From Warning to Navigation with Richard Heinberg and Rachel Donald

June 2023 Special Anniversary Event
Those of us who care about the fate of younger generations and the more-than-human world know that the warnings of the last few decades have largely fallen on deaf ears. Post Carbon Institute turns 20 this year, a milestone that has prompted us to reflect on what’s transpired since our founding in 2003. Some events surprised us (the way cheap credit and fracking postponed Peak Oil). Some rattled us (the pandemic). And some were sadly predictable (the inability of our institutions to transition away from fossil fueled-growth). While the world has experienced tremendous change and destabilization in the last two decades, it looks certain that the next 20 years will be marked by even greater environmental and societal (poly)crisis - what the great environmental philosopher Joanna Macy calls the “Great Unraveling.”
Rachel Donald, journalist, educator, and the host of the Planet: Critical podcast, joined Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute Senior Fellow and author of Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival, in conversation to reflect on all that's happened since PCI's founding in 2003 and to share expertise into what the next two decades will hold.
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[@user-bg3ow3im1d]

What a breath of fresh air Rachel is!
Articulate and a force to be admired.

[@RieCherie]

Rachel! Just found this! Love Rachel's channel!

[@voidisyinyangvoidisyinyang885]

great point about the Kyoto protocol "market solution" as the beginning of the end!! Thanks Rachel.

[@paulzozula1318]

Thank all of you for your good work and sustaining dedication.

[@robinschaufler444]

52:00 Rachel - what we need is to be gardening and planting.
Think about planting some potatoes and eating them as they mature. In this commercialized world, that simple, humble act is Radical.
As you eat your homegrown potato, you can reflect on the industrial tiller and harvesting combine that weren't used, the petrochemical fertilizer and insecticides that were bypassed, the transportation hither thither and yon in refrigerated containers that never happened, the plastic bag with brand garbage printed all over it that was bypassed, the warehouse and its forklifts where it was not stored, the supermarket where it was not displayed under glaring lights, the cash register where it never went on the automated conveyor belt and was never rung up on an electronic register, after which it was never plopped in another plastic bag, and then driven in your combustion OR electric car on asphalt roads back to your home.
And how each step not done not only avoided use of energy, it also avoided exchange of currency, reducing the inflationary pressure on the cancerous growth economy.
Now extend that to other realms of your life. Knit your own sweater with genuine wool, not superwash. Wait, handspin wool into yarn for your sweater. Buy fleece just shorn off the sheep, wash and dye it, handspin and knit it. Look at all the energy and currency motion avoided! Too much work? Don't have the patience? C'mon, you only need one sweater every five years. Get over your fashion sense. If it develops a hole, mend it with the leftover yarn. Drip tomato sauce on it? Embroider over it. Oh, you're a man, and you feel weird knitting because that's a feminine skill? Get over yourself.
Continue with all manner of DIY. Turn your friends on to your "hobbies" and do them together. Ask your friend who lives in an apartment to start some seeds under a grow light for your garden, and provide them with produce. Knit together, it's fun. Throw a pizza party for help with a home improvement project. Go change an elderly person's light bulb for them.
Let the air out of the tires of the Superorganism.

[@lancechapman3070]

Rachel is brilliant.

[@lancechapman3070]

I look forward to sharing this present with Rachel as the future unfolds.

[@lancechapman3070]

This is my first time hearing Richard and I greatly appreciate his wisdom and clarity.

[@regentoronto]

Willam Nordhaus has a lot to answer for with his anodyne predictions of the global economy only scarcely affected by climate change. His economic forecast has influenced all policy makers despite what they see with their own eyes.

[@davidwilkie9551]

Those who are correctly convinced of the necessity for maintaining civilization with fossil fuels need to be shown how to rearrange the production and use of energy, in a manner in keeping with Actuality, and the reality of the basic nature of politics requires realignment in the same way in accordance with the universal mechanism of real-time form following functional condensation-coordination.

[@jameskranz3050]

The world has become to complex and will collapse with or without our help. 8 Billion people good luck with the growing economy.

[@pattimichellesheaffer103]

Richard mentions just years, perhaps, for the US. It seems certain that there would be a heavy dependence, within that timeframe, of which party obtains office next. :^(
An layperson has to be very, *very* careful when talking to Managers or IT people!! IT researchers (and usually managers) mentally "live/act" mostly in a "fantasy" world of unphysically-large personal power - for IT folks, a virtual world of sweepingly-powerful computer code and processes they usually affect by just keystrokes. They seldom have *any* useful understanding of physical reality beyond cars and a server-room. AI is evidently properly thought of as a massive but "conventional" weapon, while consuming/squandering power rivaling global Bitcoin mining, or even more (AI "training" is horrifically wasteful and error/hacking-prone). Power (electrical) is one severe limitation, especially when power distribution fails; a process likely to be aided (and defended against) by AI. (Schneier, et al.)
"Carbon Fundamentalism" - I understand that politicized terminology is often fraught with overtones. Yet we must remember that Carbon Footprint and Consumption (in the Capitalistic sense) are *isomorphic* - Excluding carbon from the thought process will swing the pendulum away from that physical fact, and remove impetus to disable (by overt action or collapse) Consumption by the Affluent (Hurth [2012], Chancel/Piketty [2015], etc.) as the only *physical* mechanism to attenuate carbon release. And the climate *only* cares about carbon. And Civilization (and our natural diversity) is *based* on climate (i.e., the Holocene).
"Carbon Fundamentalism" - The error in the misallocation of resources to impossible carbon capture science occurs due to (scientific) dissemblance of Elites, which also includes highly-paid scientists and Think-Tank fellows. It seems unlikely we can effectively suppress this dissemblance by adopting this term, which, problematically, deflects from well-understood physical facts. It is therefore suggested to be a poor term at best, and likely counter-productive.
Blaming "overpopulation" in general is an obfuscated red-herring because the only population of humans the climate "cares about" are the Affluent/Elite, likely protecting themselves by such obfuscation.
Additionally, it is because in the time remaining to avert catastrophe (7-17 years; IPCC SR15) the general population numbers could not be significantly affected even if it *did* matter.

[@pattimichellesheaffer103]

I must state, upon reflection, that Richard's suggestion to turn from the lure of power to love is quite a fundamental principle. Is it a term in the Cliodynamic models? Well, yes, I know it is at least in the form of a threshold value for which lower-Elites turn from the path of fighting to the path of acceptance. Odd... Turchin doesn't consider the coming food shortages in the US. Is he that out of touch? Ivory Towers tend to be like that... 2022 was nearly the hottest year on record. 2023 (after publishing) is the hottest summer ever recorded. Since 2016 wildfires have been rapidly outpacing capacity across the globe. Maybe that will get the Cliodynamicists to include the effect of farming collapse on instability. The rest of this decade will be increasingly shocking to everyone at the pace of the impacts of increasing global temperatures.
Likely the results of the models will simply become irrelevant in the sense that the equations developed under one set of conditions, the Holocene, but the world is accelerating out of the Holocene. The could try to include experimental terms to account for that, but there would be no real data to test against. That's a basic flaw in any Big Data approach.
I wonder if fear of this could be a leverage point to help Elites ally for social good, as during a US great compression? Guess rich boys and techbros would not go along willingly...

[@chadreilly]

Certainly overpopulation is a BIG problem, rich and poor. And denying such is an obfuscation of its own. Near as I can tell rich people deny it just as much as poor. Gotta love those customers/cheap labor

[@pattimichellesheaffer103]

@@chadreilly I guess it depends on how accurate you want your speech to be. From the perspective of what's driving Climate Breakdown: if you take 4 billion humans, say, and shoot them into outer space and into the sun - half of all humans - *and* they were the poorest half - then you would have no impact on climate breakdown at all. This is because it's the richest 40% of humans who are releasing all the carbon into the atmosphere, and carbon is all the climate cares about. Thus, overpopulation has no impact on Climate Breakdown, in and of itself, it's the population of the Affluent which matters. Thus saying "overpopulation is the cause" is highly inaccurate, and will generate only more confusion and rationalizations by people. That's the point of my words.

[@chadreilly]

@@pattimichellesheaffer103 I think it should be very accurate. Nobody (I know of) is saying "overpopulation is the cause" but it's certainly a big part of the cause. One of the drivers in the I=PAT equation. Certainly it relates to displacement and extinction of wild animals.
If you shot the poorest humans into the sun, at least they would die faster than what they have coming. So I would argue, ignoring overpopulation as a MAJOR problem only ensures, and has ensured, massive human suffering.
And nobody (I know of) is saying only the poor people are overpopulated. One should probably shoot half the rich into the sun too, or all of them, lol. By the way, William Rees recently published a study showing the poor, by their much greater, and rapidly expanding numbers and want of affluence also that are driving most of recent increases in carbon. Jane O'Sullivan's work on the subject is probably best however. She's published research, and has some good talks describing such on youtube.

[@paulzozula1318]

At least in the form of our occupancy of our planet, I concur with William Rees that overpopulation certainly is one of our core problems that needs long-term solutions. However, in the short-term whence we are so critical, alleviation is not sufficiently actionable.

[@Changeworld408]

I see in the comments people beleving if cars can be retrofitted to shit burning all will be well 😂

[@lancechapman3070]

Nuclear powered grid based EVs would not require batteries.

[@keithomelvena2354]

They would need long cables though. 😃