THREAD: Understanding pivot. Growing pressure from world population life-style will reach a point where it is damaging the capacity of Earth systems to an extent where life support will be challenged. It is simply a question of at what stage governments act. 1/X
Pivot is the same at each point 1-4. I use the STOP acronym. a) Stop, or halt, all increase of extraction/drawdown. b) Think, plan measures that will restore Earth system capacity and keep delivering basic services. c) Organise, re-work old regulations and agencies and then 2/x
Proceed to act. Notice that pivots are different depending on where measures are set in. It is MUCH harder to change when carrying capacity is challenged to an extent where people are dying. However, the pivot idea is a useful decision framework as you will see in 3/x
Pivot planning will be informed by three different criteria:
-which societal services and Earth systems are involved?
-how well is the societal system performing now?
-what drawdown stage has been reached? For example: 4/x
Water: FAO identify five levels of water extraction stress. Measures introduced in the light green countries will be far different than those in high stress areas. That is one dimension for pivot but not sufficient. The other level is societal performance. 5/x
800 million people today lack access to clean water at all, and 2 billion have to use water that has at least some fecal contamination. So we are talking two sevenths of the world's population that need a pivot in service level. That brings us to four basic pivot strategies. 6/x
The diagram presents four strategies depending on the situation:
-Stewardship of current societal and Earth systems
- Increase societal performance whilst stewarding systems
- regenerate Earth system whilst ensuring society system continues to perform
- Full pivot 7/x
Four pivot strategies require democratic and economic pivots too. Main two: gradually increasing fees on extraction until market responds including a citizen pay-back (environmental dividend) and raising and redistributing tax surcharges (Economic stabilisation, #UBI#MMT) 8/x
TAIL RISK THREAD: A tail risk is one that is small but devastating. When an 8 year- old asks about crossing the road to get to a bus stop you correctly point out that there is a 1% risk she will get run over. However you might want to suggest instead 1/x
A 3-min walk to the traffic lights and crossing. To frame tail risk you include probability distribution of the event (car colliding with girl), with an outcome function (girl likely dies if hit), and account for the cost of mitigation (3 minutes to walk to traffic light) 2/x
In the realm of climate change, climate scientists are the ones charged with estimating the event risk, while other disciplines (e.g. economics, engineering) must be brought to bear on estimating outcome, and the costs of mitigating the risk or adapting to it. 3/x
Thread: A pivot is a sudden change in direction to another direction. The diagram explains why we need to pivot now: the sum aggregate of business activities is extracting more from and putting more into natural systems than the systems can handle. The consequence? Contd...
Natural systems unable to support the number of human population and there will be a massive die-off. This phenomenon is well-known by biologists. Populations rise and crash all the time. Populations CAN exceed carrying capacity a short time - but a crash always results. contd
We have no choice now, having entered the danger zone, but to prepare for the crash. This requires us to voluntarily pivot. Declare the emergency for what it is and get on with it.
Thread on pivoting: to avoid worse crises our way of life has to pivot. That is to say, STOP. Stop going in current direction. THINK through the new direction. ORGANISE so we are ready then PIVOT.>>>
Utopia you might say on Pivot. We cannot agree. We have I say. The broad direction and even speed of that change is embedded in the Sustainable Development Goals. How then to apply SDG goals to plan pivots? Well, >>>
Presented in this form, the bottom layer of SDGs show what to pivot away from - ceilings. The social layer shows the floors to keep above and the top layer shows the economic operating space for the production system with peace as our aim. Let's look at the math>>>
Thread: Science Based targets like Global Carbon Budget, Planetary boundaries, SDGs, are a good start. They set up a common boundary, but a common boundary is not a commons. so ... globalcommonsalliance.org/alliance-proje…
Current rules of the game that allow people with money to use that to buy property and use that property without any limits being set on that use - to the extent that the use of said property blows away all common-agreed limits contd:
The last 30 years how fossil fuel CO2 emissions have risen DESPITE a common agreement to limit warming. This shows how little political power there really is - trumped by the power of money. Capital as Power, Jonathan Nitzan & Shimshon Bichler shows this economicsfromthetopdown.com/2020/08/26/fre…