The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Just Stop Oil !? Part 4 - The Intersection | Frankly #41

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

In Part 4 of this Frankly mini-series, Nate concludes the deep dive into the nexus between "just stopping oil" and "just pumping oil" with 10 guideposts which might help us to navigate through the intersection of the Four Horsemen of the 2020s and the shrinking Web of Life….together known as The Great Simplification.  From decomplexifying at various scales to a change of consciousness arising from more humans focused on "Inner Tech", there are many ways we as individuals and as a part of the greater society can manage the push and pull of both environment and economic issues while remaining grounded in the reality of energy, technology, behavior, and the economy.   For Show Notes and More: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/41-just-stop-oil-part-4-the-intersection   To watch on Youtube: https://youtu.be/_C8rR5OR74Y

Good morning. Welcome to part four, the final part of this just stop oil series. I never really intended on calling this just stop oil. I just wanted to highlight the two parts of the narrative. There's just stop oil and just pump oil, which kind of gets to the core message of this series is that there are two very important but distinct, at least, to most people's perception, stories. And where we ended part three was, if we had to a lower emission scenario or a post-growth scenario,

we have to first navigate the four horsemen of the 2020s, which are financial overshoot. Since that episode came out, the forecast for the United States is borrowing $3 billion a day with higher interest rates. We're going to borrow $1.5 trillion in the second half of this year. This strategy has an expiration date, and this is not just the United States. The second is also getting worse.

The second horseman is geopolitics war and the real-life game of risk. There are drone attacks now from Ukraine backed by NATO in Russia, naval ships, etc. The third horseman is the global supply chains and complexity, and the fourth is the social contract. How do we talk, discuss, and decide things with our fellow countrymen and women, fellow citizens of the world? That's one story. The other story is the web of life and the environment that is downstream from human. decisions, behaviors, and economies. There are three subsets of environmental damage and risk. The first is the metabolism that comes from the size and scale of the global energy-hungry superorganism.

And we discuss the superorganism dynamic, how our culture optimizes profits, tethered to energy, tethered to carbon. this superorganism dynamic predates corporations. It predates fossil fuels. It predates capitalism. It originated when humans left hunter-gather lifestyles to store surplus, which created hierarchy and everything else. Technology, corporations, fossil fuels, capitalism turbocharged this dynamic. But we are not in control of.

of the metabolism of what's happening. So that's part of the environmental damage. The second part is everything else, plastics, endocrine disrupting chemicals, losing biodiversity, chopping down forests to grow soybeans, et cetera. The third category, highly relevant to this series, is those environmental impacts that are built in the pipeline, the same way that we have

warming coming. Even if we stopped carbon today, we have environmental impacts coming because eventually this debt-fueled turbo moonshot consuming beyond our means is going to recede. And people are going to have less money. We're going to approach taking down forests for timber and fuel, getting bushmeat, which is already happening in poor areas, et cetera. So there is an environmental built-in cost as things get worse. So this story, most people keep these two camps discrete. And the great simplification, what I care about is both, these is how do we bend and not break during the four horsemen of the 2020s and how do we

protect in midwife the web of life, the ecosystems, the 10 million other species we share this planet with who have no say in our economic decisions and trajectory. So this story is about the intersection of these two camps and that's what I'd like to talk about today. So in discussing what do we do, I would like to discuss what's at the intersection of these circles. And I have 10 rough categories. In no particular order, as we head towards a over-leveraged precipitous four-horseman situation, we're going to have to use less as the average individual and as the average nation. Certainly some individuals and some nations may use more.

But if we're able to look two steps ahead, instead of looking at this month's media, this month's news flash, this month's incentives, this month's stock market prices, if we try to anticipate and look two steps ahead at what the appropriate technologies will be, what the appropriate supply chains will be.

What sort of energy services will give humans the basic needs that we are really seeking, transportation, food, health and medical care, shelter, including heating and cooling, waste capacity. These are the things if we look two steps ahead and we stop looking at. technology and profits per se, but look at what are the energy services that can give humans what they need in the future. I think it would lead to different decisions planning and maybe structure. So that's my first suggestion is think two steps ahead on all this stuff and make decisions accordingly. Next is to simplify first and beat the rush. And there's the famous fable of the

tortoise and the hair. And the hair was out running out ahead and eventually got too tired and had kind of a debt deflation. And the tortoise caught up and ended up winning. If we imagine that a great simplification to some extent is coming, to some degree and to some timing is coming. Those individuals, those communities and those nations that simplify first and beat the rush in their decisions and their planning might be outcompeted in the short run and have more pain and heavy lifting and social strife and different. challenges, but being under the gun in those things when the rest of the world is still holding together might spur creativity, community, invention in ways that would make those

places ahead of the game in the next 10, 20, 30 years. So again, just the framing, do you want to be the tortoise or the hair in your actions and your thinking? Third category is incentives. I don't think it's the fault of the fossil fuel companies or the companies, the corporations. This is an emergent structure that happened over time, and the people that work at these organizations are following the cultural cues that we set in motion a long time ago. but we are pricing this unbelievably powerful, non-renewable on human timescales, input to our economies, oil, just at the cost of extraction. So there's too cheap energy and the goals of the system are just to maximize growth.

And so cheap energy, maximize growth, go humans, figure it out. we have self-organized into that system. So over time, we'll somehow need to change the incentives of this system. Humans are incredibly social. We copy other people. We have optimal foraging dynamics. We have very other regarding social impulses,

which have been suppressed from the stories that neoclassical economics, tell us, I think over time, we could change the incentives. And that's something that we should be working at at all scales. Number four, we talk about as long as the global growth is happening, there is Jevin's paradox, which is the more efficiency we ring out of the system, the more excess profits we have to funnel back into a global energy-hungry superorganism. And this is true. As far as going forward, we could mentally and behaviorally come up with some sort of a Chinese wall or a superorganism wall between that part of society and we could wall off our profits or

our efficiency gains or our productivity gains and take some portion of them and directed towards a system not part of the superorganism. Take the profits from some new tech invention and put it into local and regional food and supply chains as one example. It's really hard to have avalanche guns that shrink the system without breaking it, but we can move things out of the system. And I don't know how this looks, but I think there is a way to circumvent Jevin's paradox, don't funnel things back into the market, but change the direction of those profits and those gains. Related to that is the face. of King Midas where everything he touched turned to gold. And he was very happy about that at the beginning, but you can't eat gold. So this concept of transmutation is something that I think applies to this situation. The metaphor is that we have parsed everything of value in the human system, social capital, human capital, built capital and natural capital into financial capital. Financial capital gives us the

optionality to turn it into all kinds of things. I think given the four horsemen, given the deterioration of the web of life, that it behooves foundations, philanthropy, and others to spend down their digital electronic claims on reality in order to influence reality now. We can't just wait for those digits to multiply to the year 2050 because a lot of them are going to have dissipated because we have way too many financial claims to cover the the biophysical reality that underpin them and this is probably going to get worse so I would argue that a spend-down strategy for those that can do it makes a lot of sense Another idea that is pretty central is the superorganism has kicked the can repeatedly.

Almost 200 years, Thomas Malthus talked about the exponential food demand would outstrip the linear production of the food. He was wrong because he didn't know about fossil fuels and farming the earth. vertically instead of horizontally. About 50 years, Paul Ehrlich wrote a book about the population bomb predicting similar things. He was wrong, at least about that, because we found debt and we found globalization. We were able to kick the can further. 2009, the global financial system almost crashed and we switched the monetary creation authority from. the commercial banks to the central banks and have been with temporary too big to fail guarantees

ever since 2020. We had bazooka stimulus to keep things going. We're running out of technological natural resource cans to kick. I think the next can to kick is in our minds. We don't need all this stuff to lead happy and healthy lives. I've started this thing. because of my coach is advising me silent Saturdays to not use the internet or tech on Saturdays. And I'm so busy with this podcast and all my work that I've kind of failed so far. But what I do is two hours with nothing. And I set my alarm clock. And I check things for five minutes that I need to address.

But of the four major neurotransmitters, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, enderphins, we have kind of a one-legged stool where our culture has just created a love affair with dopamine. And I think inner tech how to change our behaviors as individual humans as part of this superorganism matrix, if 1% of humans or 2% of humans or 5% of humans heal the fractured existence we have and start to live more in tandem with. Earth's cycles with the natural flows of the sun, with a human time scale, and heal themselves, I think that acts as a kind of foundation for broader cultural change. So I actually think the next can to kick is in our minds, inner tech.

The thing I care the most about is all the other species and creatures. And I've even changed in my own life, like, weirdly, a few days ago, I, there's wasps over the office door here. And I can't have wasps stinging people coming into the office. I got stung 15 times last week and I eventually had to kill them. And I apologize ahead of time and I watched them die and I just sat there and reflected on it. You know, 10 years ago, I wouldn't have thought about it. But now I reflected on that experience and that they're a creature too. And I just, maybe we had to experience this tragedy to kind of come to terms with what we're doing and what we could do.

So maybe that wasn't the best example to lead into the point I'm about to make. But I think we need to deeply, deeply take a stand. to protect the natural world. And I think if you think about these three circles of environmental impact, you can choose to combat the superorganism and reduce CO2, but you can also try to help the other circles. And one of the ways to do that is to get very involved locally on ecological restoration,

all kinds of things to protect the soil, the animals, the habitats where you live, I think we need a bigger ask of people who become aware of this. And instead of just bitching at what's going on to actually take a proactive approach and maybe give some portion of your time, of your money, set it aside and have it to be Alice's the Web of Life Fund or set up a group of a life brigade in your community where we need to partition off some portion of our own individual wealth and time and allocate it either directly with your own labor and your own community on helping wild nature get midwifed through what's coming or donate it to others.

that you come in contact with that could really make an impact. I hate to keep referencing my friend DJ as an example, but he's a prime example of this. His and him and his wife had a similar feeling about nature. He's the guy at Earth Trust, and they decided instead of having children, they would reproduce other species. So they have made it their life goal

to increase the population. of dolphins and he became a very famous, not famous, very successful dolphin activists and other things. There's an essay in our book on reproducing other species. But somehow it has to be more than just adding your email to a list or sending a check to WWF or something like that. We need to own this in a cohesive way because otherwise we're going to be shifting baselines all the way to the only animal our kids will see as a squirrel or periodically a cow. I'm going to have more to say on this, but I don't want to get too prescriptive because what is sacred to each of you may be different than it is to me. It almost certainly is. As far as community, I think we

can anticipate what's coming in the next decade. And I would implore, especially those of you who are aware of the four horsemen, to mentally take a step beyond bullion, Bitcoin, and beans and ask yourself, how can you better contribute to your community, your family, your community, your area, how can you be a pro-social prepper ahead of what's coming? How can you be a rock in the river? As the water starts rushing faster, rocks that are small or unattached or without a foundation are going to tumble downstream. And the more larger solid foundation rocks in the river, the more that's going to stop or even redirect the flow of the river. So consider being such a foundation in your own community and ask yourself, how could you contribute in these coming scenarios?

Second to last, I think we are going to need, and as evidenced by the comments I get on these these podcasts. Lots of people have really strong identities. And it's understandable that someone is entirely focused on climate or entirely focused on social justice, or entirely focused on the global South. All of these issues are relevant and important. Yet we're trying to fly up high enough and look at a system. We're going to need diplomats and social facilitators.

that are able to, in a public setting, suppress their own identity and act as Mimetic tribe facilitators because the ability to have a bunch of people with different goals, different objectives, different values, but all living in the same place and all forced to be with each other, the ability to have those people have a conversation and begrudgingly or ultimately agree on something, something is going to be a massively important skill. And so just shouting at the other tribe who has a different focus than you is the way, the default path. And I think we need to be able to have a discourse with people's whose focus might be different

than our own. Last but not least, there's something in science called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which is when you observe some process in science, the act of observing it changes it, at least on a small scale. You all subscribe to following along with this conversation on the Great Simplification on the Franklies are doing something similar with respect to the superorganism

and the maximum power principle is becoming aware that our species is a mindless, metabolic, energy-hungry super-organism. At some threshold, is that enough to change the fact that we're a mindless energy-hungry superorganism? So I think inoculating more people about the dynamics of how everything fits together creates the possibility of emergence that none of us can imagine. We live in a complicated system. I think I've done a decent job of trying to describe the complicated aspects of how energy, money, human behavior, the environment fit together.

But we also live in a complex system. In a complex system, we cannot predict what's going to happen. And when something happens, then that opens a whole other array and paths. So what we can do is change the initial conditions of that moment. And I think it's an open question on how an emergent response to what's coming could happen. And a subset of that, I've integrated a lot of dots on these four episodes and in this podcast. And I'm reasonably confident that I'm telling an act. accurate story. I'm also very confident that there's a lot I don't know. And there's a lot that

many of you watching this right now know things that I've never heard of. And so I think we need to keep our minds open to things that we don't understand and continue to learn and continue to share. And this is just an unbelievable amazing time to be alive and to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to wrap up the series, just stop oil is the bookend to that is just pump oil. And we're going to be in this push and pull on environment versus economic issues for a while. So I'm trying to look at the things at the intersection of those two issues. And thank you all for listening. And hopefully we can.

on this journey together figure some of these things out. I don't know the answers, but I've spent 20 years thinking about the questions and how these things fit together. And I'm going to go see my folks, so there will not be a frankly next week, but I have lots more things to talk about. I hope this was at least somewhat helpful, if not a little long-winded. Thank you all.