No metaphor is perfect.
If a metaphor was perfect it wouldn't be a metaphor.
Unfortunately, there is a corollary to this:
all we have available to us, for expressing ourselves,
is metaphors,
otherwise everyone would be perfectly understood
all of the time,
and there would never be any misunderstandings.
Now,
we know sometimes people misunderstand each other,
which is why we have poetry.
Poetry is not about constucting beautiful, evocative,
suggestive, allusive, compact collections of metaphors,
even though it seems to be densely packed with them.
No, poetry is so full of metaphors,
precisely because it is a mechanism we have contrived
in order to try and escape from metaphor,
using only what is available to us: metaphor.
Language of a form of gravity that has no ground,
and we are in endless freefall without a parachute,
and poetry is how we try to modify ourselves
to be aerodynamic,
to form wings from all the linguistic ballast we inherit,
to connect metaphors into a indefinitely recursive sequence
that lets us fly,
or at least imagine we are flying,
to pretend, if only for a little while,
before reality reasserts itself,
and we can no longer avoid the inescapable conclusion
that we have been falling the whole time.
Poetry is a kind of photography,
at least as Barthes describes it in "Camera Lucida":
It is an attempt to be there, and yet not to be there,
to create a substance that is pure reproduction
and is nothing in and of itself,
in order to escape from the consequences of its own limitations.
Of course, in pointing this out, when I say photography,
and escape, and gravity, and parachute, and aerodynamics,
and ballast, and substance, and recursion, and so on,
I do not mean literally,
but as a kind of metaphor.
Wednesday, 27 March 2019
The beehive
One day a man bought a house. It was a nice house with a garden, and in the garden he discovered there was a beehive, which the previous owner had kept well maintained. The man liked honey, and the bees produced enough to provide for his appetite all year round.
He would sit in his garden during the long summer days enjoying honey spread thinly on crispy toast watching the bees industriously gathering nectar from the flowers which grew there in abundance. He was happy.
One day he was redecorating. As he stripped back wallpaper that previous occupants had hung, he discovered a door that had been hidden under layers that had accumulated over many decades.
He opened the door to discover a forgotten larder. The shelves were stacked with hundreds of jars of honey. He took one and put it on the table, then fetched a teaspoon. He carefully opened it and tasted the honey. It was delicious.
The sudden glut of honey led him to find new things to do with it. He didn't just eat greater quantities than before: he used it as glue; he burned it instead of candlewax to light his house all night; he rubbed it on his skin and in his hair as ointment; he mixed burned toast with it as pigment for ink and paint.
He had perhaps worked his way through half of the honey when he noticed one day that there were fewer flowers in the garden than in previous years. After a long investigation he discovered the reason was his neglect of the beehive. As its condition deteriorated, so the number of bees dropped, and fewer flowers were pollinated.
However, his appetite for honey had now grown so great a single beehive could not satisfy it.
So he resolved to do four things. He cut back on his consumption of honey. He fitted a lock on the larder and restricted how much honey he took from it. He restored the beehive to good condition.
And he built a second beehive. And although it took a few years, eventually the garden recovered, and indeed thrived, and the man was more content than before, not just because of the honey, but from a renewed sense of confidence that he would be able to enjoy his garden and toast and honey for many more summers to come.
He would sit in his garden during the long summer days enjoying honey spread thinly on crispy toast watching the bees industriously gathering nectar from the flowers which grew there in abundance. He was happy.
One day he was redecorating. As he stripped back wallpaper that previous occupants had hung, he discovered a door that had been hidden under layers that had accumulated over many decades.
He opened the door to discover a forgotten larder. The shelves were stacked with hundreds of jars of honey. He took one and put it on the table, then fetched a teaspoon. He carefully opened it and tasted the honey. It was delicious.
The sudden glut of honey led him to find new things to do with it. He didn't just eat greater quantities than before: he used it as glue; he burned it instead of candlewax to light his house all night; he rubbed it on his skin and in his hair as ointment; he mixed burned toast with it as pigment for ink and paint.
He had perhaps worked his way through half of the honey when he noticed one day that there were fewer flowers in the garden than in previous years. After a long investigation he discovered the reason was his neglect of the beehive. As its condition deteriorated, so the number of bees dropped, and fewer flowers were pollinated.
However, his appetite for honey had now grown so great a single beehive could not satisfy it.
So he resolved to do four things. He cut back on his consumption of honey. He fitted a lock on the larder and restricted how much honey he took from it. He restored the beehive to good condition.
And he built a second beehive. And although it took a few years, eventually the garden recovered, and indeed thrived, and the man was more content than before, not just because of the honey, but from a renewed sense of confidence that he would be able to enjoy his garden and toast and honey for many more summers to come.
Monday, 25 March 2019
Melencolia
My insignificance didn't used to cripple me.
I revelled in it. There was this infinite cloud
I could enter and lose myself in completely,
there was a grave I could fall backwards into
and through, and watch it recede into the distance,
growing smaller and smaller as I fell through space
until at last its darkness was lost among the stars,
but it seems there is more than one kind of nothing,
and the one I feel myself becoming these days
is not the kind I can lose myself in.
It's not the irrelevance I discovered in the woods,
a bliss I wandered in. It doesn't make me feel free.
It tethers me to some discarded ballast, to sink
to the bottom of the sea. It buries me alive.
It is not benign. It is accusation and worthlessness.
It is a paralysis of pointlessness, a malign amnesia
that erases all memories but the most miserable.
It is not a nothing that makes anything possible,
it is an everything that means nothing is possible.
I need to find my way back to that time and place
where I was most alone, where they once met in me,
and where once before I found that consolation
and respite one annihilation gives from the other.
I revelled in it. There was this infinite cloud
I could enter and lose myself in completely,
there was a grave I could fall backwards into
and through, and watch it recede into the distance,
growing smaller and smaller as I fell through space
until at last its darkness was lost among the stars,
but it seems there is more than one kind of nothing,
and the one I feel myself becoming these days
is not the kind I can lose myself in.
It's not the irrelevance I discovered in the woods,
a bliss I wandered in. It doesn't make me feel free.
It tethers me to some discarded ballast, to sink
to the bottom of the sea. It buries me alive.
It is not benign. It is accusation and worthlessness.
It is a paralysis of pointlessness, a malign amnesia
that erases all memories but the most miserable.
It is not a nothing that makes anything possible,
it is an everything that means nothing is possible.
I need to find my way back to that time and place
where I was most alone, where they once met in me,
and where once before I found that consolation
and respite one annihilation gives from the other.
Asteroid
The sun and rain clouds
share the same sky today.
Wet slate gleams like steel.
The sound of heels
hurries on a pavement.
Showers and gusts
chase pedestrians,
but what do I care
about the sudden panic of umbrellas?
The asteroid hit five years ago.
The slow dislocation of the seasons
escapes their everyday attention,
but it's already too late.
They don't need to worry
about it catching up.
They have already been overtaken by events.
The future is already out of reach.
The moves to checkmate dwindle
in an endgame they don't know they play.
The asteroid hit five years ago,
and all these people
are acting like nothing has happened,
caring about all the little things
I never got to care about. Ridicule
and ostracism and loneliness
blighted my monstrous youth,
and so, although they're all doomed,
I don't care anymore. They are the asteroid,
and the asteroid hit forty years ago,
and it's been too late for far too long.
Did I invite the next one,
to crack open the permafrost,
unlock millennia of methane
and teach them what it's like to be estranged
from the air you breathe, to introduce them
to the utter pointlessness of my existence?
That would make sense, except
the world does not deserve to suffer.
There is no judgement. God is impotent
before those who condemn themselves.
share the same sky today.
Wet slate gleams like steel.
The sound of heels
hurries on a pavement.
Showers and gusts
chase pedestrians,
but what do I care
about the sudden panic of umbrellas?
The asteroid hit five years ago.
The slow dislocation of the seasons
escapes their everyday attention,
but it's already too late.
They don't need to worry
about it catching up.
They have already been overtaken by events.
The future is already out of reach.
The moves to checkmate dwindle
in an endgame they don't know they play.
The asteroid hit five years ago,
and all these people
are acting like nothing has happened,
caring about all the little things
I never got to care about. Ridicule
and ostracism and loneliness
blighted my monstrous youth,
and so, although they're all doomed,
I don't care anymore. They are the asteroid,
and the asteroid hit forty years ago,
and it's been too late for far too long.
Did I invite the next one,
to crack open the permafrost,
unlock millennia of methane
and teach them what it's like to be estranged
from the air you breathe, to introduce them
to the utter pointlessness of my existence?
That would make sense, except
the world does not deserve to suffer.
There is no judgement. God is impotent
before those who condemn themselves.
Tuesday, 19 March 2019
Shame
The silence after speaking,
the space where we're alone,
where no-one can console us
and nothing can atone
for what once was a secret,
no longer now unknown.
An earthquake ripped the forum open,
a chasm splitting the centre of public space.
The Romans consulted the augurs.
"You must give up that which is most precious".
Only one man understood. He put on his armour,
mounted his horse, and rode into the breach,
sacrificing himself to Hades for the common good,
but it didn't work. Yes, the city was healed,
but that open gorge still runs down
the centre of my chest, and always will,
until the day I put on my armour,
mount my horse, and ride away, leaving
the silence after speaking,
the space where we're alone,
where no-one can console us
and nothing can atone
for what once was a secret,
no longer now unknown.
the space where we're alone,
where no-one can console us
and nothing can atone
for what once was a secret,
no longer now unknown.
An earthquake ripped the forum open,
a chasm splitting the centre of public space.
The Romans consulted the augurs.
"You must give up that which is most precious".
Only one man understood. He put on his armour,
mounted his horse, and rode into the breach,
sacrificing himself to Hades for the common good,
but it didn't work. Yes, the city was healed,
but that open gorge still runs down
the centre of my chest, and always will,
until the day I put on my armour,
mount my horse, and ride away, leaving
the silence after speaking,
the space where we're alone,
where no-one can console us
and nothing can atone
for what once was a secret,
no longer now unknown.
Friday, 15 March 2019
Christchurch
Tell us the names of the victims.
Let the names of those who killed them
already be forgotten.
Let the victims' live forever.
Tell us how they lived and loved. Today,
when words are most difficult
but most necessary, use them
to tell us about the gardens they kept,
the books they read and reread.
Tell us about the games they loved to play,
the subjects that inspired them to study,
their ambitions, their charity, their piety,
that saw them kneel where they were shot,
to pray to God with their last thought.
Make a book with pages of silk,
bound in gold, to record this for the ages,
and save a page for me. Save a page
for all of us, but do not spare a single word,
do no commit a single stroke of your pen
to write the names of those who did this.
Let their names be forgotten.
Let the names of those who killed them
already be forgotten.
Let the victims' live forever.
Tell us how they lived and loved. Today,
when words are most difficult
but most necessary, use them
to tell us about the gardens they kept,
the books they read and reread.
Tell us about the games they loved to play,
the subjects that inspired them to study,
their ambitions, their charity, their piety,
that saw them kneel where they were shot,
to pray to God with their last thought.
Make a book with pages of silk,
bound in gold, to record this for the ages,
and save a page for me. Save a page
for all of us, but do not spare a single word,
do no commit a single stroke of your pen
to write the names of those who did this.
Let their names be forgotten.
Thursday, 14 March 2019
The flowers
These are not the flowers
I want to give you. No,
the flowers I want to give you
were thrown out long ago.
I wish I could find them again.
I wish I could give them to you
every day, as fresh and new
as the day they were first cut.
Until then I will get these ones:
not the same, but a promise
that I will never stop looking.
I want to give you. No,
the flowers I want to give you
were thrown out long ago.
I wish I could find them again.
I wish I could give them to you
every day, as fresh and new
as the day they were first cut.
Until then I will get these ones:
not the same, but a promise
that I will never stop looking.
Wednesday, 13 March 2019
The wealth of nations
Climate change is eroding the value of the planet's wealth. We can still save the planet. It's not too late. All we need to do is two things:
"Item 2" is necessary because we probably passed the point of no return five years ago. How can we tell?
When different biological processes fix carbon in methane, they sometimes do so with different relative abundances of its isotopes. The different mechanisms for the release of methane into the atmosphere, which release different proportions of methane fixed by these different processes, can be reflected in the relative abundances of these isotopes in atmospheric methane. These relative abundances have been fairly stable for a long time. This suggests that, although the level has been rising, the mechanism has been fairly consistent.
However, in the last five years we can see a shift in the isotopic composition of carbon in atmospheric methane. This suggests previously locked up deposits of methane may be being released, such as those in permafrost, sediments, and ocean depths. The release of methane is a significant positive feedback mechanism for global warming, along with other effects such as shifts in albedo.
To illustrate the seriousness of the situation let's consider some numbers. Methane has 86 times the 20-year GWP (global warming potential) of CO2 (IPCC, 2013). Burning 1 tonne of methane produces 2.74 tonnes of carbon dioxide (the ratio of their molar masses). So if we used green hydrogen generated by, for example, hydrolysing water using electricity generated from renewable energy, to methanise atmospheric carbon dioxide, or carbon dioxide that is a combustion product that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere, we only need to leak 3.4% of it to cancel out all the benefit of capturing the carbon that way. We already leak half that amount anyway from the gas distribution infrastructure into which we would inject that methane (EPA).
Roughly 20% of global warming is due to methane. So far. Most of that comes from gas leaks. Another important contribution is agriculture. So we could all do with doing less fracking and eating fewer hamburgers. But that is nothing compared to the volume of methane locked up in permafrost and sediments. Until now.
This is on top of the global warming we know about due to carbon dioxide emissions. This requires urgent attention. The IPCC15 report last year made clear that our 2050 targets must be 2030 targets. I get quite impatient with people who dispute this. "2030 is not a realistic timescale for the sort of deployment of countermeasures that would be required," they say. Yeah, well it's less realistic to wait to destroy an asteroid until after it hits the Earth than before it hits the Earth.
Since the publication of the IPCC15 report, however, the analysis of the shift in the isotopic composition of the carbon in atmospheric methane over the last five years that I mentioned was published ...
... you know that bit at the end of the disaster movie where they destroy the asteroid and everyone is saved and rejoices and perhaps reflects on hard lessons learned? Well imagine, instead of being saved, instead of celebrating, what happens is they see, once the debris clears, that there's an even bigger asteroid that was concealed behind the first one, and it is too late to do anything about it. That's methane, that asteroid. That's those isotopic abundance numbers. That's how I felt when I read about them. An indigestable ball of dread in the pit of my stomach keeping me awake at night.
So, as I said earlier, that would come under "Item 2" in the list in the original post at the top of this thread.
This now seems like a good point to turn to "Item 1". We're on more familiar turf here. We can look at how social collapse occurs historically and, you know, try not to repeat that, given the stakes, given we're now "all in" as a species, as it were.
What we see now - environmental degradation and increasing inequality - is a classic signature of social collapse. This is common throughout human history and prehistory. It's nothing to do with ideology. Marx won't save you. The asteroid doesn't care about your dialectic. This pattern is evident during periods where the details of that kind of analysis would be unrecognisable and inapplicable. What's the hieroglyphics for proletariat? How did they discuss class warfare in neolithic Orkney? This is something that happened even during periods of primitive Utopian communism of the sort Engels entertains. What is helpful is seeing why those societies collapsed, and this is best understood in terms of what we mean by wealth.
Wealth is the word we use to describe something that is generated and accumulated to confer and preserve privilege. We quantify it. We have bank balances and portfolios of assets. But wealth is not quantifiable in any static sense because there is no permanent way to represent wealth. All ways of generating the kind of wealth that can serve the stories we tell ourselves to justify the levels of privilege and poverty we tolerate undermine its own preservation.
Value is eroded by technological innovation and environmental impacts. All forms of wealth become either obsolete or unsustainable (or, of course, both). Assets are stranded. People are left holding warehouses of things no-one wants anymore, or can no longer afford because the damage they cause has finally been factored into their cost.
So a healthy society continuously transforms the way wealth is represented from forms that are gradually becoming obsolete or less sustainable to more innovative and sustainable forms. This is why we pay scientists to do research and development. It's not to probe the mysteries of the cosmos (although that is a nice by-product). It's to rescue wealth invested in one deteriorating form and transform the way it is represented into something shiny and new to which people can still attach some value.
Why is this necessary, fundamentally? Wealth embodies the extent to which we have removed ourselves from the natural world and set ourselves up in competition with it. It is an abacus of atrocity, in which habitats and ecosystems are mutilated and eradicated to create human systems producing commodities that inevitably perish because they are nothing more than the output of the abattoir we have erected on the site of the ancient forests in which we hunted once stood. The wealth of nations is the death of nature. It is continuously depleted by a process of decay. Talking about economic growth in this context is as ridiculous as a bunch of maggots who trade the carcass they inhabit talking about economic growth.
When this process of wealth renewal falters, such that wealth is not rescued from an unsustainable or obsolete way of representing it, and the illusion of growth cannot be maintained, oligarchs must make unprecedented asset grabs to preserve their privilege. This leads to an uptick in inequality. Social unrest then occurs while the root cause is neglected. Social collapse ensues. It will not have escaped your attention that recent political developments suggest we are currently in the latter stages of a worldwide oligarchic coup that has been underway for decades motivated by precisely these considerations.
We avoid this by restoring the process of wealth transformation, from unsustainable to sustainable representations (I say "representation" because "wealth" is fundamentally a fiction).
So, at this moment in time, the most productive thing to do is not to overthrow the evil corporations. We'll get to that eventually, but just now we need to use market mechanisms as the only tools available that can do what we need to do in the short space of time available. Ideology and politics at this point is an unhelpful distraction. We don't have time for a revolution. We only have time to use market mechanisms to transform wealth into a sustainable form.
It is worth pointing out at this juncture that over the last 10 years more has been achieved in terms of reducing emissions by reducing the cost of renewable energy through innovations and deployments at scale that impact the bottom line than any policy initiative. This has attracted institutional investors as well as utilities due to the business case, and insurance companies due to the risk profile, resulting in commitments to divest $6 trillion from fossil fuels & reinvest in renewables. So the necessary wealth transformation is already underway exactly when needed!
So we are in a place where share holder value is not about the simple arithmetic of wealth anymore. We must value companies on a differential basis now: how well do they rescue the wealth of our society from the oblivion of obsolescence & environmental irresponsibility? We tolerate the concept of shareholder value only if it is a mechanism that transforms wealth from damaging to safe representations, only if it preserves the procedures for doing so. If not, it is stagnant and must fall.
So, to continue: wealth is a fiction we tell ourselves to maintain privilege. In a healthy society this fiction is accepted: privilege is seen as a reward for being socially useful in some way. This consensus is threatened if the processes of value erosion mentioned above, without a process of transformation to change the assets which represent wealth, mean wealth must be expropriated to maintain privilege, leading to perceptions of inequality.
Now the good news. Item 1 at the top of this thread, and the process of transformation necessary to achieve it, has a massive helping hand from one thing that makes renewables immediately attractive. Not zero emissions, but zero incremental cost. We are currently witnessing the stage where renewables begin to undercut other methods of generating power as a consequence. This will only continue, pulling investment away from unsustainable methods of generation. Ultimately low energy costs will drive a more general transformation as they propagate through all activities reducible to energy costs. It won't be Utopia, but it won't mean the end of civilisation.
We need to understand prosperity not in terms of growth but in terms of societies that successfully transform how wealth is represented into sustainable assets and share that wealth in a way that satisfies a consensus about fairness.
As is often the case, we have the wrong end of the stick. The narrative should not be about achieving growth but averting shrinkage that occurs through inevitable erosion of the value of wealth formulated in a static way due to its obsolescence and environmental impacts. If we don't change the narrative, the reaction to shrinkage and stagnation is exactly as described - unwarranted expropriation of wealth by oligarchs driving perceptions of inequality while ignoring environmental consequences - and social collapse is the outcome.
Returning to Item 2, it is natural to ask "what is to be done?" There seems little point if the problems leading to methanocalypse remain unresolved. I cannot provide a detailed prospectus at this point, but I can make a hopeful observation.
Before I became involved in the wind industry, I was involved in research that used diamonds in nuclear physics experiments. I became aware of something that had happened in the '50s that most people are not aware of. The world's consumption of industrial diamond abrasive grits was reaching a critical level, when demand was about to outstrip supply. The consequences of this are difficult to appreciate, but so many industries depend in one way or another on diamond abrasives that the shortfall in supply would have precipitated a significant economic crisis.
However something else happened. The first commercially viable diamond synthesis techniques cam online. The growing demand could be satisfied with the additional supply of synthetic diamond grit. Crises averted, without anyone realising.
My point is, as I have said elsewhere, that "most challenges are met by solutions that emerge without explicit co-ordination or acknowledgement. They emerge from our general unexpressed awareness. What is necessary is that the conditions for solutions to emerge are preserved. These include well informed participants in society sharing their experiences on the basis of common concerns. They include the understanding that our interests are both individual and collective. Our fates are geared in secret, where we cannot interrogate them, in hidden hinterlands of thought where our intentions and anxieties overlap and intertwine. When our salvation is announced, even though it may seem miraculous, it is mundane."
So I am hopeful that, although in many way the situation seems bleak, there is a way to avert catastrophe, and that a solution will emerge from the "hidden hinterland" where "our fates are geared in secret". As far as the wealth of nations is concerned, this is the real "hidden hand".
We need companies that future-proof wealth by putting it to work for future generations. In a world of accelerating technological obsolescence and intensifying environmental constraints, the time to rescue assets is now. As institutions disinvest in assets destined to become stranded by climate change, and technology eliminates the cost of production and erodes the addition of value possible through established business models, it is necessary to manage the process of protecting wealth by configuring it in a way that survives change. This can only be achieved by effectively financing the future.
It is necessary to invest in projects like
- All the things we've already thought of.
- Some additional things we haven't thought of yet.
"Item 2" is necessary because we probably passed the point of no return five years ago. How can we tell?
When different biological processes fix carbon in methane, they sometimes do so with different relative abundances of its isotopes. The different mechanisms for the release of methane into the atmosphere, which release different proportions of methane fixed by these different processes, can be reflected in the relative abundances of these isotopes in atmospheric methane. These relative abundances have been fairly stable for a long time. This suggests that, although the level has been rising, the mechanism has been fairly consistent.
However, in the last five years we can see a shift in the isotopic composition of carbon in atmospheric methane. This suggests previously locked up deposits of methane may be being released, such as those in permafrost, sediments, and ocean depths. The release of methane is a significant positive feedback mechanism for global warming, along with other effects such as shifts in albedo.
To illustrate the seriousness of the situation let's consider some numbers. Methane has 86 times the 20-year GWP (global warming potential) of CO2 (IPCC, 2013). Burning 1 tonne of methane produces 2.74 tonnes of carbon dioxide (the ratio of their molar masses). So if we used green hydrogen generated by, for example, hydrolysing water using electricity generated from renewable energy, to methanise atmospheric carbon dioxide, or carbon dioxide that is a combustion product that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere, we only need to leak 3.4% of it to cancel out all the benefit of capturing the carbon that way. We already leak half that amount anyway from the gas distribution infrastructure into which we would inject that methane (EPA).
Roughly 20% of global warming is due to methane. So far. Most of that comes from gas leaks. Another important contribution is agriculture. So we could all do with doing less fracking and eating fewer hamburgers. But that is nothing compared to the volume of methane locked up in permafrost and sediments. Until now.
This is on top of the global warming we know about due to carbon dioxide emissions. This requires urgent attention. The IPCC15 report last year made clear that our 2050 targets must be 2030 targets. I get quite impatient with people who dispute this. "2030 is not a realistic timescale for the sort of deployment of countermeasures that would be required," they say. Yeah, well it's less realistic to wait to destroy an asteroid until after it hits the Earth than before it hits the Earth.
Since the publication of the IPCC15 report, however, the analysis of the shift in the isotopic composition of the carbon in atmospheric methane over the last five years that I mentioned was published ...
... you know that bit at the end of the disaster movie where they destroy the asteroid and everyone is saved and rejoices and perhaps reflects on hard lessons learned? Well imagine, instead of being saved, instead of celebrating, what happens is they see, once the debris clears, that there's an even bigger asteroid that was concealed behind the first one, and it is too late to do anything about it. That's methane, that asteroid. That's those isotopic abundance numbers. That's how I felt when I read about them. An indigestable ball of dread in the pit of my stomach keeping me awake at night.
So, as I said earlier, that would come under "Item 2" in the list in the original post at the top of this thread.
This now seems like a good point to turn to "Item 1". We're on more familiar turf here. We can look at how social collapse occurs historically and, you know, try not to repeat that, given the stakes, given we're now "all in" as a species, as it were.
What we see now - environmental degradation and increasing inequality - is a classic signature of social collapse. This is common throughout human history and prehistory. It's nothing to do with ideology. Marx won't save you. The asteroid doesn't care about your dialectic. This pattern is evident during periods where the details of that kind of analysis would be unrecognisable and inapplicable. What's the hieroglyphics for proletariat? How did they discuss class warfare in neolithic Orkney? This is something that happened even during periods of primitive Utopian communism of the sort Engels entertains. What is helpful is seeing why those societies collapsed, and this is best understood in terms of what we mean by wealth.
Wealth is the word we use to describe something that is generated and accumulated to confer and preserve privilege. We quantify it. We have bank balances and portfolios of assets. But wealth is not quantifiable in any static sense because there is no permanent way to represent wealth. All ways of generating the kind of wealth that can serve the stories we tell ourselves to justify the levels of privilege and poverty we tolerate undermine its own preservation.
Value is eroded by technological innovation and environmental impacts. All forms of wealth become either obsolete or unsustainable (or, of course, both). Assets are stranded. People are left holding warehouses of things no-one wants anymore, or can no longer afford because the damage they cause has finally been factored into their cost.
So a healthy society continuously transforms the way wealth is represented from forms that are gradually becoming obsolete or less sustainable to more innovative and sustainable forms. This is why we pay scientists to do research and development. It's not to probe the mysteries of the cosmos (although that is a nice by-product). It's to rescue wealth invested in one deteriorating form and transform the way it is represented into something shiny and new to which people can still attach some value.
Why is this necessary, fundamentally? Wealth embodies the extent to which we have removed ourselves from the natural world and set ourselves up in competition with it. It is an abacus of atrocity, in which habitats and ecosystems are mutilated and eradicated to create human systems producing commodities that inevitably perish because they are nothing more than the output of the abattoir we have erected on the site of the ancient forests in which we hunted once stood. The wealth of nations is the death of nature. It is continuously depleted by a process of decay. Talking about economic growth in this context is as ridiculous as a bunch of maggots who trade the carcass they inhabit talking about economic growth.
When this process of wealth renewal falters, such that wealth is not rescued from an unsustainable or obsolete way of representing it, and the illusion of growth cannot be maintained, oligarchs must make unprecedented asset grabs to preserve their privilege. This leads to an uptick in inequality. Social unrest then occurs while the root cause is neglected. Social collapse ensues. It will not have escaped your attention that recent political developments suggest we are currently in the latter stages of a worldwide oligarchic coup that has been underway for decades motivated by precisely these considerations.
We avoid this by restoring the process of wealth transformation, from unsustainable to sustainable representations (I say "representation" because "wealth" is fundamentally a fiction).
So, at this moment in time, the most productive thing to do is not to overthrow the evil corporations. We'll get to that eventually, but just now we need to use market mechanisms as the only tools available that can do what we need to do in the short space of time available. Ideology and politics at this point is an unhelpful distraction. We don't have time for a revolution. We only have time to use market mechanisms to transform wealth into a sustainable form.
It is worth pointing out at this juncture that over the last 10 years more has been achieved in terms of reducing emissions by reducing the cost of renewable energy through innovations and deployments at scale that impact the bottom line than any policy initiative. This has attracted institutional investors as well as utilities due to the business case, and insurance companies due to the risk profile, resulting in commitments to divest $6 trillion from fossil fuels & reinvest in renewables. So the necessary wealth transformation is already underway exactly when needed!
So we are in a place where share holder value is not about the simple arithmetic of wealth anymore. We must value companies on a differential basis now: how well do they rescue the wealth of our society from the oblivion of obsolescence & environmental irresponsibility? We tolerate the concept of shareholder value only if it is a mechanism that transforms wealth from damaging to safe representations, only if it preserves the procedures for doing so. If not, it is stagnant and must fall.
So, to continue: wealth is a fiction we tell ourselves to maintain privilege. In a healthy society this fiction is accepted: privilege is seen as a reward for being socially useful in some way. This consensus is threatened if the processes of value erosion mentioned above, without a process of transformation to change the assets which represent wealth, mean wealth must be expropriated to maintain privilege, leading to perceptions of inequality.
Now the good news. Item 1 at the top of this thread, and the process of transformation necessary to achieve it, has a massive helping hand from one thing that makes renewables immediately attractive. Not zero emissions, but zero incremental cost. We are currently witnessing the stage where renewables begin to undercut other methods of generating power as a consequence. This will only continue, pulling investment away from unsustainable methods of generation. Ultimately low energy costs will drive a more general transformation as they propagate through all activities reducible to energy costs. It won't be Utopia, but it won't mean the end of civilisation.
We need to understand prosperity not in terms of growth but in terms of societies that successfully transform how wealth is represented into sustainable assets and share that wealth in a way that satisfies a consensus about fairness.
As is often the case, we have the wrong end of the stick. The narrative should not be about achieving growth but averting shrinkage that occurs through inevitable erosion of the value of wealth formulated in a static way due to its obsolescence and environmental impacts. If we don't change the narrative, the reaction to shrinkage and stagnation is exactly as described - unwarranted expropriation of wealth by oligarchs driving perceptions of inequality while ignoring environmental consequences - and social collapse is the outcome.
Returning to Item 2, it is natural to ask "what is to be done?" There seems little point if the problems leading to methanocalypse remain unresolved. I cannot provide a detailed prospectus at this point, but I can make a hopeful observation.
Before I became involved in the wind industry, I was involved in research that used diamonds in nuclear physics experiments. I became aware of something that had happened in the '50s that most people are not aware of. The world's consumption of industrial diamond abrasive grits was reaching a critical level, when demand was about to outstrip supply. The consequences of this are difficult to appreciate, but so many industries depend in one way or another on diamond abrasives that the shortfall in supply would have precipitated a significant economic crisis.
However something else happened. The first commercially viable diamond synthesis techniques cam online. The growing demand could be satisfied with the additional supply of synthetic diamond grit. Crises averted, without anyone realising.
My point is, as I have said elsewhere, that "most challenges are met by solutions that emerge without explicit co-ordination or acknowledgement. They emerge from our general unexpressed awareness. What is necessary is that the conditions for solutions to emerge are preserved. These include well informed participants in society sharing their experiences on the basis of common concerns. They include the understanding that our interests are both individual and collective. Our fates are geared in secret, where we cannot interrogate them, in hidden hinterlands of thought where our intentions and anxieties overlap and intertwine. When our salvation is announced, even though it may seem miraculous, it is mundane."
So I am hopeful that, although in many way the situation seems bleak, there is a way to avert catastrophe, and that a solution will emerge from the "hidden hinterland" where "our fates are geared in secret". As far as the wealth of nations is concerned, this is the real "hidden hand".
We need companies that future-proof wealth by putting it to work for future generations. In a world of accelerating technological obsolescence and intensifying environmental constraints, the time to rescue assets is now. As institutions disinvest in assets destined to become stranded by climate change, and technology eliminates the cost of production and erodes the addition of value possible through established business models, it is necessary to manage the process of protecting wealth by configuring it in a way that survives change. This can only be achieved by effectively financing the future.
It is necessary to invest in projects like
- Decarbonisation of global shipping through the integration of hydrogen propulsion with marine renewables
- Solar powered electrosynthesis of hydrocarbons from atmospheric carbon dioxide. Technologies are now emerging with efficiencies that outstrip the photosynthesis that has powered life for the last billion years
- Infrastructure projects that address ethical and environmental concerns and are embraced by all stakeholders
- Innovations that pass from blue sky to practical reality through the hands of a constallation of project participants, each able to guide them through all the stages from infancy to maturity
- Instruments such as power purchase agreements that manage the risks of investment in renewables and secure the best possible returns
- Partnerships that align the capabilities of our biggest enterprises and the requirements of our most ambitious undertakings to move us forward together towards a sustainable highly inter-dependent circular economy in which conflict profits no-one
Our energy supply will finally be traceable to solar irradiance over the same timescales as its use, rather than requiring the extravagant and irresponsible consumption of energy accumulated in fossil fuels over hundreds of millions of years without considering that integration time in the way it is costed.
This places human civilisation firmly and securely on the Kardashev scale for the first time, ready to take its next steps into space. Currently global energy consumption corresponds to around 0.7 on the Kardashev scale, a logarithmic scale on which 1 corresponds to using all the energy incident upon a planet from the star it orbits, and 2 to using all the energy from that star. However that number, 0.7, is illusory, as the energy we use on the basis of consuming fossil fuels represents the gradual accumulation of energy over hundreds of millions of years by natural processes capturing solar irradiance at efficiencies around 1% (through photosynthesis). When that time interval is taken into account, and our energy consumption divided by the time taken to accumulate it, we find we are not a Kardashev type 0.7 civilisation at all, but have a much more modest rating.
However, once the same energy demand is satisfied by means traceable to solar irradiance accumulated over timescales of the same order as those associated with the consumption of that energy, that Kardashev rating will finally be an accurate representation of human activity on this planet.
Although we have landed on the Moon already, we are imposters at space travel. A truly space-faring society does not have to rely on geological timescales to accumulate the energy necessary to fuel its rockets. It consumes energy at the rate it receives it from solar resources.
Before we terraform anywhere else, first we must terraform our home: we must bring processes that impact our climate under control. That includes our own economic activity. Only then will it be possible to establish a true and sustainable calculus of wealth.
Tuesday, 12 March 2019
Thaidhcu trì-fillte / triple haiku
Ceò falaisg' an-diugh.
Choimhead mi air fàth-fiata dìochuimhne a-chaoidh.
Lìon càrr an caladh,
acarsaid mar cliabh-giomach,
gach bàta partan.
M' anam air m' aire
leig mi ri cuan air làn-mara,
coma leam de chàch.
Heather smoke today.
I glimpsed through invisibility
forgetfulness hereafter.
Harr filled the harbour,
an anchorage like a lobster creel
each boat a crab.
With my soul in mind
I set off to sea on high tide,
indifferent to anything else
The fictitious woman
My friend Nadine wrote a Facebook note recently on the discrepancy between the representation of women in poetry and literature and the reality of women's lives, quoting Virginia Woolf. It can be found here.
As a man, and one who affects to write poetry, and one who was utterly beguiled by Robert Graves' "The White Goddess: a Historic Grammar of Poetic Myth" at a young age, one who completely fell under its spell, I am acutely aware of this. Men like to imagine they are inspired by a female "muse".
I do still believe there is a legitimate way of using that concept, but most of the time "she" is an exercise in the projection of men's personal inadequacy onto a remote and completely differentiated other, where it can be controlled, sanitised, transformed, made safe, manipulated, made mannequin, maid marionette: another way of women bearing a burden forced on them by men, perhaps the most rarefied and sublimated form of emotional labour to which they are indentured by the male poetic imagination.
As I say, there is a legitimate way of discussing the Muse, but to use her as an escapist fantasy is the opposite of this. I think when a male poet discusses a female Muse he must interrogate himself thoroughly about what job he is asking Her to perform, and why.
It's not legitimate to use the Muse as a clothes' horse on which one hangs the various robes and masks that accompany the rituals with which one cements one's fantasies. It is not legitimate for us to require Her to entertain us, to dance and perform to stimulate and satisfy appetites both poetic and carnal. It is not legitimate for us to use Her in any way.
She is not instrumental to our imagination the way tools and techniques are to the edifices we would build when we make what we imagine into a reality. To use the Muse in this way would be to enlist women to collude in their own erasure through the sorts of representation we recruit the Muse for, obscuring them behind the catwalk role we ask the Muse to fulfil, then using that to justify the role that then extends to the women we imagine the Muse represents.
However, as poets, we still need to imagine someone who intercedes between the world we experience and one in which we don't exist. Negotiating this impossible interaction is perhaps the poet's only purpose. We loiter at the cliff edge of existence casting straws out into the up-drafts. We hold our breath as we immerse ourselves under water to see our reflection looking down at us from the surface. But for all our efforts something remains hidden from us. We rely on the intercession of the Muse who returns to us from a place we cannot go, or rather, a place from which we cannot send any report ourselves, that place where we don't exist.
We still need to find a way to express the glory that resides in our own insignificance. And because we are all born of woman, and although as men we are not woman, but the person who stands at the threshold between a world in which we do not exist and one in which we do is a woman, the personality it is most easy for us to imagine fulfils this role of Muse is often female. She lives on Parnassus because this is the furthest place to which we can extend our fingertips, the brink of that which is made inaccessible by our finitude.
But we are limited in our ability to imagine Her. Indeed, the assignment of a gender to Her is a consequence of this limitation and not some intrinsic attribute. She can contain our infinite selves with all the repertoires of gender they entail. And so there is a dance she will perform, not to satisfy our appetites, but to provide a form that allows us to imagine the unimaginable. It is dance in which Her gender is incidental, not essential, one in which She may indeed be male, a dance of which She may be the Lord.
Just as the apparently mutually exclusive cities described by Marco Polo to the Khan in Calvino's "Invisible Cities" are all Venice, just as all the citadels described to Arthur by the porter in the "Pa Gur" - the citadel of glass, of wind, of turning, and so on - are all that single otherwise insurmountable citadel that lies at His journey's end, just as the zodiac dances round the ecliptic to display the ways we are enslaved by a prime mover who has Herself retreated from the world to hide somewhere behind the Pole Star, so She invites us to a dance that changes us.
Because we are altered by our encounter. It makes us ask ourselves what we are beyond the steps we take and what remains of us once the dance is done. The dance is how she shows us the empty hall, its constellated vaults, its night curtained with aurorae, and how she enables us to imagine our absence in it, rather than our presence, as that permanence to which we can at last surrender.
As a man, and one who affects to write poetry, and one who was utterly beguiled by Robert Graves' "The White Goddess: a Historic Grammar of Poetic Myth" at a young age, one who completely fell under its spell, I am acutely aware of this. Men like to imagine they are inspired by a female "muse".
I do still believe there is a legitimate way of using that concept, but most of the time "she" is an exercise in the projection of men's personal inadequacy onto a remote and completely differentiated other, where it can be controlled, sanitised, transformed, made safe, manipulated, made mannequin, maid marionette: another way of women bearing a burden forced on them by men, perhaps the most rarefied and sublimated form of emotional labour to which they are indentured by the male poetic imagination.
As I say, there is a legitimate way of discussing the Muse, but to use her as an escapist fantasy is the opposite of this. I think when a male poet discusses a female Muse he must interrogate himself thoroughly about what job he is asking Her to perform, and why.
It's not legitimate to use the Muse as a clothes' horse on which one hangs the various robes and masks that accompany the rituals with which one cements one's fantasies. It is not legitimate for us to require Her to entertain us, to dance and perform to stimulate and satisfy appetites both poetic and carnal. It is not legitimate for us to use Her in any way.
She is not instrumental to our imagination the way tools and techniques are to the edifices we would build when we make what we imagine into a reality. To use the Muse in this way would be to enlist women to collude in their own erasure through the sorts of representation we recruit the Muse for, obscuring them behind the catwalk role we ask the Muse to fulfil, then using that to justify the role that then extends to the women we imagine the Muse represents.
However, as poets, we still need to imagine someone who intercedes between the world we experience and one in which we don't exist. Negotiating this impossible interaction is perhaps the poet's only purpose. We loiter at the cliff edge of existence casting straws out into the up-drafts. We hold our breath as we immerse ourselves under water to see our reflection looking down at us from the surface. But for all our efforts something remains hidden from us. We rely on the intercession of the Muse who returns to us from a place we cannot go, or rather, a place from which we cannot send any report ourselves, that place where we don't exist.
We still need to find a way to express the glory that resides in our own insignificance. And because we are all born of woman, and although as men we are not woman, but the person who stands at the threshold between a world in which we do not exist and one in which we do is a woman, the personality it is most easy for us to imagine fulfils this role of Muse is often female. She lives on Parnassus because this is the furthest place to which we can extend our fingertips, the brink of that which is made inaccessible by our finitude.
But we are limited in our ability to imagine Her. Indeed, the assignment of a gender to Her is a consequence of this limitation and not some intrinsic attribute. She can contain our infinite selves with all the repertoires of gender they entail. And so there is a dance she will perform, not to satisfy our appetites, but to provide a form that allows us to imagine the unimaginable. It is dance in which Her gender is incidental, not essential, one in which She may indeed be male, a dance of which She may be the Lord.
Just as the apparently mutually exclusive cities described by Marco Polo to the Khan in Calvino's "Invisible Cities" are all Venice, just as all the citadels described to Arthur by the porter in the "Pa Gur" - the citadel of glass, of wind, of turning, and so on - are all that single otherwise insurmountable citadel that lies at His journey's end, just as the zodiac dances round the ecliptic to display the ways we are enslaved by a prime mover who has Herself retreated from the world to hide somewhere behind the Pole Star, so She invites us to a dance that changes us.
Because we are altered by our encounter. It makes us ask ourselves what we are beyond the steps we take and what remains of us once the dance is done. The dance is how she shows us the empty hall, its constellated vaults, its night curtained with aurorae, and how she enables us to imagine our absence in it, rather than our presence, as that permanence to which we can at last surrender.
Friday, 8 March 2019
The fate of the poets
Scene: A midnight campfire in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. A few malnourished survivors wracked with radiation sickness gather to cement the fragile relationships that constitute what remains of society. Having exhausted all noteworthy items of information worth discussing, they grow quiet. Then one of them interrupts the silence with a convivial outburst of enthusiasm:
"Here's to the Ballads of Billy the Bard!
His poetry rhymed and it wasn't too hard
to get what he meant when he spun us a yarn,
so we clothed him and fed him and kept him from harm.
"But nobody liked Johnny Troubadour's poems.
No-one could tell where his stories were going:
obscure, indecipherable, complete waste of breath -
so we starved all his family and clubbed him to death."
"Here's to the Ballads of Billy the Bard!
His poetry rhymed and it wasn't too hard
to get what he meant when he spun us a yarn,
so we clothed him and fed him and kept him from harm.
"But nobody liked Johnny Troubadour's poems.
No-one could tell where his stories were going:
obscure, indecipherable, complete waste of breath -
so we starved all his family and clubbed him to death."
Thursday, 7 March 2019
Vote No
I would like to encourage you to vote No. I think at the next referendum about Scottish Independence we should vote No. Of course, what that means depends on what the question is. And I think the question should seek confirmation of Scotland's continued status as part of the United Kingdom under the changed material circumstances of Brexit. I would vote to oppose that. Scotland should be Independent and free to form its own relationship with Europe instead.
Why do I think that's what the question should be?
Well, I see that unionist trolls are currently ramping up rhetoric disputing the legitimacy of Scotland's democratically elected government, challenging their mandate, asserting they do not speak on behalf of all Scots, and so on. The Scottish Conservatives are happy to use word's like "illegal" in their tweets about the next Independence referendum.
This is all being done to support a broader narrative being developed to discourage the participation of unionists in an advisory referendum once a request for a Section 30 order is declined. We know it will be an advisory referendum (like the EU Referendum in 2016) because that remains within the competence of Holyrood once Westminster denies the request for a Section 30 order to hold a legally binding referendum, as they have repeatedly stated they will.
To be clear, yes, this unionist tactic of undermining the legitimacy of the duly elected government of Scotland is highly irresponsible, but it's part of a "polarise and paralyse" tactic that the UK has been using in Scotland more or less actively for a few years now, to try and prevent constructive debate that might result in an outcome they oppose. The health of Scotland's public discourse is of secondary importance to those whose priority is the preservation of the Union. They are happy to slash and burn our democracy to keep us in the fold.
They realise a Section 30 order is merely a legal courtesy, which is why they are moving on from opposing the referendum to trying to invalidate its outcome through lack of participation. They want to be able to say the outcome is not representative of Scottish opinion due to a low turnout and so can be ignored. This is already being speculated about in the media to prepare the public for this eventuality, doubtless in collusion with unionist politicians.
But wouldn't it be ironic if there was some sort of rule that meant non-participation was interpreted in a different way? What if there was a rule like the 40% rule that applied to the 1979 referendum, introduced by Labour MP George Cunningham as an amendment to the 1978 Scotland Act. That rule required that the proposition that was voted on had to be approved by at least 40% of the electorate. So "don't knows" counted against the proposition. Dead people who were still on the electoral roll were effectively counted as Noes. The result was Yes by 51.6% of the votes cast, but on a turnout of 63.7%, the proposal fell.
So, framing the question as a referendum on the Union, rather than on Independence, and putting in place a 40% rule like the one applied in 1979, would mean that failure to participate would count as rejection of the Union. The question could be framed as a "confirmatory referendum" on Scotland exiting the EU along with the rest of the UK that requires over 40% of the electorate to confirm Scotland's continued status as part of the United Kingdom. The default result in the event of non-participation is then an endorsement of Independence. Unionists would have to take part or be counted against the Union the way non-participation counted against devolution in 1979.
Although there was no referendum in 1707, we can finally have that referendum now, and vote No to the Union.
Why do I think that's what the question should be?
Well, I see that unionist trolls are currently ramping up rhetoric disputing the legitimacy of Scotland's democratically elected government, challenging their mandate, asserting they do not speak on behalf of all Scots, and so on. The Scottish Conservatives are happy to use word's like "illegal" in their tweets about the next Independence referendum.
This is all being done to support a broader narrative being developed to discourage the participation of unionists in an advisory referendum once a request for a Section 30 order is declined. We know it will be an advisory referendum (like the EU Referendum in 2016) because that remains within the competence of Holyrood once Westminster denies the request for a Section 30 order to hold a legally binding referendum, as they have repeatedly stated they will.
To be clear, yes, this unionist tactic of undermining the legitimacy of the duly elected government of Scotland is highly irresponsible, but it's part of a "polarise and paralyse" tactic that the UK has been using in Scotland more or less actively for a few years now, to try and prevent constructive debate that might result in an outcome they oppose. The health of Scotland's public discourse is of secondary importance to those whose priority is the preservation of the Union. They are happy to slash and burn our democracy to keep us in the fold.
They realise a Section 30 order is merely a legal courtesy, which is why they are moving on from opposing the referendum to trying to invalidate its outcome through lack of participation. They want to be able to say the outcome is not representative of Scottish opinion due to a low turnout and so can be ignored. This is already being speculated about in the media to prepare the public for this eventuality, doubtless in collusion with unionist politicians.
But wouldn't it be ironic if there was some sort of rule that meant non-participation was interpreted in a different way? What if there was a rule like the 40% rule that applied to the 1979 referendum, introduced by Labour MP George Cunningham as an amendment to the 1978 Scotland Act. That rule required that the proposition that was voted on had to be approved by at least 40% of the electorate. So "don't knows" counted against the proposition. Dead people who were still on the electoral roll were effectively counted as Noes. The result was Yes by 51.6% of the votes cast, but on a turnout of 63.7%, the proposal fell.
So, framing the question as a referendum on the Union, rather than on Independence, and putting in place a 40% rule like the one applied in 1979, would mean that failure to participate would count as rejection of the Union. The question could be framed as a "confirmatory referendum" on Scotland exiting the EU along with the rest of the UK that requires over 40% of the electorate to confirm Scotland's continued status as part of the United Kingdom. The default result in the event of non-participation is then an endorsement of Independence. Unionists would have to take part or be counted against the Union the way non-participation counted against devolution in 1979.
Although there was no referendum in 1707, we can finally have that referendum now, and vote No to the Union.
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