The horns of the problem. Toward action: planet management.

# 4047

Nov 22

I have been waiting for the air to clear a little bit post-elections, so it’s possible to see the emergence of a coherent story that’s worth discussing. The proceedings at Cop 29 are providing the opportunity. The Cops are often regarded as the single most important discussion about climate but the problem is this year as last the emerging story there is to finance Green growth, especially in the poorer countries. Financing Green growth sounds good, but in practice, it means money to corporations to industrialize the global south, especially in agriculture. It means replacing the current culture of survivability in low-tech solutions, from huts to sticks, with costly wealth concentration using new tech managed as a system by AI.

The background is the deeper problem that we do not know how to stop burning fossil fuels, and instead are distracted by the project of Green growth. Green growth is always paying money to develop infrastructure for burning, coal or gas to generate electricity. Remember, clean, energy means electricity, but that electricity has to be generated by turbines, panels, geothermal, nuclear, and wave action. All of these require highly engineered infrastructure for digging, pumping, transporting, manufacturing, and distribution.

Money spent can only be spent on moving stuff or bits around from one place to another and this requires lots of energy. The idea of green energy, as giving us a clean green economy is a fraud and we are witnessing the acceptance of that story by all the major institutions. What is going on here? People sensing the logic of climate recognize that we can keep going in the short term sort of as we are and let things collapse in somewhere between five and 20 years (I think it’s shorter) and we can continue to live well in that period and then accept our fate of the collapse of civilization. The only alternative is to try and change now and screw everything up.

The core problem is that if we cut Energy use anywhere that Energy will move to another part of the system for sale and use. It does not disappear from the system, but Rhea merges in some other part of it. This is a really intriguing problem.

My own view is that we need to think about managing the planet, which is a much broader task than managing our portfolios. I hope to be exploring that space of planet management, and the posts to follow.