deep dive into AI and who are some of the major thinkers in the field, people who are working at the forefront. And it's interesting that if you look at the most vocal, most experienced, most knowledgeable people in this field, they're the people who are the most worried about where this is all going. Now some of them suggest that AI will kill us all, basically wipe out life on earth. It's sort of like if you were a hunter-gatherer and you suddenly encountered somebody from a different culture who had guns and money and all this. Would you welcome them in and offer them something to eat? Well, of course, that's what many hunter-gatherers traditionally have done, and the result is not pretty. Hunter-gatherers get wiped out by the colonists. Well, in the analogy, ai is kind of like the colonists.

Speaker 2: 25:45

This is a form of intelligence that far outstrips the human brain already in many respects and very quickly is going to develop the ability to do just about everything we do with our brains faster and on a bigger scale. Are we prepared to deal with the results of that? What if, as some AI researchers have said, ai at some point looks upon human beings and the rest of nature is just a pile of atoms and molecules that it can find better uses for. Okay, so that's the worst case scenario. But step back from that. What can we be pretty sure that AI is going to do? Well, it's going to increase wealth inequality almost surely Most technological advances do that. And then we have to play catch up later on and try to find other jobs for people or ways of taking care of their basic needs while they make other arrangements in their lives, and so on. Well, ai has the potential to do the same thing on a much bigger scale and much faster than we've seen with any of the other technological advances of the last few decades. We're talking about most jobs in the information world. What are all those people are going to do?

Speaker 2: 27:11

And then, how do you tell what's real and what's computer generated? after a while, whether it's visual information or verbal text or whatever, it's all up for grabs. It can be recreated, it can be synthesized and simulated more convincingly than the real thing. So what does that do for democracy? These are the things that are more or less inevitable. Human extinction is a possibility. That's the worst case, but these other things are virtually inevitable. The AI researchers are waving their hands frantically and saying, hey, you'd better get busy thinking about these implications right now, because this is happening fast. So, yeah, ai will accelerate everything that we're already doing Technological systems, financial systems, resource extraction, manufacturing, distribution all of these things are going to be speeded up. So if we can't handle the repercussions of what we're doing now and the implications of them and the blowback from what we're doing, then, what are we going to do when all of that gets speeded up?

Speaker 1: 28:29

Three years ago, before Sam Altman and ChatGPT were household names, the UN's World Social Report said that inequalities increasing, primarily driven by four megatrends or maybe not primarily, but certainly driven by four megatrends Technological innovation, climate change, urbanization and international migration. So now we can add AI to that, i would imagine, since 2020, that this trend has only intensified. So what is the risk of inequality to climate and to the hope of a post-carbon world?

Speaker 2: 29:02

Right? Well, if we're going to deal with these kinds of problems, we have to have some kind of social solidarity, because we're going to have to coordinate some behavioral changes and there will be some sacrifices that we have to make along the way. And if we're not working together, then the result will be a lot of blame and recrimination and fighting over things that we don't really have to fight over, and economic inequality tends to make us less socially stable and cohesive. And how do we know this? I just finished reading a wonderful new book by Peter Turchin called End Times Elites Counter-Elites on the Path of Political Disintegration.

Speaker 2: 29:49

Turchin is one of a group of social scientists who are using big data to try to understand patterns in history. Okay, so they've created a database about all the quantifiable information that we can glean about hundreds of human societies over the past several thousand years, and so they create this database and then they comb the data electronically, of course to try to find patterns. And one of the patterns that leaps out is that when societies become more economically unequal, they become more fragile, more prone to internal social collapse, and, of course, that collapse can come about in any number of ways financial collapse, becoming vulnerable to being taken over by other societies or a political crisis. But when societies become very unequal and there's a sort of wealth pump at work, where the rich are constantly getting richer and the poor are constantly getting poorer, the people at the bottom of the economic pyramid reach a point where they have nothing to lose And they see the system as a whole as being so unfair, why bother to support it? And at that point there tends to be a revolt among the elites. One of the things that happens as a result of the wealth pump is that the societies tend to produce more and more elite aspirants, more people who want to be part of the elite group at the top. That's getting all the goodies right. And with more and more elite aspirants, there tends to be a fracturing among the elites, and some of those are going to say well, i can get more power by at least pretending to represent the interests of all of these people at the bottom of the economic pyramid who are getting absolutely miserable. And so society fractures and people start fighting, and of course, that's exactly what we're seeing in places like the United States right now.

Speaker 2: 32:01

And a church, and, of course, focuses most of his analysis on the US and uses data and history and examples from what's going on now. If we don't deal with economic inequality, we won't have enough social cohesion to deal with climate change or any of these other problems. So economic inequality is not this other thing that we can take care of later, once we deal with climate change, etc. It's part of the poly crisis and we have to deal with the whole thing. As complex as it is, we can't just divide it up into simple problems and with simple solutions. We got to take the whole ball of yarn and deal with it.

Speaker 1: 32:47

So we should be reading about the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the French Revolution, maybe for a blueprint of what we've got ahead of us.

Speaker 2: 32:56

Yeah, these are good historical examples And history can't teach us if we're willing to learn.

Speaker 1: 33:02

You talk about social cohesion in order to try to fight this and arguably, or we haven't seen less social cohesion than we do right now, not just in the US, but in many countries.

Speaker 1: 33:13

I saw a headline asking if wind energy is woke electricity And so you know it was only a matter of time, and this has kind of always been been the case since renewable energy. I used to work in renewable energy and I think there was maybe more of a openness to it in the naughties, but now it's become very politicized and you talk about the energy transition that we need to undertake to reduce carbon emissions, but interestingly and this was a hot take for me to see this you think that, ironically, our wish to transition to renewable energy will cause us to blow past the emissions targets that are commensurate with maintaining a livable planet. What's that about?

Speaker 2: 34:00

Well, that's, that's based on some preliminary systems analyses by energy researchers. Our energy system is a complex system, right, and it's right now. It's overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels. About 85% of our current energy is from fossil fuels.

Speaker 1: 34:20

Is that globally or in the US?

Speaker 2: 34:21

Globally, and what we want to do is shift that so that from 85% we go down to as close to zero as possible and supply that energy instead with renewable sources. Some people are proposing also nuclear, but I don't think anybody thinks that nuclear could do it all, mostly renewable sources like solar and wind. Okay, so what's the problem? We just build more solar panels and wind turbines. Well, it's a complex system, and so it takes energy to build solar panels and wind turbines. Also, in the energy transition, it's not just the energy generators that we need to replace. It's also a lot of technology that uses energy, because we've built our current energy using infrastructure and technology to fit the energy sources that we currently have. So we have machines that burn fossil fuels, heat sources that use fossil fuels, manufacturing systems that depend on fossil fuels, agriculture that depends on fossil fuels, and so on. So we need to replace a heck of a lot of infrastructure and machines. Then there's the question of how fast do we need to do this? Can we just replace all this infrastructure and all these machines as they wear out naturally, and then you need to buy a new car, maybe in five years, and so you'll plan to buy an electric car, then Well, that's fine, but a lot of the technology and infrastructure that is really embedded in our whole industrial system has long lifespan And we're not planning to switch it all out, for ordinary economic reasons, all in the next 20 years. But if we're going to prevent catastrophic climate change, we do have to change a lot of this stuff over the next 20 years. So that means expending a lot of energy to build a heck of a lot of new stuff.

Speaker 2: 36:32

Where's that energy going to come from? Well, at least in the early stages, it's got to come from fossil fuels, and we don't want to cut down on the amount of energy that we're using so that we can devote all this energy to the energy transition. We want to keep doing all these other things at the same time. We want to keep taking vacations on other continents and consuming, ordering stuff off the internet and having it delivered to our doors and doing all these other things that require energy, and so, as long as the economy is growing, we're using more energy overall, and what's happened over the last couple of decades is renewable energy has been growing very rapidly, but the amount of fossil fuels we've been using has continued to grow in spite of that, because the overall energy usage is growing faster than renewable energy is growing. So you take all these things into account and it's pretty clear that the only way the energy transition is going to work is if we actually reduce the amount of energy we're using for so-called normal operations, like transportation, consumption and so on, so that we can devote energy to the energy transition and so that we don't have to replace as much energy.

Speaker 2: 37:56

You see, the usage of energy to build all these machines is itself going to produce a lot of greenhouse gas emissions. And the stuff that we're building the solar panels, wind turbines and all the rest we're front loading the energy usage for that. So if you buy an electric car, that's going to produce less greenhouse gas emissions than if you buy a standard internal combustion engine car, right, but the energy reduction is later. The actual manufacturing of the car requires more energy than the manufacturing of the internal combustion engine car, so you get the benefit later on. And the same thing with solar panels, wind turbines. You invest the energy up front to build these things And then over the course of their lifetime over 20 years then they pay that back in terms of reduction in carbon emissions Over the short term, we're actually going to be producing more carbon emissions, at least in some sectors of the economy, then we currently are If we attempt to keep this whole thing growing at its current rate.

Speaker 2: 39:23

And there's not a lot of analysis in this area yet. It's hard to put precise numbers to it because there aren't that many analysts working on it, but the preliminary analysis suggests that this is a significant problem and it's being almost entirely ignored and overlooked by mainstream energy planners, by governments, ipcc and so on.

Speaker 1: 39:47

We need to build more things to try to dig ourselves out of this problem, but by building more things, we're exacerbating the problem. So much of this, so much of that. Maybe this is kind of a key to the Poly crisis is feedback loops and how one exacerbates the other, how inequality drives climate change and how international migration is affected by climate change. What are some of the feedback loops that we should be looking for that you see on the horizon?

Speaker 2: 40:19

Well, the Poly crisis has two large sectors. One is environmental, the other is social. So in the social area you have things like political stability and social solidarity, the fragility of financial systems and so on. And in the ecological area you have, of course, climate change, but also the biodiversity crisis, depletion of resources, including fresh water, topsoil pollution, issues having to do with plastic pollution in the environment, and so on. So this is a complex situation. If you've got a simple problem, you can find a simple solution. If you have two problems, you can start to see how they might interact. But once you have a dozen or more all interacting, that's complexity, and the only way you can hope to understand and predict it is with complex system science. Fortunately, people have been studying systems for some time and coming up with computer simulations and so on to try to understand these things.

Speaker 2: 41:32

And, as you say, one of the characteristics of complex systems is the tendency for feedbacks to happen, and there can be balancing feedbacks, like homeostasis in the human body and predator prey cycles and ecosystems. But there can also be self-reinforcing feedbacks, and wherever we see a self-reinforcing feedback process going on in systems, that's a warning sign. Typically, that means something really bad is going to happen And we see lots of self-reinforcing feedbacks in human environmental systems right now. I mean one is just economic growth. It's economic growth creates the conditions for more economic growth And we become dependent on economic growth for the bottom line, for corporations, for political systems, stability and so on. But then what? you can't continue growing consumption on a finite planet beyond a certain point.

Speaker 2: 42:31

So one example of this tendency for feedbacks among factors in complex systems is with climate change and the social system, as climate change creates problems and heat domes, like we're seeing in the Southern United States right now wildfires, extreme drought, so on.

Speaker 2: 42:59

This creates stress, localized stress for populations And there will be a tendency for people to move from places where they just can't live, where they can't survive much longer because of lack of water, too much heat at certain times of the year where a human body just can't adapt, not enough food, et cetera, et cetera. So people are going to want to move. But if we have mass migration, that creates political problems which undermine social solidarity, and when people's attention is captivated by these kinds of political and social problems, then it becomes much harder for them to agree around strategies to deal with climate change. So if our solutions to climate change are faltering for social and economic and political reasons, just as climate change is creating more food for those political and social and economic crises, then that's a classic instance of a self-reinforcing feedback. But that's again, that's only one example of many that are starting to appear.

Speaker 1: 44:10

And the migration crisis that we saw here in Europe in 2014, 2015,. Could very arguably be called a climate migration crisis, and it was a boon to populist governments across Europe, and we're seeing the knock-on effects of that today. And, of course, one of the things that populist governments do very well is to drive wedges between populations and so decrease that solidarity exactly.

Speaker 2: 44:35

Right, we'll give you somebody to blame for it. Here's the problem. We'll give you somebody to blame. Yeah, but that's not a solution.

Speaker 1: 44:42

No, it's a cheap way to win votes One of the other. I don't know if this counts as a feedback loop, but it was maybe an externality in using kind of the economics terminology. Not long ago a doctor specialized in fertility told me that through the course of her career she's seen that male fertility plummet, with sperm counts, motility and morphology all suffering. So I guess these are the three aspects that they measure this on. In your report you talk about this in connection with pollution from plastics, fertilizer, runoff and all the kind of environmental chemicals that we see.

Speaker 1: 45:20

And it made me think when I was reading your report that as a teenager I read the children of men, a book by PD James that was turned into a great movie as well, which is basically about the end of human fertility, and you're kind of hoping for the solution, hoping that humanity will prevail. And now maybe I'm a little bit older, i'm cynical and I've worked in this space for a little while in climate, and I'm thinking maybe that's not so bad, maybe that's kind of Mother Nature's way of readjusting to what you know. If we were any other, if humans were any other kind of animal, we would say that we're an invasive species or overpopulated. Is this a correction? Is this a way for nature to kind of shake off some of the fleas that we've become? Or is this just all bad?

Speaker 2: 46:11

Well, you know, declining fertility is human. Fertility is generally a good thing. I mean, if our population declines, then that helps to reduce the pressure that we're putting on ecosystems. However, if that's what's happening as a result of environmental pollution, then it's not a good thing because it doesn't just affect human beings, it affects all the other species in our ecosystems. You mentioned children of men. I would recommend another book, and that's Countdown by Shanna Swan. Subtitle is How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race.

Speaker 2: 46:59

It's a well researched book. It's really scary to read. But you know these environmental chemicals, most of them produced from fossil fuels or with fossil fuels. Many of them are endocrine mimicking chemicals, so they're altering reproductive systems and cycles in species across the board, from insects all the way up through human beings, and we find them in mother's breast milk. We find them all across the globe, including the Arctic and the Antarctic, and the concentration is increasing and the effect that's being seen is increasing. So certain chemicals we just got a ban outright Very fast PFOS chemicals, so-called forever chemicals these are.

Speaker 2: 47:47

They need to be banned immediately, along with a whole range of chemical pesticides and fungicides and so on that are. We use these to solve problems, of course, but sometimes the solution to the problem creates even worse problems, and that's what we're seeing now. I mean if we get to the point, like in children of men, where we basically can't reproduce anymore, i'd say that's a pretty serious problem. And if that extends to the rest of nature too, if we're killing all of nature in order to solve a few economic problems not a good idea.

Speaker 1: 48:24

Indeed, i'll link all of these books in the show notes And I'm just imagining reading this book on a sort of morning commute on a subway and someone reading the title. It's a real conversation starter, maybe the only aside from all the new farmers that we might have, as AI gobbles up the rest of the jobs that are out there. Arguably the only part of the report that gave me a real glimmer of hope is that in the title itself, where you use the term navigating. So that suggests that there is a way to navigate through this. Is that intentional?

Speaker 2: 49:00

Yeah Well, i mean, it is possible that we simply won't make it through this, that the poly crisis will lead to human extinction, and I guess the worst possible outcome would be an extinction of all higher life on the planet, and that's conceivable. That's a conceivable result. I don't think it's inevitable. I think that it's probably not even the most likely way things will proceed The most likely course, i think and of course, nobody knows what the future is actually going to be. I'm surprised every day at things I read in the newspaper.

Speaker 2: 49:38

But the most likely course of events is that we will see things get more complicated, more difficult, we'll see problems arise that we didn't see coming, and there'll be worse problems all the time.

Speaker 2: 49:52

And we'll have to try to get through this as best we can.

Speaker 2: 49:56

We will have to make sacrifices, we will be uncomfortable And growth will turn to population decline, economic growth will turn to economic contraction, and we'll somehow get through. And there are better and worse ways to get through difficult times. And what we're trying to do in the report is just, in broad strokes, describe what the major factors are that are converging over the next few decades, and readers can figure out for themselves what some of the likely pathways will be for how events will manifest. Looking at this over the past few years, we've decided that probably the best path to take is a kind of no regrets strategy of building more societal resilience, building more societal cohesion, so that we can work together to solve problems rather than just blaming each other for them, and then do the best we can in a whack-a-mole style to maintain biodiversity, stop the destruction of rainforests and ecosystems and reduce economic inequality as much as we can. And stay on our feet and stay alert and make it through together and support each other in the process.

Speaker 1: 51:19

A problem with no silver bullet, but maybe with silver birdshot? Yeah, Right.

Speaker 2: 51:26

I mean a lot depends on the attitude we maintain as we approach this shift that we're going through. For the last few decades, environmental scientists and social scientists have been saying, hey look, if you continue on this trend, at a certain point things are going to go haywire. So we continued on that trend, right? Everybody listened to the social and environmental scientists and said, oh, we can't continue to go on growing population and consumption forever. We got to do something about that. Nobody said, oh, reliance on fossil fuels doesn't make sense over the long run. I mean, these are depleting non-renewable resources. They're changing the climate. We got to get rid of them. We knew enough to make that determination 50 years ago, but we didn't do anything about it. Then We're at the point where warnings aren't enough. We're at the point where we're actually seeing the consequences unfolding And over the next years and decades we will be going through the shift from warnings to consequences. And that's what the report is about. How do we navigate that shift?

Speaker 1: 52:41

So bottom of the ninth base is loaded and it's all up to us. The report is called Welcome to the Great Unraveling Navigating the Polycrisis of Environmental and Social Breakdown by the Post Carbon Institute, and I'm going to link to it in the show notes. Richard, thank you so much for joining.

Speaker 2: 52:58

Thank you, ryan, it's going to pleasure speaking with you.

Speaker 1: 53:06

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