Episode 4: Peter Piper picked a peck of … climate change solutions?!

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TRANSCRIPT

Full transcript available here. 

SHOW NOTES

In this episode, Nick gives us a live reading* and we discuss all things risks.

This episode was recorded on 5 August 2019.

The Drawdown Project

• Led by Paul Hawken, this project aimed to find ways to reverse climate change
• Note the difference between mitigation (reduce the effects of something) and reversing (stopping the phenomenon and possibly undoing). Drawdown was looking at reversing climate change
• A range of potential methods identified, and ranked according to particular criteria – in this case, emissions reductions and costs
• Coming out in the top spot #1 was … refrigerant management?!
• Drawdown prioritises solutions based on effectiveness, rather than ranking threats based on severity, and focuses exclusively on climate change
• Read: “Risk and Triage in Reality: Drawdown – A case study in prioritization“
• Read: “Intro to Sustainability and Risk”

Triage

• Triage is the idea that you should treat the most severe problem first – this is what they do at emergency rooms in hospitals
• We lack a triage-based approach to sustainability
• There are three steps to achieving this:-
  1. Identify candidate issues for consideration
  2. Develop criteria
  3. Apply criteria to issues, and – ta da! – develop a ranked list
• Read: “Risk and Triage“
• Read: “Risk-based Sustainability Models”

Infinite risks

• Working definition: “Global existential risk is a risk that threatens to either annihilate humans, or to drastically curtail our potential”
• The Global Challenges Foundation presented a new definition of risk that includes a new category: infinite risk
• Risk = Probability x Impact
• The precautionary principle builds on this – it doesn’t matter if we don’t have full information about probability, if the impact is going to be big, we should act regardless
• The impacts of some risks are essentially infinite – e.g. the Manhattan Project and nuclear bombs
• Read: “Infinite Risk“

Endurable and terminal Risks

• Nick Bostrom popularised a way of assessing risk, based on two variables: scale and severity
  • Onto these two factors, we can superimpose probability
• An endurable risk ties into the idea of resilience – in spite of loss, the human species can still survive
• A terminal risk is one that irreversibly annihilates the species, or greatly curtails its potential
  • However, a seemingly endurable risk may actually be terminal, depending on what is lost (e.g. loss of reproductive capacity)
• According to Bostrom, existential risks are global in scale and terminal in impact, regardless of probability
• Read: “Defining Risk”

The Grass Ceiling

• The overwhelming majority of conversations we have about existential risk are about climate change
• As mentioned by Will Steffen (upcoming TGC interview, stay tuned!), if we continue as we are now, we could see the global population shrinking to around one billion
  • Climate change is definitely severe, but is it endurable? Depends on your definition of survival
• The line between terminal and endurable risk is not entirely clear, and it’s ultimately based on what the person who determines those definitions thinks is “worth” keeping or losing
• Read: “Risks and ‘Blind Spots’: The Grass Ceiling’s Role in Creating ‘Blind Spots'”

Survival

• In a risk-conscious society, a siege mentality may develop, so what’s important is channeling efforts to turning challenges into opportunities
• “Risk for who?” is an important question to ask
  • Species-level thinking is a trap that may allow us to gloss over the inequalities across groups, and the differences in values across cultures
  • E.g. triple whammy: drought, land clearing, climate change – cultural loss for Aboriginal people
• Annihilation doesn’t necessarily have to be about the absolute number of lives lost, and with it, there are many ways endurable and terminal risks – and survival – can be defined
• What if we uploaded our brains to computers and our bodies disintegrated? Is that still considered “survival” of the human race?
  • This comes down to the bigger philosophical question: what is humanity?
• Read: “Risk and Survival”

*Although it is mentioned in the episode that this is a reading of one article, this content has been published as a number of separate pieces, all here on our website. Links have been included where relevant.

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