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Looking at how life expectancy has risen globally and in a few countries over time.
A large driver of this has been the fall in childhood mortality.
This paints a picture that we’ve achieved much but we still have many challenges to go.
GDP is up. Ideas are up. But other aspects like natural capital are down. And deep poverty while down is still in the hundreds of millions.
I’m enjoying superforecasting by Philip Tetlock. I’ve been using quite a few of the techniques for many years and I am a fan of “fox” thinking over “hedgehog” thinking. Where the Fox knows quite a lot about many things but doesn’t have one BIG idea whereas the hedgehog has one Big idea which applies to most/everything “.
Here’s an April 2020 podcast with Tyler Cowen and Tetlock and trascipt of the conversation.
My one critical thought is his conflation at times between judging matters that fall under bounded natural or physical laws. For instance, theoretical coins and dice. And real world complex or human systems.
In the real world, if dice came up double six, 20 times in a row - I think a superforecaster would put a 70 percent chance or even higher that the dice are loaded.
Many parts of theoretical statistics don’t apply well in real world. However the majority of techniques don’t rely on these statistics so don’t invalidate the book.
Still - the whole book is good food for thought for forecasting in general.
Knowing what the baseline rate of something is or estimating it - is a useful technique as well.
The tips are below:
This summary has the core of the techniques although as it mentions an important component is deliberate practice and other background factors like deep curiosity.
I’ve been dwelling on idea (2). Break big problems into smaller problems. This can be applied to climate change as well. You can break into the 7 major countries, the 6 major sectors and a number of policies/actions to impact change and then it is not so big a problem.
(1) Triage. Focus on questions where your hard work is likely to pay off. Don’t waste time either on easy “clocklike” questions (where simple rules of thumb can get you close to the right answer) or on impenetrable “cloud-like” questions (where even fancy statistical models can’t beat the dart-throwing chimp). Concentrate on questions in the Goldilocks zone of difficulty, where effort pays off the most. For instance, “Who will win the presidential election, twelve years out, in 2028?” is impossible to forecast now. Don’t even try. Could you have predicted in 1940 the winner of the election, twelve years out, in 1952? If you think you could have known it would be a then-unknown colonel in the United States Army, Dwight Eisenhower, you may be afflicted by one of the worst cases of hindsight bias ever documented by psychologists. Of course, triage judgment calls get harder as we come closer to home. How much justifiable confidence can we place in March 2015 on who will win the 2016 election? The short answer is not a lot but still a lot more than we can for the election in 2028. We can at least narrow the 2016 field to a small set of plausible contenders, which is a lot better than the vast set of unknown (Eisenhower-ish) possibilities lurking in 2028. Certain classes of outcomes have well-deserved reputations for being radically unpredictable (e.g., oil prices, currency markets). But we usually don’t discover how unpredictable outcomes are until we have spun our wheels for a while trying to gain analytical traction. Bear in mind the two basic errors it is possible to make here. We could fail to try to predict the potentially predictable or we could waste our time trying to predict the unpredictable. Which error would be worse in the situation you face?
(2) Break seemingly intractable problems into tractable sub-problems. Channel the playful but disciplined spirit of Enrico Fermi who—when he wasn’t designing the world’s first atomic reactor—loved ballparking answers to head-scratchers such as “How many extraterrestrial civilizations exist in the universe?” Decompose the problem into its knowable and unknowable parts. Flush ignorance into the open. Expose and examine your assumptions. Dare to be wrong by making your best guesses. Better to discover errors quickly than to hide them behind vague verbiage. Superforecasters see Fermi-izing as part of the job. How else could they generate quantitative answers to seemingly impossible-to-quantify questions about Arafat’s autopsy, bird-flu epidemics, oil prices, Boko Haram, the Battle of Aleppo, and bond-yield spreads. We find this Fermi-izing spirit at work even in the quest for love, the ultimate unquantifiable. Consider Peter Backus, a lonely guy in London, who guesstimated the number of potential female partners in his vicinity by starting with the population of London (approximately six million) and winnowing that number down by the proportion of women in the population (about 50%), by the proportion of singles (about 50%), by the proportion in the right age range (about 20%), by the proportion of university graduates (about 26%), by the proportion he finds attractive (only 5%), by the proportion likely to find him attractive (only 5%), and by the proportion likely to be compatible with him (about 10%). Conclusion: roughly twenty-six women in the pool, a daunting but not impossible search task. 1 There are no objectively correct answers to true-love questions, but we can score the accuracy of the Fermi estimates that superforecasters generate in the IARPA tournament. The surprise is how often remarkably good probability estimates arise from a remarkably crude series of assumptions and guesstimates.
(3) Strike the right balance between inside and outside views. Superforecasters know that there is nothing new under the sun. Nothing is 100% “unique.” Language purists be damned: uniqueness is a matter of degree. So superforecasters conduct creative searches for comparison classes even for seemingly unique events, such as the outcome of a hunt for a high-profile terrorist (Joseph Kony) or the standoff between a new socialist government in Athens and Greece’s creditors. Superforecasters are in the habit of posing the outside-view question: How often do things of this sort happen in situations of this sort? So too apparently is Larry Summers, a Harvard professor and former Treasury secretary. He knows about the planning fallacy: when bosses ask employees how long it will take to finish a project, employees tend to underestimate the time they need, often by factors of two or three. Summers suspects his own employees are no different. One former employee, Greg Mankiw, himself now a famous economist, recalls Summers’s strategy: he doubled the employee’s estimate, then moved to the next higher time unit. “So, if the research assistant says the task will take an hour, it will take two days. If he says two days, it will take four weeks.” It’s a nerd joke: Summers corrected for employees’ failure to take the outside view in making estimates by taking the outside view toward employees’ estimates, and then inventing a funny correction factor. Of course Summers would adjust his correction factor if an employee astonished him and delivered on time. He would balance his outside-view expectation of tardiness against the new inside-view evidence that a particular employee is an exception to the rule. Because each of us is, to some degree, unique.
(4) Strike the right balance between under-and overreacting to evidence. Belief updating is to good forecasting as brushing and flossing are to good dental hygiene. It can be boring, occasionally uncomfortable, but it pays off in the long term. That said, don’t suppose that belief updating is always easy because it sometimes is. Skillful updating requires teasing subtle signals from noisy news flows—all the while resisting the lure of wishful thinking. Savvy forecasters learn to ferret out telltale clues before the rest of us. They snoop for nonobvious lead indicators, about what would have to happen before X could, where X might be anything from an expansion of Arctic sea ice to a nuclear war in the Korean peninsula. Note the fine line here between picking up subtle clues before everyone else and getting suckered by misleading clues. Does the appearance of an article critical of North Korea in the official Chinese press signal that China is about to squeeze Pyongyang hard—or was it just a quirky error in editorial judgment? The best forecasters tend to be incremental belief updaters, often moving from probabilities of, say, 0.4 to 0.35 or from 0.6 to 0.65, distinctions too subtle to capture with vague verbiage, like “might” or “maybe,” but distinctions that, in the long run, define the difference between good and great forecasters. Yet superforecasters also know how to jump, to move their probability estimates fast in response to diagnostic signals. Superforecasters are not perfect Bayesian updaters but they are better than most of us. And that is largely because they value this skill and work hard at cultivating it.
(5) Look for the clashing causal forces at work in each problem. For every good policy argument, there is typically a counterargument that is at least worth acknowledging. For instance, if you are a devout dove who believes that threatening military action never brings peace, be open to the possibility that you might be wrong about Iran. And the same advice applies if you are a devout hawk who believes that soft “appeasement” policies never pay off. Each side should list, in advance, the signs that would nudge them toward the other. Now here comes the really hard part. In classical dialectics, thesis meets antithesis, producing synthesis. In dragonfly eye, one view meets another and another and another—all of which must be synthesized into a single image. There are no paint-by-number rules here. Synthesis is an art that requires reconciling irreducibly subjective judgments. If you do it well, engaging in this process of synthesizing should transform you from a cookie-cutter dove or hawk into an odd hybrid creature, a dove-hawk, with a nuanced view of when tougher or softer policies are likelier to work.
(6) Strive to distinguish as many degrees of doubt as the problem permits but no more. Few things are either certain or impossible. And “maybe” isn’t all that informative. So your uncertainty dial needs more than three settings. Nuance matters. The more degrees of uncertainty you can distinguish, the better a forecaster you are likely to be. As in poker, you have an advantage if you are better than your competitors at separating 60/ 40 bets from 40/ 60—or 55/ 45 from 45/ 55. Translating vague-verbiage hunches into numeric probabilities feels unnatural at first but it can be done. It just requires patience and practice. The superforecasters have shown what is possible. Most of us could learn, quite quickly, to think in more granular ways about uncertainty. Recall the episode in which President Obama was trying to figure out whether Osama bin Laden was the mystery occupant of the walled-in compound in Abbottabad. And recall the probability estimates of his intelligence officers and the president’s reaction to their estimates: “This is fifty-fifty … a flip of the coin.” Now suppose that President Obama had been shooting the breeze with basketball buddies and each one offered probability estimates on the outcome of a college game—and those estimates corresponded exactly to those offered by intelligence officers on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. Would the president still have shrugged and said, “This is fifty-fifty,” or would he have said, “Sounds like the odds fall between three to one and four to one”? I bet on the latter. The president is accustomed to granular thinking in the domain of sports. Every year, he enjoys trying to predict the winners of the March Madness basketball tournament, a probability puzzle that draws the attention of serious statisticians. But, like his Democratic and Republican predecessors, he does not apply the same rigor to national security decisions. Why? Because different norms govern different thought processes. Reducing complex hunches to scorable probabilities is de rigueur in sports but not in national security. 3 So, don’t reserve rigorous reasoning for trivial pursuits. George Tenet would not have dared utter “slam dunk” about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq if the Bush White House had enforced standards of evidence and proof that are second nature to seasoned gamblers on sporting events. Slam dunk implies one is willing to offer infinite odds—and to lose everything if one is wrong.
(7) Strike the right balance between under-and overconfidence, between prudence and decisiveness. Superforecasters understand the risks both of rushing to judgment and of dawdling too long near “maybe.” They routinely manage the trade-off between the need to take decisive stands (who wants to listen to a waffler?) and the need to qualify their stands (who wants to listen to a blowhard?). They realize that long-term accuracy requires getting good scores on both calibration and resolution—which requires moving beyond blame-game ping-pong. It is not enough just to avoid the most recent mistake. They have to find creative ways to tamp down both types of forecasting errors—misses and false alarms—to the degree a fickle world permits such uncontroversial improvements in accuracy.
(8) Look for the errors behind your mistakes but beware of rearview-mirror hindsight biases. Don’t try to justify or excuse your failures. Own them! Conduct unflinching postmortems: Where exactly did I go wrong? And remember that although the more common error is to learn too little from failure and to overlook flaws in your basic assumptions, it is also possible to learn too much (you may have been basically on the right track but made a minor technical mistake that had big ramifications). Also don’t forget to do postmortems on your successes too. Not all successes imply that your reasoning was right. You may have just lucked out by making offsetting errors. And if you keep confidently reasoning along the same lines, you are setting yourself up for a nasty surprise.
(9) Bring out the best in others and let others bring out the best in you. Master the fine arts of team management, especially perspective taking (understanding the arguments of the other side so well that you can reproduce them to the other’s satisfaction), precision questioning (helping others to clarify their arguments so they are not misunderstood), and constructive confrontation (learning to disagree without being disagreeable). Wise leaders know how fine the line can be between a helpful suggestion and micromanagerial meddling or between a rigid group and a decisive one or between a scatterbrained group and an open-minded one. Tommy Lasorda, the former coach of the Los Angeles Dodgers, got it roughly right: “Managing is like holding a dove in your hand. If you hold it too tightly you kill it, but if you hold it too loosely, you lose it.”
(10) Master the error-balancing bicycle. Implementing each commandment requires balancing opposing errors. Just as you can’t learn to ride a bicycle by reading a physics textbook, you can’t become a superforecaster by reading training manuals. Learning requires doing, with good feedback that leaves no ambiguity about whether you are succeeding—“ I’m rolling along smoothly!”—or whether you are failing—“ crash!” Also remember that practice is not just going through the motions of making forecasts, or casually reading the news and tossing out probabilities. Like all other known forms of expertise, superforecasting is the product of deep, deliberative practice.
(11) Don’t treat commandments as commandments. “It is impossible to lay down binding rules,” Helmuth von Moltke warned, “because two cases will never be exactly the same.” As in war, so in all things. Guidelines are the best we can do in a world where nothing is certain or exactly repeatable. Superforecasting requires constant mindfulness, even when—perhaps especially when—you are dutifully trying to follow these commandments.
My visual story that the climate challenge is 75% outside power.
This is one of the messages in my show Thinking Bigly.
This is my visualisation of the top 50 countries of the world and life expectancy over the last 218 years.
I’ve used the gapminder data source, but OECD, Worldbank an dothers have similar.
An astonishing and insightful set of data on where technology and digitalisation and the internet are going.
Mary Meeker has been analysing this for years - decades now - and its always worth reading. This is her 2019 set.
Full set of slides needs an hour to read to least, although you can flick through quicker. (Links below)
A must to have a sense of where the world is going and what has already happened.
The above slides shows how video and audio are rapidly rising.
Especially short form video.
There are two mega-trends. The global digital trend but also the local / niche trend. Above shows how the local trend is going.
Shows the power of image communication.
Gaming is a new type of social. It’s small group. It’s about friendship and teaming.
Data is enabling businesses to make better customer service and better business products and decisions.
Institutions, public, politicians - everyone is behind the curve. There are few people who put these trends together. And it’s not reaching wider audiences. This (my view) is true for science and climate as well which are intersectional trends / challenges.
Every tool can be good/bad. Like a hammer. Can be used to build or to smash.
There are some initial ideas about how this can be regulated.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2019/06/19/science.aau8712
In performing Thinking Bigly, it’s clear to me that we (ie my friends as sample) don’t know the long way we have come in many important ways eg women’s vote, life expectancy or childhood cancer. (These are points that Hans Rosling and Steven Pinker make). That’s the positive stuff.
Nor, that in the climate change challenges, the challenge from land use/food is about the same as the challenge from energy/electricity use (about 20 to 25% of the problem each). As in, most of us have barely put our minds around the root causes of the challenges. That’s on the negative stuff.
Still, skepticism on “experts” as regards to complex systems and human behaviour is warranted.
Take this recent rather amazing real world experiment on returning wallets.
Most experts (economist in this case, but not all, with a good 3/10 being right) predicted that it was more likely that wallets with no money would be returned vs wallets with some money in them. (This is what non-expert thought too).
The results across almost every country is that it’s much more likely to have your wallet returned if you had money in it.
This highlights that we are typically not good at predicting human behavior (although it seems some of us can). I expect the real life data is also very different to how we would respond in a survey.
Increasingly, I put limited weight on lab-based social science experiments. They simply don’t apply in the real world.
Study here: Civic honesty is essential to social capital and economic development, but is often in conflict with material self-interest. We examine the trade-off between honesty and self-interest using field experiments in 355 cities spanning 40 countries around the globe. We turned in over 17,000 lost wallets with varying amounts of money at public and private institutions, and measured whether recipients contacted the owner to return the wallets. In virtually all countries citizens were more likely to return wallets that contained more money. Both non-experts and professional economists were unable to predict this result. Link here.
Brief details on my perform-lecture: Thinking Bigly here.
Good example of how random shock can help create improvements. From Messy by Tim Harford.
“...In 2014, some of the workers on London’s Underground system went on strike for two days. The strike closed 171 of the Tube’s 270 stations, leaving commuters scrambling to find alternative routes using buses, overground trains or the stations that remained open. Many London commuters use electronic fare cards that are valid on all forms of public transport, and after the strike, three economists examined data generated by those cards. The researchers were able to see that most people used a different route to get to work on the strike days, no doubt with some annoyance. But what was surprising is that when the strike was over, not everybody returned to their habitual route. One in twenty of the commuters who had switched then stayed with the route that they had used during the strike; presumably, they had discovered that it was faster or cheaper or preferable in some other way to their old routine. We tend to think that commuters have their route to work honed to perfection; evidently not. A substantial minority promptly found an improvement to the journey they had been making for years. All they needed was an unexpected shock to force them to seek out something better…”
Thinking Bigly - a guide to saving the world.
I take a look at the complexities around sustainability challenges and offer a combination of solutions, on both a personal and systemic levels. (If you are here from Thinking Bigly - thanks!) This is draft incomplete summary of the research sources, notes and ideas behind the project. If there is something you would like to add (eg letter templates) or comments message me as I will add them slowly as time allows.
Major sustainability ideas in Thinking Bigly are:
↠Reduce/Reuse/Recycle/Waste less
↠Support culture and behaviour change
↠Support Innovation
↠Advocate for carbon pricing
↠Advocate for performance/efficiency standards
↠Think second order.
↠Discuss ideas with people who don’t think like you
↠Petition
And they spring along side ideas of (1) Cultural/Behaviour Change and (2) Second Order thinking. They are supported by evidence that cultural change can happen fast enough (eg abolition of slavery, pink becoming a girl’s colour) and that the problem is manageable as it is concentrated in (i) 7 countries (50% emmission) and (ii) cities (50% of people) and (iii) 5 broad areas which policy can impact (buildings, industry, transport, agriculture and energy).
-Major emphasis on consuming/buying less or differently
Look for win-win or close substitutes
-eating/cooking with friends vs take out
-video call vs long distance travel to meeting
-second-hand clothes or technology, extend use
-junk modelling for toys
-hand-made gifts, poems, mix-tapes
-own-grown food
This list could be very long and is driven by a mix of personal and/or cultural change.
It’s typically what a frugally minded person would do overall. While individually the impacts are small, it adds signals.
-wash clothes less (eg unless really smell)
-wash less
-travel slower (walk, bike)
-always take food leftovers from restaurants
-ignore best before dates and use cooking skills
Again this list is very long but bends closer to re-shaping or re-imagining the cultural stories and myths we’ve told ourselves (this is where the stories of the colour pink or making slavery illegal or how we wear our clothes and all other type of “intersubjective myth” come from - it’s true as many humans believe it to be true).
-green energy; fridge; washing machines, cookers
-boilers, heating, insulation
-technology, furniture, mattresses
Major decisions will impact over long cycles eg the washing machine or fridge - sustainable energy and use pay back is significant for these items.
Those signals are targeted at an individual level that collectively signals but equally, if not more important is what we can advocate on the systems or wider level.
Use your choices and conversation to support innovation
-consider innovation investments
-supporting friends ideas and job choices
-encourage innovation thinking and debate
-be wide and second-order in your choices
-encourage companies, leaders to innovate
As described below, innovation has to be a major part of the answer (even if we can’t or don’t want to change behaviours). This can be supporting innovation ideas (eg Drawdown) or policy.
While I hear arguments for non-market based ideas, my pragmatic view is that a market pricing signal such as a carbon price needs to be an important part of the answer. A pricing signal is not sufficient in itself it needs to be supported by innovations and performance standards and other supportive policies (eg urban design, labelling) but I don’t see any politically viable alternative at this point in time and even this policy has struggled due to its unequal impact (for those who support social justice) and its taxing nature (for those who dislike taxes).
Performance standards or similar will need to be wide ranging over several sectors eg industry efficiency, building codes and transport. But they are necessary alongside innovation and pricing signals, they help solve a split incentive alignment problem.
Eg Building owners vs building renters. Owners/builders have to make the capital investment, but renters take the gains/losses of energy efficient buildings. A well-enforced building code is needed.
There are simple principles of good policy design that need to be thought through to avoid loop holes and second order unintended consequences. These are:
i) Long-term certainty so business can plan
ii) Continuous improvement built-in because the world constantly updates
iii) Focus on outcomes not individual tech as policy can’t predict individual winners
iv) Simplicity to prevent gaming
Finally I support the collision and mixing of ideas so that we collectively grow the pie, as well as split it more fairly, and focus on the most impactful matters:
There are many unintended consequences of first order thinking, both negative and positive.
Go beyond first order thinking to second order
-Education over divestment
-Cultural behaviour change over sell-by dates
Consider letter writing or petitions to spread ideas
-to CEOs
-politicians
Discuss ideas with friends, research and innovate
-talk to those who don’t think like you
-find second order win-win ideas
-tell people
Part 1
Background and resources:
There are different components of Sustainability: Climate, Green House Gases, Water, Biodiversity, Waste, Air pollution, Land Pollution, Energy, Food, Innovation. They are summed up imperfectly here within the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
There are many components of the sustainability challenges although climate change and for instance plastic waste are two of the most high profile.
Many of the challenges intersect with one another and intersect with positive human development such as within education and equality. Some of these ideas are relatively newly accepted for humanity (eg equality) in the last 100 to 200 years.
Four broad frameworks which each provide a useful lens on the challenges are:
-The Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs)
-The Human Development Index
-The Peace Index
-The Happiness Index
A discussion on these broad indices of human development are beyond this article. But, do go to the relevant indices. (Other sources: Consider reading Amaryta Sen’s Development as Freedom and for a lay overview of human history, Harari’s Sapiens.)
Climate Change: Framing the challenge
I’m going to focus this next part on the challenges of climate change bearing in mind that other challenges intersect with climate change.
Out of this, it’s worth noting that the challenges go across mostly 5 sectors and and a large part of what humanity is involved in.
It’s not only energy production and direct use. Electricity use is about 25% of the challenge. That leaves 75% in other areas.
….Supposedly: 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions: why don't we take the fight there instead?
This statistic is correct, but misleading without context. It derives from the fact that 100 fossil fuel producers originate 71% of carbon emissions. It includes the use of the fossil fuels produced.
That means the person using a fossil fuel car or train and the manufacturer powering their factories (to make stuff for you to buy, or fertilizer for your food to eat) the emissions they produce are accounted as part of this 71%. While the fuel is produced by the oil and gas companies, the residual person responsible for the emissions is typically the end consumer.
Halting these 100 companies would be banning the production of fossil fuel. (This is equivalent to a type of infinite carbon tax). This may work in the very long term, it is not a good transition plan if we want humanity to survive today (or the next 50 years)....
Many of the remaining areas will need to be solved by new innovation as well as a change in current practice.
While on an individual level our impact is small, in aggregate the “Demand” or the consumer side of the challenge is 60% to 70% of the pie. Supply side is 30% of the problem.
This is tricky for multiple reasons. A critical difficulty for human economic development is that “economic growth” has been a major factor in supporting people out of poverty but that many challenges ask humans to consume less (much less in wealthy nations) as well as innovate more.
Several solutions to asking people to consume less (eg carbon taxes, use less coal) fall unequally across rich / poor people and rich / poor nations.
Other solutions rely on innovation we haven’t invented yet.
Most of the solutions on reducing the demand side require behavioural change that humans have found difficult to do.
Certain solutions require second order (or higher) changes that go counter to other desired aims (for instance, food best before dates save a certain amount of lives from food poisoning (maybe a few hundred in the UK) but have increased food waste (in the hundreds of millions of tonnes, eg 720 million eggs wasted a year in the UK).
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2019/apr/09/britons-throw-away-720m-eggs-a-year-over-best-before-date-fears
….because we find behavioural change hard (but not impossible), I continue to view carbon tax with re-distributive elements (for political justice eg back to poorer people and perhaps into innovation) as useful on systemic basis. A carbon tax enables both business behaviour change as well as personal….
Part Two:
At the level of the household, we can look at these items:
-Babies & Nappies
Disposable nappies have a larger effect on waste pollution, re-usable nappies have a bigger impact on water use. Energy use is in the same bucket depending on temp. Of washing and how drying is achieved. But the largest impact is having a moderate family size.
-Food & Cooking
Efficient cooking in less developed countries can be an important impact, as well as minimising waste in the food supply chain. In rich countries, it is to be less wasteful on food and moderate ruminant animal use, and to consume a normal amount of calories. This would have a double impact on health.
-Clothing
In rich countries, we need to consume much less in clothing. And probably wash clothes well. But the value in clothing is in its social signalling not in its utility.
-Water
Use less. Behaviour change can be hard.
-Warmth and cooling
-Toilets
-Laundry
Air dry. Use efficient washing machines. Wash less. Consider the implications that its remains still typically a woman’s chore.
-Furniture
-Plastic bags
Single use plastic is often used at least twice (as a bin liner), so from an energy point of view paper bags need to be used 5 to 10x to break even. Cotton bags in the range of 50 to 100x. Shop less, consider what you place in the bag. Tha landfill/waste aspects of plastic bag are worse than paper which degrades/recycles.
-Cars
-Trains
-Flying
-Refrigeration
-Technology
-Mobile phones
-Gardening
-Christmas
-Work and retirement
-Death
Every single item is intersectional with
(i) cultural / behaviour change or norm
(ii) the need for less ie reduce/reuse/recycle
And in many cases (iii) a need for innovation to replace the current carbon intensive use
And in many cases would be supported by iv) innovation in urban design (eg mobility, waste use) and v) performance standards (building codes, vehicle standards) and vi) carbon pricing.
[This is in draft as I will slowly elaborate on some of these choices]
A round up of household choices for sustainability (Australia govt sponsored) is found here:
http://www.yourhome.gov.au/housing/carbon-zero-carbon-positive
A book looking at this is here: Household Sustainability: Challenges and Dilemmas in Everyday Life
(and in sum, https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/IJSHE.24915aaa.011)
Part 3
I think there is surprising strength in a well written hand crafted letter sent to people in positions of power.
These can be linked to consumer choices eg to CEOs of companies and products you buy and admire; or to politicians and policy makers; or to investment managers of your savings.
Typically CEOs do not receive many personal letters. A large number of well crafted letters can cause them to stop and think about why eg. a commitment to a more carbon neutral business model in the future would make sense.
[At some point draft letters and points could be shared here]
Advocating at the level of politicians and policy makers is also helpful. Awareness is there (school strike, XR, divestment) but policy is not yet there.
I’m not thinking a rote template, but a well-thought out letter. (If you write one, I will write one…)
Part 4
The three major policies would centre around:
-Carbon pricing / tax (pricing signals)
-Support for innovation
-Performance standards
And these would run alongside a raft of other complementary areas such as food supply/waste, transport infrastructure, power infrastructure, urban design, building materials and industry etc.
Carbon tax ideas are here: https://www.thendobetter.com/investing/carbon-tax
A list of innovation and technology ideas can be seen from Project Drawdown:
A collection of policy ideas can be found here:
https://energyinnovation.org/resources/presentations/
Part 5
Here’s a list of links to raft of ideas, arguments and counter-arguments about what we should be thinking about and doing. These formed source material behind Thinking Bigly.
BP to explain how business chimes with Paris climate deal
Pressure from investors forces UK oil and gas firm to be more transparent on climate change
David Wallace-Wells on climate: ‘People should be scared – I'm scared’
The journalist and author has claimed climate change will soon render the world uninhabitable, leading his supporters to say he’s telling the terrifying truth and critics to brand him a reckless alarmist. Why is he so worried?
Investing Prophet Jeremy Grantham Takes Aim at Climate Change
The veteran money manager will devote $1 billion to helping the world escape catastrophe.
How to stop the climate crisis: six lessons from the campaign that saved the ozone
Thirty years ago, all 197 countries got together to ban the gases damaging the Earth’s ozone layer. Now we need to unite to combat an even greater threat. What can we learn from 1989?
the carbon bubble. https://thenearlynow.com/trump-putin-and-the-pipelines-to-nowhere-742d745ce8fd
https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-e-wildfires-and-the-first-climate-change-bankruptcy-11547820006
The case for “conditional optimism” on climate change - Vox
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/12/28/18156094/conditional-optimism-climate-change
The case for "conditional optimism" on climate change
Limiting the damage requires rapid, radical change — but such changes have happened before.
2020 Vision: why you should see the fossil fuel peak coming - Carbon Tracker Initiative
https://www.carbontracker.org/reports/2020-vision-why-you-should-see-the-fossil-fuel-peak-coming/
2020 Vision: why you should see the fossil fuel peak coming - Carbon Tracker Initiative
The peak in fossil fuel demand will have a dramatic impact on financial markets in the…
How to Shift Public Attitudes and Win the Global Climate Battle - Yale E360
https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-essential-front-in-the-climate-battle-altering-public-attitudes
The world is making progress in decarbonizing economies, but not nearly fast enough, says the former U.S. chief climate negotiator. Here he spells out what forces must come together to marshal the public and political will needed to tackle climate change.
https://www.ecowatch.com/how-to-reduce-food-waste-2628392195.amp.html
Climate change policy can be overwhelming. Here’s a guide to the policies that work.
A new book from veteran energy analyst Hal Harvey simplifies decarbonization.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/magazine/climeworks-business-climate-change.html
The Tiny Swiss Company That Thinks It Can Help Stop Climate Change
Two European entrepreneurs want to remove carbon from the air at prices cheap enough to matter.
Options for keeping the food system within environmental limits - Stockholm Resilience Centre
An international centre that advances transdisciplinary research for governance of social-ecological systems.
Significant Major cross-discipline EAT-Lancet Commission paper on Sustainable Food
Major cross-discipline EAT-Lancet Commission on Sustainable Food has published its findings (Jan 2019).
The case for funding a Green New Deal through government debt
Humanity will not come to an end if we double debt to GDP ratios, but it could come to an end if we fail to combat climate change.
https://www.ft.com/content/2a0d4caa-337c-11e9-bb0c-42459962a812
The US debate on climate change is heating up
Two different plans to attack the problem could be combined in a workable compromise
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-017-0058-9
Nature Climate Change, The price of fast fashion
The fashion industry has changed rapidly in recent years with the increased prevalence of fast fashion, impacting the environment. Efforts to green this polluting industry require action from businesses and consumers.
https://www.thendobetter.com/investing/2019/2/24/new-zealand-looking-at-non-financial-capitals
New Zealand looking at non-financial capitals, more than GDP
The NZ PM talking about the problems with GDP and suggesting NZ should look at a broader set of indicators and changing the way it should make decisions, including a well-being budget in 2019
https://www.wri.org/blog/2017/07/apparel-industrys-environmental-impact-6-graphics
The Apparel Industry’s Environmental Impact in 6 Graphics | World Resources Institute
Growth of the multi-trillion-dollar apparel industry has been fed by "fast fashion," which makes clothing cheaply and quickly with a low price-tag. Six graphics show how this trend and others can add to water stress, pollution and other environmental impacts.
Faking It on Climate Change | by Bjørn Lomborg
Because honest and deep emissions cuts are staggeringly hard to make, achieving carbon neutrality anytime soon is an empty ambition for almost everywhere. But countries continue to make big promises and massage their emissions numbers to give a false sense of progress on combating global warming.
Steady investments in a changing climate - GOV.UK
https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/steady-investments-in-a-changing-climate
Steady investments in a changing climate
Emma Howard Boyd, Chair of the Environment Agency speech at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
www.blog.google/products/earth/new-app-map-and-monitor-worlds-freshwater-supply/amp/
A new app to map and monitor the world's freshwater supply
In partnership with United Nations Environment, Joint Research Centre and Google, new tools for monitoring global freshwater resources are freely available.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212094718300495?via%3Dihub
Natural disasters over France a 35 years assessment
Using an exhaustive administrative database, we assess the impact of extreme weather events over French cities between 1982 and 2017.
The World’s First Data Visualization of Product Carbon Footprints
By generating carbon-intensity data for each product, CoClear was able to identify industry trends, as well as track product performance improvements along value chains.
Resistance in the Anthropocene. – David Mattin – Medium
https://medium.com/@DMattin/resistance-in-the-anthropocene-6dde37f0f975
Resistance in the Anthropocene.
Should we turn to civil disobedience to avert looming ecological disaster?
Don't know how to save the planet? This is what you can do
Should we become vegetarians? Is it OK to fly? The author of There Is No Planet B, A Handbook for the Make or Break Years, answers the big question
https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/climate-change-national-emergency-bad-idea.html
Climate Change Is Not a “National Emergency”
A Democratic president shouldn’t try to do the same end run around democracy that Trump is attempting.
https://www.iea.org/geco/emissions/
https://amp.ft.com/content/7889cb6e-501f-11e9-9c76-bf4a0ce37d49
Life after climate change: lessons from Cape Town
The city’s response to a three-year drought offers pointers to the coming ‘new normal’
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/26/climate/wind-solar-energy-workers.html
They Grew Up Around Fossil Fuels. Now, Their Jobs Are in Renewables.
These are portraits of seven people working in wind and solar, industries their families hardly imagined they’d go into. But as one of them put it: “It’s not ideology. It’s just math.”
Opinion: The energy-hungry world isn’t waiting for Canada
The country must take a balanced approach to harnessing its natural resources and investing in clean technologies
6 Pressing Questions About Beef and Climate Change, Answered | World Resources Institute
https://www.wri.org/blog/2019/04/6-pressing-questions-about-beef-and-climate-change-answered
There are a lot of misconceptions swirling about beef—its environmental impacts, how it's produced and whether or how much to eat. We examined the latest research to separate myth from fact.
https://www.ft.com/content/9bcb1bf8-5b20-11e9-9dde-7aedca0a081a
Extinction Rebellion: inside the new climate resistance
A new movement plans mass civil disobedience — and its numbers are growing
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304405X19300807
Disaster on the horizon: The price effect of sea level rise
Homes exposed to sea level rise (SLR) sell for approximately 7% less than observably equivalent unexposed properties equidistant from the beach.
Mercer - investing in a time of climate change
ttps://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/15/david-buckel-lawyer-climate-change-protest
A lawyer set himself on fire to protest climate change. Did anyone care?
David Buckel hoped his death would catalyze action. But what is individual responsibility when confronted with the crisis of a rapidly changing planet?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/11/magazine/climate-change-exxon-renewable-energy.html
The zero-waste revolution: how a new wave of shops could end excess packaging
Shops that minimise the environmental impact of our consumer habits are springing up across Britain. Could they help us avert catastrophe?
Over 4,200 Amazon Workers Push for Climate Change Action, Including Cutting Some Ties to Big Oil - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/technology/amazon-climate-change-letter.html
They say Amazon should stop offering custom cloud computing services that help the oil and gas industry explore for and extract more fossil fuels.
To Map a Coral Reef, Peel Back the Seawater - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/10/science/coral-reefs-mapping-biodiversity.html
To Map a Coral Reef, Peel Back the Seawater
This scientist couple created an airborne observatory to map tropical forests. Now they’re using it to identify threatened reefs.