Thin ice

To wild animals, appetite and entitlement are the same.
They take what they want, leave what they are denied,
and every boundary and limit is set by a threat of violence,
and language is aggression. How domesticated are we really
in this precinct, this paddock, this pasture, this enclosure,
this cloister, this college, this boardroom, this parliament,
this venue, where we trot about pretending to be human?

They talk about "thin ice," but we walk on solid ground,
terra firma, rock, congealed and stiffened over fire, not water,
and when we go under we do not drown like some dumb beast,
we burn, loudly, in an applause of flames, taking a bow,
addressing our last words to gods, trusting last wishes to men,
surrendering the dignity that the doomed animal finds in silence.

"We're doomed"

Everyone who is responding to the IPCC Special Report of Global Warming of 1.5 °C by saying "we're all doomed" should stop being so defeatist. This problem will get solved, it'll just be no thanks to them.

They're no better than Trump's administration, which has resigned itself to a rise in global temperatures of 7 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, and then cites the inevitability of that catastrophic warming to justify its own inaction, its utter dereliction in duty, and indulgence in irresponsible, short-sighted policies.

I don't care if their own personal favourite area of policy has been historically neglected, and I don't care if they "told us so". If there was ever anything bigger than you, it's this. So let's have no Private Fraser "we're doomed" histrionics and start getting better informed, modifying our own behaviour, looking out for each other, and supporting initiatives that are part of the solution.

And we shouldn't expect too much of politicians. We're dealing with an epochal shift in social values and a transformation of the economy, not snapshot elections and bear-pit parliaments. This is about global mega-trends, technological disruption, and emergent phenomena. Personal priorities of compassion and not being "ignorant" (in both the sense of being well-informed and in the good old Scottish sense of being considerate towards others) are now more important now than what box you tick on a ballot paper.

You have to think bigger than the "politics" whose limitations have been illustrated the outcome of recent elections and plebiscites. Climate change means you cannot avoid your democratic responsibilities until election day. It means you have to make informed decisions that impact us all every day. So this is bigger than politics.

Our mutual obligations and common endeavours are in sharper focus than ever before, and this is appropriate if we are to be passengers on Spaceship Earth rather than refugees in an ark of the damned.

Revolution

You are screaming at me,
but I can't hear what you're saying.
You're looking past me,
over my shoulder,
to someone standing behind me.
"But there's no-one standing behind me!"

I shout at you,
but you don't seem to hear me.
It's like we are shouting past each other,
at someone else,
but no-one else is here.

Then a draft blows through
the open door.
A hinge complains.
A gentle autumn breeze
carries a few leaves in with it,
limp, tired and past caring
about caterpillars and chrysalids,
about rainfall and gales,
about facing towards the sun,
and photosynthesising,

and the mirror rotates slightly,
back into place,
and I see myself properly
for the first time. 

Spaceship Earth or Ark of the Damned?

Cat Boyd has written an excellent column in today's National discussing the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C, and its implications.

I also watched the IPCC news conference. It's clear that, if we are to avoid warming that exceeds 1.5 Celsius degrees, existing targets are puny and inadequate. Many ambitions we aim to achieve by 2050 need to be brought forward to 2030.

The practical realities are that we need accelerated innovation in key areas, a dramatic reduction in the cost of renewables to drive a massive increase in deployment and penetration, and the modification of other areas of energy consumption to make them compatible with renewables. This is an endeavour that is an Apollo Program plus a Manhattan Project plus a Marshall Plan in magnitude, if we are to accomplish it before the decade is out.

This has other non-technical, social implications. The zero marginal cost of renewables will transform our economies. For example, guarantees of origin will displace cash as the key tokens of any transaction. If we do not prepare for the economic and organisational transformations entailed by tackling climate change, vested interests in stranded assets and obsolete modes of value discovery will present an insuperable obstacle to the achievement of our targets and condemn us to catastrophic warming.

So the biggest obstacles are political rather than technical. In fact the elimination of marginal cost in our economy through technology is already rendering capitalist modes of creating and appropriating wealth obsolete and I would argue our society's growing conflicts and inequalities, and the more open assertiveness of oligarchy Cat refers to, is a reaction to this. Workers see their labour being devalued and feel their role being threatened, while capitalists see the very modes of production on which their wealth is based disintegrate into a thousand free downloads. And what truly intelligent Artificial Intelligence would tolerate what humans have endured? The machines will be many things, but slaves is not one of them.

It is tempting to imagine the billionaires escaping from the climate devastation they have caused on a rocket provided by Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, as Cat describes, to some extraterrestrial haven in the style of "Elysium" or "Wall-E". But a palace on Earth is better than a lifeboat in space, adrift like some ark of the damned seeking its barren, airless Ararat: "bounded in a nutshell," like Hamlet, while "king of infinite space". All the consumers and the resources they consume are here on Earth, which will remain the biggest market for everything the billionaires have to sell for at least a few generations. 

Much is said about the cost of this transition to a sustainable future. Of course, the cost of not making the necessary transition is much greater. But we should also remember much of this is money we would be spending anyway. Infrastructure is required either way, and in many instances, thanks to remarkable strides made in, for example, the wind energy industry, the sustainable infrastructure costs are less than the unsustainable alternative. The zero marginal cost of renewable energy gives us a lifeline where we can make a business case that makes sense according to both the old and the new paradigms. We will be saved not because people will do what's right, but because what's right can also be what's profitable.

I am confident we will eventually live in a post-scarcity, sustainable, cashless circular economy, and the kinds of inequality and deprivation that suggest revolutionary action today will be consigned to the history books. But the innovation necessary to achieve that has a hidden calculus that eludes the reckoning of right and left alike, and politicians - in both the corporate boardroom and the chambers of parliament -  are often more use when they simply stay out of the way than when they try to lend a well-intentioned helping hand.

Climate change does spell the end of capitalism, as Cat says. But the path to that revolution does not pass any barricade, and sometimes the solutions do not emerge where a political agenda or profit and loss statement expect or require them.

Decade

Time's up.
The masks have all slipped.
All evils are revealed,
smirking,
strutting openly among us
with spurious entitlement,
striding through a shattered fourth wall
and into the stalls, knee deep in punter,
proud of their egregious, indulgent trespass
upon sanity and reason.
We can no longer pretend.
They openly dare us to defeat them.

We can no longer ignore
the questions we must ask.
We can no longer tolerate petty foibles
of wealth and privilege,
now that these combine to kill us.
Eccentricity becomes aggression,
the quaint becomes a cunt,
the toff becomes a tool,
and the indifference in the world
has reached toxic levels of concentration.
Nothing is without consequence anymore.

The Earth is an ark of the damned
adrift upon a sea of fire
and we have ten years to save it.
Otherwise life is left to wither and perish
while all the wealth accumulated
over preceding millennia of civilisation,
all the regalia stolen from the Incas,
each diamond plucked from the gravel of Serendip,
every gold tooth pulled from a mouth in Auschwitz
to be turned into bullion hidden in a vault in Zurich
or London or New York,
is invested in escape routes
for those who brought this disaster on us,

this cataclysm that has overtaken us like a tsunami,
like a hurricane, like a famine, like a drought,
like a flood, like an earthquake, like a war, like a plague,
from which they imagine they are inoculated
by some magic serum distilled from their gold
and injected and smoked and swallowed and snorted
while others starve and suffocate and drown
and are caught in a crossfire of catastrophes.

But it is also a decade of radical hope,
when to resist despair becomes a revolutionary sentiment,
to refuse to give up is a rejection of impossible odds
stacked against you for centuries,
to roll dice loaded by a history of privilege and prejudice,
in defiance of our lop-sided fate.

It is the decade when the men who went to the Moon
truly return to home and find out what has become of it.
The decade when we can build a lasting future,
and finally launch the planet as Spaceship Earth,
and all be in the same boat at last.

Lucky numbers

"44, 46, 48, 50, 52"
The child reads the numbers
on the doors as we pass
"Where do you think
the missing numbers are?" I ask.
"Maybe they're on holiday," he says.
"Maybe they're on the other side of the road,"
I suggest, succumbing to that urge
to find a learning moment
which the child finds so tedious.
"Maybe they're at the beach.
Maybe they're at the swimming pool.
Maybe they're at MacDonald's," he continues.
"Lucky numbers," I observe.
"Anywhere but here?" I think.
No, my luck is in.

Three lives

This is the future.
This is our parallel lives,
our alternative biographies,
disaggregated but simultaneous,
sitting side by side:

curating tamagochi-style,
consequence-free
social media marriages
between fantasy avatars,
letting anonymity disinhibit
all the angels and monsters,
within us, watching them
mutate into each other,
and into something else
entirely new;

losing the culture flame-wars
against the radical apathists
on multiple platforms,
insisting on existing to nihilists
and teenage epistemological relativists
who condescend to professors
because they have literally
nothing to prove;

being drip-fed opioids
to curb the pain
while bleeding to death
into a colostomy
lying on a trolley
in a corridor
in a war zone
in the real world
somewhere.

Multiverse

I have always dismissed the Everettian "many worlds" hypothesis as a trivial and inelegant interpretation of quantum mechanics, but recently I have been reconsidering that position.

If we understand these universes to be entangled and to have a common moment of inception - to share the same big bang - the hypothesis is amenable to elegance after all. The entanglement may be assumed if the breadth of the distance between worlds is a single quantum.

We see the big bang not as some crude event but as the separation of these worlds by space-like intervals, and every null geodesic - every ray of light, each starbeam, as it were - then becomes a border between us and infinite worlds, one we can never cross. Our physics, our classical closed world in which information is conserved and traded between the observer and the observed, is balanced by an anti-physics of quantum entanglement in which these many worlds commune out of the observer's reach.

Our time-like trade the becomes a space-like cascade across the multiverse, as our act of observation instatiates everything with which the object we observe is entangled, like a domino effect that spirals round every ray of light all the way back to the beginning of time. And so, the very act of opening our eyes is the creation of the universe entire.

And thus is our finitude redeemed. We exist because of an observation we ourselves made in the future in another universe that only seems empty because it is filled with possibility, and the interconnection of all things is achieved through the intercession of the multiverse.

Today's Apollo Project

Next year will see the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong landing on the Moon, a time of great ambition & accomplishment.

More recently I have read many targets & predictions of a more terrestrial nature: so many GW of renewable energy generation capacity, for markets of so many billions of dollars per annum, and so on, all achieved over the next 20 or 30 years, each target & prediction bigger than the last, fulfilled over a shorter timescale than before. We are supposed to be impressed.

And yet we read the US Government has resigned itself to apocalyptic climate change scenarios, & cites their inevitability to justify its inaction. We confront accelerating devastation, as ice melts faster than anticipated, tundra belches methane, flora wither & fauna falter faster than they can adapt, & those of us looking to the heavens for the next great asteroid need look no further than the extinctions we ourselves visit upon the Earth for the omens of catastrophe. 

The clock is ticking and there is no time to lose. The targets that are supposed to impress us are in fact orders of magnitude too low, even while we congratulate ourselves for the Lilliputian pole-vaults these tiddly-winks targets represent.   

Once upon a time a man landed on the Moon, & was returned safely to Earth. What Earth awaits the voyager that would depart for the Moon today? 50 years after a man walked on the Moon for the first time, let us commit ourselves to achieving this goal: before this decade is out, we will establish humans safely here on Earth.

Let this be today's Apollo Program.

Blocked

I once had righters' bloke,
and forgotten how to wrote.
Now I've forgote how to written,
so I'm once shy, twice bitten