[TheClimate.Vote] January 12, 2019 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[Richard Pauli]

/January 12, 2019/

[Climate Diva of Science Communicators - with an improved conversation]
*The most important thing you can do to fight climate change: talk about 
it - Katharine Hayhoe*
TED - Published on Jan 11, 2019
How do you talk to someone who doesn't believe in climate change? Not by 
rehashing the same data and facts we've been discussing for years, says 
climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe. In this inspiring, pragmatic talk, 
Hayhoe shows how the key to having a real discussion is to connect over 
shared values like family, community and religion -- and to prompt 
people to realize that they already care about a changing climate. "We 
can't give in to despair," she says. "We have to go out and look for the 
hope we need to inspire us to act -- and that hope begins with a 
conversation, today."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BvcToPZCLI


[10 minute video summary ]
*SCW18: Climate Change and Renewable Energy -- The Shrinking Timeline 
for Global Warming*
UF/IFAS Extension Sarasota County
Published on Jan 2, 2019
Ringling College Professor Tim Rumage discusses the increasing urgency 
to take action on climate change
Transcript available
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSpw0CpgEq4
- - -
[more video: "not talking about it, isn't going to help us"]
*Contemplating INTHE - Inevitable Near Term Human Extinction*
Scott Poynton - Dec 5, 2018
My good friend Julien Troussier and I discuss INTHE, a new acronym that 
should scare the pants off us all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYZE7Ob-deQ


[looks good on paper, or on screen]
*Oil industry makes landmark investment in CO2 air capture*
Christa Marshall, E&E News reporter Energywire: Thursday, January 10, 2019
Chevron Corp. and Occidental Petroleum Corp. are forming the first major 
collaboration between the oil industry and a company deploying 
technology to capture carbon dioxide from the air.

In an announcement yesterday, Chevron's venture capital arm and Oxy Low 
Carbon Ventures LLC, an Occidental subsidiary, said they would invest in 
Carbon Engineering, a Canadian-based firm supported by Microsoft Corp. 
co-founder Bill Gates and other entrepreneurs.

"It is a very important time for the air capture field right now," said 
Steve Oldham, the CEO of Carbon Engineering. "CE's relationships with 
Occidental and Chevron, and these new investments, will allow us to 
accelerate the deployment."

The companies did not disclose the dollar amount of the Carbon 
Engineering partnership, but a CE spokeswoman said the company is on 
track to reach a goal of raising $60 million by the end of the first 
quarter of this year...
https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060111481


[recycling solar]
*Old solar panels get second life in repurposing and recycling markets*
By Billy Ludt - January 9, 2019
Solar modules no longer need to simply wind up in the landfill once 
they're decommissioned. Is a panel cracked? Shattered? At the end of its 
warranty lifetime? That panel can still serve a purpose, whether run 
through a recycling process and fed back into the supply chain; or 
repurposed or reused as a replacement panel or a power source for a 
smaller project.

Companies are putting in the hours to ensure the longevity of solar, 
despite a lack of any legislative backing. One does it through an online 
marketplace for solar; another is repurposing decommissioned panels to 
power homes in need; and another recently opened a solar recycling facility.

Online panel reselling market
EnergyBin is a members-only, business-to-business web platform for solar 
companies to list or seek solar components for sale or resale. The 
renewables marketplace grew out of BrokerBin of the Broker Exchange 
Network, a similar service that lists commercial computer equipment 
rather than solar...
https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2019/01/old-solar-panels-get-second-life-in-repurposing-and-recycling-markets/


[from the Washington Post $]
*How the fossil fuel industry got the media to think climate change was 
debatable*
By Amy Westervelt
Late last year, the Trump administration released the latest national 
climate assessment on Black Friday in what many assumed was an attempt 
to bury the document. If that was the plan, it backfired, and the 
assessment wound up earning more coverage than it probably would have 
otherwise. But much of that coverage perpetuated a decades-old practice, 
one that has been weaponized by the fossil fuel industry: false equivalence.

Although various business interests began pushing back against 
environmental action in general in the early 1970s as part of the 
conservative "war of ideas" launched in response to the social movements 
of the 1960s, when global warming first broke into the public sphere, it 
was a bipartisan issue and remained so for years. On the campaign trail 
in 1988, George H.W. Bush identified as an environmentalist and called 
for action on global warming, framing it as a technological challenge 
that American innovation could address. But fossil fuel interests were 
shifting as the industry and its allies began to push back against 
empirical evidence of climate change, taking many conservatives along 
with them.

Documents uncovered by journalists and activists over the past decade 
lay out a clear strategy: First, target media outlets to get them to 
report more on the "uncertainties" in climate science, and position 
industry-backed contrarian scientists as expert sources for media. 
Second, target conservatives with the message that climate change is a 
liberal hoax, and paint anyone who takes the issue seriously as "out of 
touch with reality." In the 1990s, oil companies, fossil fuel industry 
trade groups and their respective PR firms began positioning contrarian 
scientists such as Willie Soon, William Happer and David Legates as 
experts whose opinions on climate change should be considered equal and 
opposite to that of climate scientists. The Heartland Institute, which 
hosts an annual International Conference on Climate Change known as the 
leading climate skeptics conference, for example, routinely calls out 
media outlets (including The Washington Post) for showing "bias" in 
covering climate change when they either decline to quote a skeptic or 
question a skeptic's credibility.

Data on how effective this strategy has been is hard to come by, but 
anecdotal evidence of its success abounds. In the early 1990s, polls 
showed that about 80 percent of Americans were aware of climate change 
and accepted that something must be done about it, an opinion that 
crossed party lines. By 2008, Gallup found a marked partisan divide on 
climate change. By 2010, the American public's belief in climate change 
hit an all-time low of 48 percent, despite the fact that those 20 years 
saw increased research, improved climate models and several climate 
change predictions coming true.

By demanding "balance," the industry transformed climate change into a 
partisan issue. We know that was a deliberate strategy because various 
internal documents from ExxonMobil, Shell, the American Petroleum 
Institute and a handful of now-defunct fossil fuel industry groups 
reveal not only the industry's strategy to target media with this 
message and these experts, but also its own preemptive debunking of the 
very theories it went on to support.

It need not have been such a successful strategy: If news purveyors 
really wanted to be evenhanded on coverage of climate change, they could 
certainly weave in the insights of more conservative scientists -- those 
whose predictions err on the sunnier side of apocalypse. Instead, many 
took the industry's bait, routinely inserting denialist claims into 
stories about climate science in the interest of providing balance: In 
an analysis of 636 articles covering climate change that appeared in 
"prestige U.S. outlets" from 1988 to 2002, researchers from the 
University of California at Santa Cruz and American University found 
that 52.65 percent presented climate science and contrarian theories as 
equal. The practice continued into the mid-2000s. As recently as 2007, 
PBS New Hour invited well-known (and widely debunked) former weatherman 
Anthony Watts on to counterbalance Richard Muller, a former Koch-funded 
skeptic who had shifted his view.

By about 2008, most mainstream print outlets had moved past the notion 
that "balance" means including climate contrarians in coverage of 
climate science. These outlets do still trip up occasionally, though. In 
2017, ProPublica published a remarkably uncritical Q&A with Happer, for 
example, describing him as "brilliant and controversial," and 
characterizing his view that global warming is good for the planet as 
merely "unusual." That same year, the New York Times was roundly 
criticized for hiring climate contrarian Bret Stephens as a regular 
editorial columnist (and his first column didn't help).

While print outlets aren't perfect, TV news has lagged further behind on 
climate, often presenting climate contrarians as an equal and opposite 
balance to climate scientists. In coverage of the national climate 
assessment, for example, multiple cable news shows featured both climate 
scientists and climate deniers, as though the two are simply opposite 
sides of a debate. "Meet the Press," "Anderson Cooper 360" and "State of 
the Union" all brought on climate deniers to provide balance to their 
shows. Republican politicians made the cable news rounds, too, spouting 
familiar tall tales about climate change being normal and cyclical or 
sun spots and volcanoes being the real culprits. Sen. Joni Ernst 
(R-Iowa) repeated the "the climate always changes" story on CNN, while 
Rick Santorum, informal White House adviser Stephen Moore and British 
politician Nigel Farage pushed the "climate scientists getting rich" 
narrative.

Though some outlets have moved to extricate deniers from the 
conversation, too many television news programs continue to bring on 
"contrarian" experts, giving a platform to tired lies. I say "lies" 
because fossil fuel industry scientists debunked these theories 
themselves decades ago, so they are knowingly perpetuating falsehoods. 
In a "global warming primer" prepared in the 1990s by the Global Climate 
Coalition, a since-disbanded consortium of fossil fuel producers, 
utilities, manufacturers, and other U.S. business interests (including 
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce), a Mobil scientist debunked all of the 
prevailing contrarian theories of the day on climate change. That part 
of the primer was left unprinted, of course, and oil companies went on 
to fund scientists promoting those very theories -- the same ones that 
industry spokesmen and conservative politicians spout today.

In addition to propping up experts and leaning on media to use them as 
sources, oil companies have spent millions on advertising and 
advertorials over the years. Which seems innocuous -- most companies 
advertise -- but oil companies don't sell a consumer product so much as 
a commodity. Most people aren't loyal to a particular brand of gas; they 
buy whatever is most convenient or cheapest. So, when oil companies take 
out ads, it's with the intention of shifting the opinions of the voting 
public, policymakers, and the media.

In an exhaustive survey of ExxonMobil's advertorials from 1977 to 2014, 
science historian Naomi Oreskes and researcher Geoffrey Supran found 
that these pieces often took the form of "op-ads" that look and read a 
lot like op-eds but are paid for by an advertiser. Some simply presented 
positive stories about the company (heavily focused on their investments 
in algal biofuels, for example), but others argued for more relaxed 
policies on offshore drilling or a "common sense" approach to climate 
change regulation. The researchers found that "83 percent of 
peer-reviewed papers and 80 percent of internal documents acknowledge 
that climate change is real and human-caused, yet only 12% of 
advertorials do so, with 81 percent instead expressing doubt."

A 1981 internal Mobil memo discovered by the Climate Investigations 
Center is an evaluation of the first decade of Mobil's advertorial 
program, and it makes the company's goals clear: "Not only is the 
company presenting its opinion to key opinion leaders, but it has been 
engaging in continuing debate with the New York Times itself. In fact, 
the paper has even changed to positions similar to Mobil's on at least 
seven key energy issues."

Granted, Mobil communications staff are giving themselves a lot of 
credit here, but whether they accomplished their goal is almost beside 
the point. This document shows the intention of these campaigns, and 
that's something that should be taken seriously by any media outlet 
agreeing to run them, especially because many still do today. Campaigns 
that bring in big money at a time when the business of news is 
struggling are surely hard to turn down, but media outlets need to 
seriously consider the impact these campaigns have on their ability to 
inform the public, and work to mitigate that impact, above and beyond 
the usual "church and state" division between advertising and editorial. 
They could stop running these campaigns alongside climate reporting, do 
a better job of labeling campaigns, or refuse to run them altogether.

It's well past time the media stopped allowing itself to be a tool in 
the fossil fuel industry's information war. Oreskes likens the push for 
"balance" on climate change to journalists arguing over the final score 
of a baseball game. "If the Yankees beat the Red Sox 6-2, journalists 
would report that. They would not feel compelled to find someone to say 
actually the Red Sox won, or the score was 6-4," she says.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/10/how-fossil-fuel-industry-got-media-think-climate-change-was-debatable/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6beb6fff6187


[maybe AI computational eco-totalitarianism could save us - is this a 
fringe idea?]
*Why Catastrophic Climate Change is Probably Inevitable Now*
How Capitalism Torched the Planet by Imploding Into Fascism
umair haque - Oct 10, 2018
Sometimes, when I write scary essays, I encourage you not to read them. 
This one's different. It's going to be brutal, scary, jarring, and 
alarming. But if you want my thoughts on the future, then read away.

It strikes me that the planet's fate is now probably sealed. We have 
just a decade in which to control climate change -- or goodbye, an 
unknown level of catastrophic, inescapable, runaway warming is 
inevitable. The reality is: we're probably not going to make it. It's 
highly dubious at this juncture that humanity is going to win the fight 
against climate change.

Yet that is for a very unexpected -- yet perfectly 
predictable -- reason: the sudden explosion in global fascism -- which 
in turn is a consequence of capitalism having failed as a model of 
global order. If, when, Brazil elects a neo-fascist who plans to raze 
and sell off the Amazon -- the world's lungs -- then how do you suppose 
the fight against warming will be won? It will be set back by 
decades -- decades…we don't have. America's newest Supreme Court justice 
is already striking down environmental laws -- in his first few days in 
office -- but he will be on the bench for life…beside a President who 
hasn't just decimated the EPA, but stacked it with the kind of 
delusional simpletons who think global warming is a hoax. Again, the 
world is set by back by decades…it doesn't have. Do you see my point 
yet? Let me make it razor sharp.

My friends, catastrophic climate change is not a problem for 
fascists -- it is a solution. History's most perfect, lethal, and 
efficient one means of genocide, ever, period. Who needs to build a camp 
or a gas chamber when the flood and hurricane will do the dirty work for 
free? Please don't mistake this for conspiracism: climate change accords 
perfectly with the foundational fascist belief that only the strong 
should survive, and the weak -- the dirty, the impure, the 
foul -- should perish. That is why neo-fascists do not lift a finger to 
stop climate change -- but do everything they can to in fact accelerate 
it, and prevent every effort to reverse or mitigate it.
- - [conclusion:] - - - -
So now let's connect all the dots. Capitalism didn't just rape the 
planet laughing, and cause climate change that way. It did something 
which history will think of as even more astonishing. By quite 
predictably imploding into fascism at precisely the moment when the 
world needed cooperation, it made it impossible, more or less, for the 
fight against climate change to gather strength, pace, and force. It 
wasn't just the environmental costs of capitalism which melted down the 
planet -- it was the social costs, too, which, by wrecking global 
democracy, international law, cooperation, the idea that nations should 
work together, made a fractured, broken world which no longer had the 
capability to act jointly to prevent the rising floodwaters and the 
burning summers.

(Now, it's at this point that Americans will ask me, a little angrily, 
for "solutions". Ah, my friends. When will you learn? Don't you remember 
my point?

There are no solutions, because these were never "problems" to begin 
with. The planet, like society, is a garden, which needs tending, 
watering, care. The linkages between these things -- inequality 
destabilizing societies making global cooperation less possible -- are 
not things we can fix overnight, by turning a nut or a bolt, or throwing 
money at them. They never were. They are things we needed to see long 
ago, to really reject together, and invest in, nurture, protect, defend, 
for decades -- so that capitalism did not melt down into fascism, and 
take away all our power to fight for our worlds, precisely when we would 
need it most.

But we did not do that. We were busy "solving problems". Problems 
like…hey, how can I get my laundry done? Can I get my package delivered 
in one hour instead of one day? Wow -- you mean I don't have to walk 
down the street to get my pizza anymore? Amazing!! In this way, we 
solved all the wrong problems, if you like, but I would say that we 
solved mechanical problems instead of growing up as people. Things like 
climate change and inequality and fascism are not really 
"problems" -- they are emergent processes, which join up, in great 
tendrils of ruin, each piling on the next, which result from decades of 
neglect, inaction, folly, blindness. We did not plant the seeds, or tend 
to our societies, economies, democracies, or planet carefully 
enough -- and now we are harvesting bitter ruin instead. Maybe you see 
my point. Or maybe you don't see my point at all. I wouldn't blame you. 
It's a tough one to catch sight of.)

The tables have turned. The problem isn't climate change anymore, and 
the solution isn't global cooperation -- at least given today's 
implosive politics. The problem is you -- if you are not one of the 
chosen, predatory few. And the solution to the problem of you is climate 
change. To the fascists, that is. They are quite overjoyed to have found 
the most spectacular and efficient and lethal engine of genocide and 
devastation known to humankind, which is endless, free natural 
catastrophe. Nothing sorts the strong from the weak more ruthlessly like 
a flooded planet, a thundering sky, a forest in flames, a parched ocean. 
A man with a gun is hardly a match for a planet on fire.

I think this much becomes clearer by the year: we have failed, my 
friends, to save our home. How funny that we are focused, instead, on 
our homelands. It would be funny, disgraceful, and pathetic of me to 
say: is there still time to save ourselves? That is the kind of nervous, 
anxious selfishness that Americans are known for -- and it is only if we 
reject it, really, that we learn the lesson of now. Let us simply 
imagine, instead, that despite all the folly and stupidity and ruin of 
this age, the strongmen and the weak-minded, in those dark and 
frightening nights when the rain pours and the thunder roars, we might 
still light a candle for democracy, for freedom, and for truth. The 
truth is that we do not deserve to be saved if we do not save them first.
Umair
October 2018
https://eand.co/how-capitalism-torched-the-planet-and-left-it-a-smoking-fascist-greenhouse-fe687e99f070 



[From the BBC - a very long essay only slightly clipped]
*The perils of short-termism: Civilisation's greatest threat*
Our inability to look beyond the latest news cycle could be one of the 
most dangerous traits of our generation, says Richard Fisher.
- - -
As a journalist, I often encounter and deploy the date 2100. It's a 
milestone year frequently cited in climate change news reports, stories 
about future technologies and science fiction. But it's so far ahead, 
clouded with so many possibilities, that the route we will take to get 
there is difficult to see. I rarely consider that, like my daughter, 
millions of people alive today will be there as 2100 arrives, inheriting 
the century my generation will leave behind. All the decisions we make, 
for better and worse, will be theirs to live with. And these descendants 
will have their own families: hundreds of millions of people not yet 
born, most of whom you or I will never meet.

For many of us currently in adulthood, how often can we truly say we are 
thinking about the well-being of these future generations? How often do 
we contemplate the impact of our decisions as they ripple into the 
decades and centuries ahead?

Part of the problem is that the 'now' commands so much more attention. 
We are saturated with knowledge and standards of living have mostly 
never been higher - but today it is difficult to look beyond the next 
news cycle. If time can be sliced, it is only getting finer, with 
ever-shorter periods now shaping our world. To paraphrase the investor 
Esther Dyson: in politics the dominant time frame is a term of office, 
in fashion and culture it's a season, for corporations it's a quarter, 
on the internet it's minutes, and on the financial markets mere 
milliseconds.
Modern society is suffering from "temporal exhaustion", the sociologist 
Elise Boulding once said. "If one is mentally out of breath all the time 
from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the 
future," she wrote in 1978. We can only guess her reaction to the 
relentless, Twitter-fuelled politics of 2019. No wonder wicked problems 
like climate change or inequality feel so hard to tackle right now.

That's why researchers, artists, technologists and philosophers are 
converging on the idea that short-termism may be the greatest threat our 
species is facing this century. They include philosophers arguing the 
moral case for prioritising our distant descendants; researchers mapping 
out the long-term path of Homo sapiens; artists creating cultural works 
that wrestle with time, legacy and the sublime; and Silicon Valley 
engineers building a giant clock that will tick for 10,000 years.

What these thinkers from myriad fields share is a simple idea: that the 
longevity of civilisation depends on us extending our frame of reference 
in time - considering the world and our descendants through a much 
longer lens. What if we could be altruistic enough to care about people 
we might never live to see? And if so, what will it take to break out of 
our short-termist ways?

Human beings haven't always had the ability to think in an abstract way 
about long-term time. Today, we can live totally in the moment - 
absorbed by music, for instance - or we can mentally time-travel to 
imagine scenarios in the past or future. As you read this page, you can 
zoom back in your imagination to picture the first acts of our 
ancestors, and moments later spin the dial to billions of years hence as 
the Sun engulfs the Earth.

In fact, some researchers argue that this mental time-travel is a vital 
adaptation that led to our species' success. According to Thomas 
Suddendorf of the University of Queensland, humans may be the only 
animals with this ability: we can create a complex 'theatre stage' in 
our minds with the equivalent of a set, playwright, director and actors, 
and subsequently describe these imaginary scenes to other people.
"It is a tremendously powerful skill," Suddendorf told BBC Future's 
Claudia Hammond in 2016. "We can imagine situations like what we're 
going to do tomorrow, next week, where we're going to have a holiday, 
what career path to pursue, and we can imagine alternative versions of 
those. And we can evaluate each of them in terms of their likelihood and 
desirability."

We have the innate ability, then, to imagine the consequences of our 
actions in deeper time, but sadly not always the will or the motivation 
to escape the salience of the present.

Despite our mental faculty to look and plan ahead, we have a weakness in 
our thinking called 'present bias', which favours short-term payoffs 
over long-term rewards. For example, people are more likely to accept an 
offer of £10 today, rather than a guarantee of £12 in a week; to smoke 
cigarettes despite a shortened life; to spend on pleasures, not save for 
rainy days.

Some psychologists have used the metaphor of a "horse and rider" to 
describe this tension between our rationality and urges: the rider knows 
it's smart to think longer-term, but the horse has its own ideas.

And if we are prone to neglecting the wellbeing of our own future 
selves, it's even harder to muster empathy for our descendants.

There is nowhere this is more apparent than in the world of politics and 
economics.
To better understand why short-termism has such a hold on our society 
and how it is governed, imagine a newly-elected politician - let's call 
her Clarissa - who has a dilemma. She is weighing up whether to spend a 
few billion dollars on climate change mitigation, pandemic preparation 
and reducing nuclear waste.

All will be of immense value to Clarissa's great-grandchildren, saving 
lives and trillions of dollars down the track. But the immediate 
benefits will be invisible and the cost painful. She is conflicted: her 
constituents in the fossil fuel industry also need jobs, the military 
want funding for national security, and she was elected by promising tax 
cuts.

One of Clarissa's economists has an answer: pointing out that something 
called a 'discount rate' can be applied to these far future benefits. 
It's standard practice; countries all over the world use it.

A social discount rate is a technique that policy-makers use in their 
cost-benefit analyses to gauge whether to make investments with a 
long-term impact. It weighs the upsides for future people against costs 
borne in the present-day, and proposes that the calculated value of 
benefits to future economies and people should steadily decline over 
time. For example, if you're weighing up whether to build an expensive 
sea-bridge to foster trade, it'll tell you that a 5% boost in economic 
growth in 12 months is better than a 5% boost in 12 years.

There are a number of reasons discount rates exist. One is the 
assumption that economic growth over time will mean future generations 
will be richer and therefore better able to bear costs; another is to 
capture, in economic terms, people's preference to prefer income today 
rather than tomorrow. Like the 'present bias' experienced by 
individuals, many politicians - and the societies they govern - have a 
limit to how much cost they are collectively willing to bear for the 
benefit of people who don't yet exist.

So, to return to Clarissa, she and her economist whip out their 
metaphorical calculator and crunch the numbers using a standard discount 
rate. Heading off these problems, they realise, might not show enough 
payback for decades or possibly even centuries - so the investments fail 
their cost-benefit analysis. Clarissa will leave it to her successor to 
decide.
Discount rates have been at the root of vigorous debates about climate 
change - and how urgently to make investments in mitigation as the 
effects rapidly worsen. Many citizens would accept that there's a need 
to bear some costs to avoid future climate catastrophe. But how much 
cost is acceptable, and how quickly? What portion of your own income 
today would you be willing to give up for the benefit of future 
generations? When economists and politicians are debating this question, 
they are essentially arguing over how big a discount rate to apply.

Tell a philosopher about this rationale, meanwhile, and you'll hear an 
ethical argument that dismantles the economic reasoning. It may work 
over the time scale of years, but a discount rate becomes problematic if 
you extend many decades or centuries hence. It means that the importance 
of the benefits felt by future human beings in these calculations 
eventually dwindles to nothing.
Some philosophers have reasoned that discounting the needs of our 
descendants is akin to burying a shard of broken glass in a forest. If a 
child steps on the glass and cuts themselves today or tomorrow, then a 
discount rate suggests this injury is much worse than a child hurting 
themselves on the glass a century from now. But ethically, there is no 
difference between the two.

The philosophical argument for investing in measures to protect the 
wellbeing of future generations can also be framed, simplistically, by 
imagining a set of scales, with everybody alive today on one side, and 
every unborn person on the other. Today's population of 7.7 billion is a 
lot - but it is small when you weigh it against everybody on Earth who 
will ever call themselves human, along with all their achievements. If 
Homo sapiens (or the species we evolve into) endures for tens or 
hundreds of thousands of years, that becomes a humongous number of lives 
to consider. Trillions of families, relationships, births; countless 
moments of potential joy, love, friendship and tenderness.

By some estimates, around 100 billion people have lived and died on 
Earth in the last 50,000 years. But if the average annual birth numbers 
projected for the 21st Century were to hold steady for the next 50,000 
years (unlikely, but let's assume they do for illustration), then the 
number of people still to be born during this period looks like this:
According to the social philosopher Roman Krznaric, failing to value the 
lives of all these descendants is akin to 'colonising' the future - 
essentially deciding that future generations have no ownership rights 
there, or any say over how it evolves. "We treat the future as a distant 
colonial outpost where we dump ecological degradation, nuclear waste, 
public debt and technological risk," he told attendees at a recent event 
in London organised by The Long Time Inquiry, an initiative to encourage 
long-term thinking in the cultural sector.
Krznaric calls this attitude 'tempus nullius', drawing a parallel with 
an idea used to justify acts like the British settlement of Australia in 
the 1700-1800s. According to the legal notion of 'terra nullius' - 
nobody's land - any ownership rights of indigenous Aborigines were 
ignored. Similarly, "we treat the future as 'empty time', where there 
are no generations", he says.

A few governments are, reassuringly, trying to change their ways. For 
example, Finland and Sweden have parliamentary advisory groups to foster 
longer-term planning, and Hungary has an ombudsman for future 
generations. There are also various organisations now lobbying 
politicians to consider future generations from a human rights 
perspective, particularly in relation to climate change
Meanwhile, Wales appointed Sophie Howe in 2016 - a former senior leader 
in the police - to be a "future generations commissioner", charged with 
ensuring Welsh public bodies think about the long-term in their 
decisions. "This isn't just through some aspirational policy document, 
it's actually written into law through the Wellbeing of Future 
Generations Act," Howe explained recently on BBC Radio 4. "All decisions 
taken by the public sector in Wales, including our government, must 
demonstrate how they are meeting today's needs without compromising the 
ability of future generations to meet their own."

It's early days though, and while these examples are encouraging, they 
are also isolated. Unless we get better at ditching our short-termist 
ways on a global scale, the decisions we make in the early 21st Century 
could shape the future of our species in far more profound - and 
chilling - ways than we might realise.

And as one group of researchers warned recently, acts of neglect or 
stupidity in the present day could possibly even threaten civilisation 
itself.
--
In early September 2017, the world's attention was focused on various 
pieces of salient news: Hurricane Irma was brewing in the Caribbean, 
Donald Trump's administration had announced plans to dismantle an 
Obama-era immigration policy, and photographers captured Prince George's 
first day at school.

Around the same time, a small, little-known group of researchers were 
meeting at a workshop in Gothenburg, Sweden with a goal to look much, 
much further ahead - far beyond this latest news cycle. Motivated by a 
moral concern for our descendants, their goal was to discuss the 
existential risks facing humanity.

The meeting would lead to an intriguing and readable co-authored paper 
called Long-term Trajectories of Human Civilisation, which attempts to 
"formalise a scientific and ethical field of study" for thousands of 
years hence. As they write: "To restrict attention to near-term decades 
may be akin to the drunk searching for his keys under the streetlight: 
it may be where empirical study is more robust, but the important part 
lies elsewhere."
The Trajectories group began with the assumption that, while the future 
is uncertain, it is not unknown. We can predict many things with 
reasonable confidence, via observed patterns, repeating events, and 
established behaviours throughout human history. For example: biology 
suggests that each mammalian species exists, on average, for roughly 1 
million years before it becomes extinct; history shows that humanity has 
continually colonised new lands and strived to transform our abilities 
with technology for millennia; and the fossil record demonstrates that 
global extinction events can and do happen continually.

Extrapolating these patterns and behaviours into the future allowed them 
to map out four possible long-term trajectories for our species:

Status quo trajectories, in which human civilisation persists in a 
broadly similar state into the distant future.
Catastrophe trajectories, in which one or more events cause significant 
harm to human civilisation.
Technological transformation trajectories, in which radical 
technological breakthroughs put human civilisation on a fundamentally 
different course.
Astronomical trajectories, in which human civilisation expands beyond 
its home planet and into the accessible portions of the cosmos.
Following their discussions in Sweden and afterwards, the Trajectories 
group concluded that the 'status quo' path would be a pretty unlikely 
scenario once you get to longer-term timescales. "Instead, civilisation 
is likely to either end catastrophically or expand dramatically," they 
write.

So on the optimistic path, merging with some as-yet-unimagined 
technology or colonising the stars are two scenarios that are entirely 
possible with the passage of enough time, they suggest. Both paths could 
lead to our descendants thriving for millions if not billions of years, 
spreading out into the Universe or evolving into a more advanced species.

But we also are almost certain to face serious existential risks along 
the way. Natural disasters have pruned life on Earth continually - this 
much we know. What worries the Trajectories researchers more is that in 
the 20th and early 21st Century we've added a whole host of additional 
human-made risks into the mix too - from nuclear armageddon to AI 
apocalypse to anthropogenic climate change.

In their paper, they lay out a variety of chilling scenarios where 
civilisation is rewound back to pre-industrial times, or wiped out 
altogether. As you can see below, there are myriad paths we could 
potentially take:

The researchers can't predict which order any of this will play out. 
They can predict, though, that it's our trajectory to shape - for better 
or worse, the decisions we make this century could shape the next one 
and far beyond. "The stakes are extremely large, and there may be a lot 
that people today can do to have a positive impact," they write.

The question is: will we?
--
I'm troubled by all this. It's possible that we are at one of the most 
precarious points of human history. Yet I worry that our power to 
destroy ourselves is radically outstripping our wisdom and foresight.

How do we avoid sleepwalking into acts that harm future generations, or 
even worse, precipitating a catastrophe that could threaten our 
existence as a species? How are enough minds changed to prioritise a 
longer-term view when so many present-day pressures nudge us towards 
short-termism?

You can make philosophical and evidence-based arguments for protecting 
our species and future generations. But sadly, human beings are not 
rational. It's not that easy.

To foster longer-term thinking that goes against our psychological base 
instincts, there need to be approaches and arguments that inspire and 
engage the non-rational part of our brain too.
That's the thinking behind one new initiative called the Long Time 
Inquiry, recently established in the UK, to foster long-term thinking 
via artistic rather than empirical routes. The founders Ella Saltmarshe 
and Beatrice Pembroke argue that culture is often relegated in big 
strategic conversations about the future of humanity and the planet, and 
that needs to change.

"Culture forms the operating system for our society," they write. "It's 
foundational to the way science, politics, economics and technology 
develop. It shapes how we feel, how we empathise and how we connect with 
each other. It provides the reflective space to navigate complexity and 
uncertainty."

Moreover, a piece of art - whether it is a painting or a play - has the 
potential to endure longer than a policy paper or political initiative. 
It is often tended, reproduced and preserved as the ages pass, making it 
one of most enduring legacies a human being can leave for the world.

It's early days in their project, but Saltmarshe and Pembroke aim to 
foster and encourage new cultural works about the long-term as well as 
creating a network of like-minded artists, institutions and intellectuals.

The pair have been influenced by a principle called 'Seventh Generation' 
stewardship, defined by the leaders of the Native American Iroquois 
Confederacy many centuries ago. "Every decision they took had to keep in 
mind seven generations hence," explains Saltmarshe. Similarly, they 
point to concepts such as Cathedral Thinking, which refers to the 
approach of building over multiple generations.
They also propose that the prevalence of short-termism is entwined with 
our attitude to death. "We've got a hunch that our inability to deal 
with the future of the world beyond our lifespan is wrapped up with our 
inability to deal with the fact that our lives will end," they write. 
"Our denial of our own mortality prevents us from engaging with the 
long-term future."

The Long Time Inquiry will build on the work of various individuals and 
groups who are using art and other symbolic means to provoke people to 
think longer-term.
For example, in 2014 the artist Katie Paterson began building The Future 
Library. Once a year, authors such as Margaret Atwood submit manuscripts 
to the Library that will not be read until the year 2114. Their books 
will be printed on paper made from 1,000 trees growing in a special 
forest called Nordmaka, near Oslo in Norway.

Or there's Longplayer, a musical score that will play for 1,000 years. 
It is an eerie, but calming, composition seemingly intended to evoke a 
feeling of religiosity in its listeners. The installation can be heard 
at a lighthouse in London where you'll also find 234 Tibetan singing 
bowls used in live concerts to accompany the score. There are also 
listening posts across the world and an online stream.

But perhaps one of the most ambitious symbolic gestures that our 
generation will create is a special clock buried deep inside a mountain 
in Texas. It involves a group of Silicon Valley visionaries, a 
pioneering musician, and the world's richest person - and its story 
begins in a bad neighbourhood in the late 1970s.
--
The music producer Brian Eno was in a run-down corner of New York, on 
the way to a glamorous dinner party.
It was the winter of 1978, and Eno's taxi was bumping over potholes, 
hurtling towards an address he didn't recognise. As he drove south, the 
streets got darker and the sense of urban neglect grew, until finally he 
arrived at his destination. A man lay slumped in the doorway.
Puzzled, he double-checked the address on the invitation card. He had 
been invited to the home of a celebrity singer for dinner. Could this 
really be the right place?
Eno rang the bell and rode the elevator up to the apartment. Inside, to 
his surprise, was a glittering, glamorous loft probably worth $2-3m.

Curious, he asked the hostess during dinner if she liked living where 
she did. "Oh sure," she replied, "this is the loveliest place I have 
ever lived."

He realised that what she meant was 'within these four walls'. The 
dilapidated neighbourhood outside didn't exist for her.
Afterwards, when he looked around at his contemporaries, Eno saw the 
singer's narrow view everywhere. What's more, this attitude to space 
also translated to the way this New York glitterati seemed to think 
about time - not much further than the following week. They were living 
in what Eno called a 'small here' and a 'short now'. "Everything was 
exciting, fast, current, and temporary. Enormous buildings came and 
went, careers rose and crashed in weeks. You rarely got the feeling that 
anyone had the time to think two years ahead, let alone 10 or a 
hundred," he later reflected.

"More and more," he would write in his notebook, "I find I want to be 
living in a Big Here and a Long Now."

Decades later, this experience inspired Eno to work with several other 
like-minded thinkers to establish the Long Now Foundation, which aims to 
"provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make 
long-term thinking more common". It runs regular speaker events in San 
Francisco, and has launched initiatives such as the Rosetta Project, a 
digital library of all human languages designed to last millennia, or a 
website called Long Bets, which asks people to stake money on their 
predictions for the long-term future. Their scope of view is 10,000 
years hence, because it was around 10 millennia ago that agriculture 
became widespread and civilisations began. When talking about dates, 
they also add an extra 0 in order to capture the notion that our paltry 
years are dwarfed by a larger timeframe (Happy 02019!).

Of all their projects, however, the most ambitious attempt to break 
people out of short-term thinking is a symbolic installation - the 
60m-tall (200ft) 10,000 Year Clock, currently being installed in the 
mountains of Western Texas on land owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff 
Bezos. The Clock is intended to be a monument that outlasts its 
creators, ticking for 10 millenia.

In 2018, the first parts of the clock's mechanical architecture were 
placed inside the limestone cavern. Yet it has been almost two decades 
in the making. Engineering a mechanism that lasts 10,000 years has 
stretched designers to answer questions few have tackled before - 
everything from choosing which ball bearings will last longest (ceramic, 
not steel) to how to avoid the timing drifting as Earth's rotation slows 
and wobbles over millenia.
Inside the mountain, a 16-tonne diamond-chainsaw robot has carved a 
spiral rock staircase, which will snake around the metal cogs and gears 
of the clock in a central cavity hundreds of feet deep. Engineers 
recently installed a manual winding mechanism to power the bells and 
display dials - but the clock itself will be kept running by the 
temperature difference from day to night. Air within a tank and bellows 
at the cavern's top will expand during the day, providing just enough 
energy to keep a pendulum ticking for centuries.

As the centuries pass, a new, different sequence of bells will play 
every so often. You can get a sense of what future generations might 
hear on one of Eno's albums, inspired by the clock. The first track 
features the sequence of bells that will play 5,000 years from the year 
he composed it - in the year 07003.

The clock is designed to provoke its visitors to reflect on their place 
in time. While rationally we can conceive of the deeper future and how 
our acts affect tomorrow, its creators believe that it will be a wholly 
different experience to stand inside an ancient cavern looking at a 
clock that will tick for hundreds of lifetimes.

It's not outlandish to believe that works of art or installations such 
as the clock can influence people's views and actions in ways that 
rational, empirical arguments cannot. For example, BBC Future recently 
explored how the style of imagery deployed to depict climate change can 
influence the viewer's sense of agency, empathy and willingness to 
change their behaviour. Similarly, researchers have found that people 
are more likely to alter their environmental habits if they are asked to 
engage with climate change through their personal values and experiences 
rather than hearing scientific arguments from experts.
Myself, I have mixed feelings about the clock. I wonder what future 
generations will make it of it, looking back at the period and the place 
in which it was conceived. It will cost tens of millions of dollars and 
has developed amidst the dizzying growth of Silicon Valley - and the 
fortunes and controversies that followed.

The project may come to be associated with its main funder Bezos and his 
company Amazon, which has become notorious for pushing its workers to 
meet deliveries on ever-shorter timeframes. And a cynic might argue that 
the riches of a corporation notorious for paying low taxes might be 
better spent on long-term infrastructure, catastrophe prevention or 
social programmes that benefit future generations.

Still, I hope that the clock will be seen as its makers intended, a 
symbol that changes minds about short-term thinking rather than Silicon 
Valley largesse.

Over 10,000 years, perhaps all of these details will be forgotten 
anyway. Maybe the clock will mean something entirely different to our 
descendants, revealing a truth of our age that we can't yet imagine. 
Like time capsules, often when humanity erects monuments that reach for 
posterity, these symbols go on to say more about what we value and who 
we are today than we will ever know ourselves. If the 10,000 Year Clock 
does hold a hidden truth about us that only our descendants will see, I 
suppose it would be an appropriate legacy for the long-forgotten 
billionaire and foundation that placed it inside a mountain.
--
I understand the dangers of short-termism. I can both rationalise the 
argument, and feel the need to care more about future generations. But I 
confess I still struggle with how to translate that to action as an 
individual. Some days I wonder if I should be eating more ethically. The 
next I consider sacrificing a trip abroad to reduce my carbon emissions.

It is daunting to contemplate how we as individuals might act with 
kindness and foresight for unborn people. To realise that we are just 
one in a chain of generations, and accept that while we will one day be 
forgotten, we owe an ethical obligation to our descendants to leave a 
better world than the one we inherited ourselves. I find it is difficult 
enough extrapolating how my small acts as an individual might affect the 
wider world and its population today, let alone hundreds of years into 
the future.

I experienced a brief moment of clarity, though, when sitting with my 
daughter at breakfast recently. As five-year-olds do, she often asks 
questions. We got talking about what I had been writing.

"Do you know what the future is?" I asked.

She paused. "No, not really."

"Well you know history, and the past? This is the opposite."

She chewed her cereal.

"What's the furthest in the future you can imagine?" I asked.

"Um... when I am 10."

"Can you imagine further? Being a grown-up?"

"No. When I am 10."

She picked up her bowl and wandered out to the kitchen.

And so, I thought, this is where I can start: as a parent. As my 
daughter grows up, what I am sure I can do is try my hardest to widen 
the horizons, empathy and potential of a little girl who can't yet 
imagine a world beyond life as a 10-year-old. A girl who will become a 
teenager, an adult, a grandmother, my closest descendant in a chain of 
generations, who, just maybe, will live long enough to watch the start 
of the 22nd Century unfold.
--
Richard Fisher is the managing editor of the BBC.com features sites (UK 
& RoW), and tweets at @rifish.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190109-the-perils-of-short-termism-civilisations-greatest-threat


*This Day in Climate History - January 12, 2012 - from D.R. Tucker*
January 12, 2012: NPR reports on climate scientists who are calling for 
efforts to reduce ozone and soot as a means of combating climate change.
http://www.npr.org/2012/01/12/145117211/scientists-turn-focus-to-ozone-soot-to-fix-climate 

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