The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - The 7 Stages of Climate Awareness | Frankly #10

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

Climate change is often described as one of the single most important and existential issues of our time - that there is no greater threat to humanity. While the effects of climate on our ecosystems and wildlife is one of my greatest concerns, it does not tell the whole story.  On this weeks Frankly, I highlight (what was in my case) Seven Stages of Climate Awareness – from recognizing 'there is an environment' to understanding that the systems dynamics of the human economy implies a much different choreography of societal response than is currently being advertised and pursued. Global warming is becoming more obvious to more people, but the interventions look quite different at Stage 7 than Stage 4. It is unlikely we'll find 'solutions' without first understanding the dynamics at its core. For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/frankly-original/frankly-10-the-7-stages-of-climate To Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDi82plBOh4

Good morning, good humans. I have decided to attempt weekly franklies. Our podcast comes out on Wednesday mornings, and we will have weekly franklies as long as it doesn't impair my constitution or I run out of things to say. And I think the latter is pretty unlikely. Today, I would like to give a reflection about climate change. not about the science of climate change, but about the different stages of awareness when it comes to the issue of global warming and our future. I can't categorize that everyone follows this same sequence, but this sequence of stages is roughly what I've followed in my own life. And I think it's important to attempt to explain why lots of people use the word climate change, but their solutions and their fixes and their hopes and interventions are wildly different. So seven stages of climate awareness. Well, they're stage zero, which is that the human sphere and the human sphere and the environment are not separate. Many, many humans go through life, taking that forest walk to work

or getting a fish out of a lake. And it all seems like it's part of their life. The natural world and the environmental processes are invisible to people. It's just all their life. Which brings is to stage one, which is a recognition that the human system is embedded in an environment that has its own ecological processes, creatures, systems, etc. I learned about this at an early age for no, I mean, for one reason at least when I saw the American Indian ad with the tear streaming down his face for litter in the 1970s. But it became relatively apparent to me that to get the conveniences and stimulation and comfort of modern life, we do things that have a deleterious impact on the natural world.

So that would be stage one, being aware that there is an environment. Stage two is that we recognize that climate change, that climate itself is a part of the environment, processes on Earth and that climate can and does change over time because of influences. And some of this awareness is looking at paleo data and the science from the past that many of Earth's mass extinctions were due to volcanic pulses of laval basalts from volcanoes that had huge amounts over tens of thousands of years. belching CO2 into the atmosphere, and that dramatically changed the climate. We also had snowball earths when CO2 got very low.

So the third stage is awareness that CO2 is the culprit, and the effects we see of floods and wildfires and massive northern forest loss and polar bears and all these things are from accelerated warming due to CO2. The fourth stage of climate awareness is recognizing that two-thirds of the CO2 that we emit every year comes from the burning of fossil fuels and that we know that the CO2 in the atmosphere is predominantly from the burning of this ancient carbon because of the isotope difference because relative to pre-industrial times. And so, this. this stage, there is a blame towards fossil fuels, towards fossil fuel companies because Exxon knew about climate change 40 years ago and suppressed it, et cetera. And at this stage of

climate awareness, it's blaming this part of our system, fossil oil, coal, and natural gas and we just need to get rid of that, replace it with something else, and we will solve climate change. Which brings to the fifth stage of climate awareness, our energy reality. And the fifth stage, which I learned around 20 years ago or longer, has got three components. First of all, is that we use a hundred billion barrel of oil equivalence of coal, natural gas, and oil to power the the modern economy. And these equate to around half a trillion of actual human workers in what they provide in labor and power potential. And that our entire global $90 trillion economy is completely supported by these labor and power equivalents. They explain the entire globally interconnected

system of transport, trade. And basically fossil hydrocarbons, especially oil, are the hemoglobin of modern society. Our wages, our profits, the size of our economy being a thousand times bigger than it was 500 years ago are predominantly due to this giant amount of ancient productivity that we're adding to our economies. So that is a big recognition in the fifth stage of climate awareness, which is followed by the fact that this stuff is a pulse. We are drawing down this ancient carbon battery of Earth millions of times faster than it was sequestered in the past by daily photosynthesis.

Our culture is treating this as if it were interest when we're rapidly drawing down the principle. The underlying decline rate of existing oil fields in the world is approaching 6% a year. So to offset that, we have to drill faster and more and deeper in order to offset what's already depleting. So this is a one-time pulse. There's plenty of natural gas left and there's plenty of lower grade coal left. But oil as the master resource will start to decline soon. The third part of energy reality is that energy has different properties and so-called called renewable energy is powerful, it's robust, it's the right answer to the wrong question. The question that's currently be asked is how can we reduce our emissions by replacing fossil

fuels with renewable energy? And that's not what's happening. We're adding renewable energy to fossil fuels to grow the economy. And so the gross GDP is growing, but we're allocating more and more resources to the energy and material sector. And in order to scale, renewable energy to a level equivalent, we would have to massively increase the mining of materials like cobalt and copper and nickel. And we would have to take energy away from the regular economy and direct it towards this scaling. It's kind of like getting a job that pays you $100,000 a year and you forecast forward how you're going to spend that $100,000 the next 10 years. but you forget that you owe the state, local, and national government, 40% of that in the form of taxes.

So the taxes in this biophysical situation are the energy and materials it will take to get to these fanciful net zero scenarios. So this is the fifth stage of climate awareness is that energy underpins our modern society and we can't just wish it away, nor can we replace it. And actually, we're going to have to do with less total energy in the not-to-discipline. future, which brings me to this sixth stage of climate awareness, which is that climate change is not the problem. It is a symptom of an underlying problem that has been long in the making of a social species, self-organizing in an economic system around profits. The profits are tethered 99% to energy consumption, which is in turn about 80% tethered to fossil hydrocarbons. We live at a as part of a system.

And you have to understand human behavior, both individual and aggregate, our anthropological background of how we got here today that we as a global system of eight billion of us try to replicate the emotional states of our ancestors in this wildly consumptive economic system. And this consumption is tethered to energy and materials and technology. And we have a monetary overlay on all of that. of it, monetary symbols that represent this reality. And the whole thing is out of control of billionaires and politicians. No one has control of this system because of the momentum. So climate change and many other things, biodiversity loss, overpopulation, plastics,

toxicity, one could argue increasing polarization. A lot of these things are downstream of this huge amount of energy growth imperative. Which brings me to the seventh stage of climate awareness, which is if you understand this systemic overview of the human situation and how we are much like a blind amoeba sloughing forward, grabbing low entropy goodies without a plan, without even thinking about it. This changes substantially the choreography of of how we will solve climate change. First of all, the really bad climate scenarios are energy blind.

And they just assume that we will continue to grow at 3% this entire century and that there will be enough fossil hydrocarbons available to continue that growth. That's not gonna happen. What will likely happen is we will continue to optimize for growth. We will not optimize for growth.

We will not optimize. optimize for carbon. We will not optimize for biodiversity. We will continue to make choices like Germany is making right now by importing trainloads of coal and restarting a massive biomass program. They are repealing their environmental rules in the service of energy security as opposed to low carbon energy. And you see as the economic pie begins to shrink around the world, you will see populist leaders like what happened last night in Italy and a couple weeks ago in Sweden, because loss a version of what people have versus the past is a very strong motivator for political response. So once you understand this, this seventh stage of climate awareness is we're going to have

to respond to a smaller economy, probably gradually and then suddenly when the musical chairs financial situation ends up having too many chairs, too many people versus the amount of chairs available. And that I think is in the next five to seven years. And so this means that our regenerative agriculture and our low carbon technologies and our 50 to 100 years solar panel yet to come inventions and our communities having more local and regional supply chains and all the things that would benefit a reduced emission economy are not going to happen directly. They need to be happening in tandem in parallel with this other story that's unfolding. And I think there's too few people in the climate community that are paying attention to this sort of a flow chart of the future.

And that doesn't mean that we shouldn't stop caring about climate change or other species or the natural world. It just means to understand that the way the game pieces are moving, we are not going to collectively galvanize around this. problem because finance the economy and an increase in poverty to lots more people in the world are going to take precedence. So this is kind of how I see the seven stages of climate awareness. At least that's how I have kind of moved through them in my personal and professional life. I still care deeply about climate change and biodiversity. But I'm trying to work looking two or three steps ahead on what the interventions that we really need to be doing to save all these things. And future reflections on this show and podcast guests will be discussing those.

Thank you. Have a good weekend. I will talk to you next week.