Cold Turkey

One of the enjoyable things about found object photography is just the variety of random items one comes across.

Clad in Motley

It occurs to me that Greta Thunberg is being deployed in a manner similar to the idea of a court jester or fool of old: someone who can tell "the powerful" things that they don't want to hear and are immune from punishment for doing so. I'm not sure of the honesty of doing so, however; President Trump and other people who are invested in current levels of fossil fuel use have shown themselves unwilling to give Miss Thunberg a pass, for either her age or her autism, and I suspect that this was part of the plan all along: she was held up as a punching bag that couldn't be legitimately punched specifically so that when she was punched, there could be the requisite outrage about it. (To be sure, however, I'm not entirely certain that things were quite as cynical as all that. But I am fairly confident that there were people who positioned themselves to take advantage of how they knew the situation was going to turn out.)

I'm not sure that there's much value in the idea of someone who can tell the Emperor that they have no clothes simply for the sake of having the Emperor look weak or unwise. To the degree that rulers did (if they ever did) have people on the payroll who were exempted from losing their heads if they said something that displeased the monarch, it's presumably because someone realized that there needed to be someone who would level with the ruler. Sycophants come into being when flattery becomes a profession; having someone around with a different line of work can be valuable.

But if one of the knocks on President Trump is that he doesn't value unflattering information being delivered to him, then he would have no use for a jester. But it's also worth noting that this characteristic isn't unique to the President. There are a lot of people, at all walks of life, who prefer to simply be told how good they are at life. And once battle lines have been drawn, they often have little patience for the news that maybe they're fighting the wrong war.

No Fair

And when [Greta] Thunberg talks about this, especially in private, she sounds a lot like … a teenager. “We are not the ones who are responsible for this, but we are the ones who have to live with these consequences, and that is so incredibly unfair,” she said at one point.
Robinson Meyer “Why Greta Makes Adults Uncomfortable” The Atlantic. Monday, 23 September, 2019

I remember when I viewed the world this way. It's part of the power of being a child; for many young people, fairness is simply an entitlement and you can be huffy about life not being fair because the compromises and trade-offs that fairness require are a combination of invisible and not their problem. Unfairness has no rights, and so if it's unfair that someone has something, then they should simply give that thing up... and problem solved. But fairness is not real; it has no existence outside of our own perceptions.

When I worked with children, in a past life, the unfairness of life was a daily concern. The children in my care had been taken out of their families' homes for abuse and/or neglect, and so they lived in a large brick building in the suburbs in one of five Units of about a dozen children apiece. They realized that this fate had befallen them, and that it hadn't befallen other children they knew, and they saw this as unfair. And it was. The children had done nothing to deserve the events that had put them on this path. One could say that their difficulties in holding it together well enough to be in foster care, rather than residential treatment, could be ascribed to them, but even that seems somewhat uncharitable. And they were in the same position that Miss Thunberg finds herself in; a situation that someone else was responsible for, but that they had to live with the consequences of.

My initial responses to their complaints was that "Life isn't fair." It's what had been drilled into me when I was a child, and I duly dispensed it in turn. But one day, it occurred to me that this aphorism wasn't useful, and so I agreed with them, instead. I confirmed for them that it wasn't fair that some people had parents that loved and wanted and could care for them, while they had to make due with a rotating group of random adults. They'd been dealt bad hands in a poker game that they hadn't signed up for.

But in the end, it didn't change anything. They were still stuck in a system of residential treatment, with no clear way out of it, other than running away and either living on the streets or finding someone to take them in. But there's no running away from climate change. But I don't know that anything will change, either.

Governments have difficulty being beholden to both their constituencies and other people's understandings of virtue simultaneously. While the costly changes that would be required to forestall serious alterations to the future climate may be within the reach of current legislatures, undoing them is within reach of the legislatures that follow them. And the people who understand themselves as having to pay the costs see the situation in much the same terms that Miss Thunberg does; they're not responsible it, but they will have to live with the consequences, and it's unfair.

Nothing will change as long as people are concerned with fairness. That's why we're were we are now. Having to bite the bullet is also unfair, even when it's the only way to change things.

I Hear You

Overdrawn

While they aren't exactly similar, an analogy can be made between climate concerns and finance. One can think of the greenhouse gasses that are being released into the atmosphere as a sort of "climate debt" that, at some point, is going to need to be paid off. And if that debt is not properly managed, it's possible to imagine a "climate default," a scenario in which the changes to the climate create enough upheaval that it's no longer possible to continue to borrow against the climate.

And I do think that it's possible to make the case that currently, world economic activity borrows against the climate, mainly because of scale. For a certain population size, all manner of wasteful, polluting practices are sustainable, because the local environment replenishes itself faster than it can be used up. One could conceptualize this as being similar to the tax revenue of a nation-state, where that revenue is consistently greater than expenditures. While the level of services it supports may be extravagant, it can go on forever. But as population rises relative to tax receipts, it comes to pass that to maintain that level of services requires more money than current income, and the state resorts to borrowing to make up the shortfall. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with borrowing. But if one is borrowing to fund consumption, there may eventually be a problem, as that consumption usually doesn't create the extra resources required to service the debt incurred.

And so to return to our climate analogy, a case can be made that the current world economy is consuming, rather than investing, the resources borrowed from the biosphere, and so the duration over which this can be sustained is finite. And at the end of that duration, as with a point at which a nation my no longer borrow, things are going to have to change.

I make this analogy because it occurred to me that many climate activists have set their sights on Congressional action as a means of heading off the metaphorical "climate default." But the United States Congress is a body that doesn't seem to understand that "kick the can down the road" isn't a viable solution to dealing with the currently mounting fiscal debt that the nation is incurring. So why expect that they'd treat "climate debt" any differently?

After all, the same set of incentives are in place. Just as with fiscal expenditures, climate expenditures have constituencies that rely on them, and therefore lobby for them to be maintained. And as a general rule, "fiscal restraint" isn't put forward as: "I'm willing to forgo this, that or the other in order to lessen the need to borrow." It's more commonly phrased as: "Those people over there should have this, that or the other benefit removed in order to reserve capacity for me." The climate discussion often isn't any different.

Whether it's simply doing without what is otherwise perceived as a necessary good or service, or making expensive (and perhaps risky) investments where the payoff is far in the future, the current set of incentives is not conducive to either fiscal or climate management. And that likely needs to change before policy will.