Thread by @SteB777

1) This came up in a discussion the other day, when someone was misguidedly claiming that cuts to emissions should come before attempts at system change, because that was impossible to achieve in the short term.

https://twitter.com/KevinClimate/status/1388175373196726277

2) Yet as @KevinClimate succinctly points out meaningful reductions in carbon emissions and system change are inextricably linked. There is so much misunderstanding of this because of the disjointed reasoning methods we are taught to use to think about things.

3) You see, even if you managed to create the necessary reductions in carbon emissions, without any conscience attempt to change the system, you would in fact of radically altered the system, even if that was not your intention.

4) Fossil fuel burning and therefore carbon emissions is an integral part of the current economic system and model. In fact it could be strongly argued that it was the lynchpin to the current system. Therefore you cannot change this, without changing the whole system.

5) As I say, this is primarily a thinking problem and the unrealistic model of thinking our modern culture has developed (by modern I mean pre-industrial revolution to the present). At the heart of the problem is the logical fallacy of mistaking the map for the territory.

6) The European culture that came to dominate the world, first with colonization, and then with the industrial revolution, developed a very simplified model of the world, which just saw it in terms of commodities to be exploited.

7) This simplistic commodification of the world was very successful in developing wealth and wealth creation in a very single minded way. However this model of the world is deeply unrealistic and doesn't represent how the world we live in actually operates.

8) Remember, when this commodified view of the world was developed, our culture knew absolutely nothing about the natural systems that make life on Earth possible.

9) What this means is that the most powerful and influential people in the world, who determine how things are, have this simplified, objectified, commodified view of the world and how things should be, totally detached from the world view developed by science.

10) Science has uncovered the global systems of weather and climate, the oceanic movement of heat and currents, and ecosystems, which interface with the physical natural systems of the world. Economics has not incorporated this into its models of the world we live in.

11) Remember, the core economic ideas, the models on which the current economy runs, were developed before this modern scientific understanding of the world, and it's systems even existed. In fact, there was no idea that the natural world were even systems.

12) The only systems this economic view of the world recognised, was the economic system itself. The natural environment was just seen as a thing, a store house of commodities which could be exploited eternally, without effecting the economic system itself.

13) This is the huge irony. In the economic view of the world, all the components of the economy are seen as interlinked and interconnected i.e. a system and processes. It's fully recognised that you can't alter one part of the system, without altering everything else.

14) This is after all the primary objection those with this economic view of the world, have against measures to address the climate and ecological crisis i.e. in that they will profoundly alter the nature of the economic system. That is their overt objection to these measures.

15) However, what those with this primarily economic view of the world don't recognise is the highly interlinked and interconnected systems of the natural environment, especially the interface with our economy. They still see the natural environment as a thing, not a system.

16) Therefore, we are stuck with this totally unrealistic view of the world, where those who have most power, see the world in terms of simplistic concepts, totally detached from the big picture of the world which has emerged from the scientific study of it.

17) It is impossible to reconcile the classical economic world view, with the world view of natural systems derived from scientific investigation, because this classical economic world view has a view of the Earth, as just a thing, just there to be exploited.

18) The two different world views are totally incommensurate. This is what I mean by mistaking the map for the territory i.e. mistaking the simplistic idea of something, to the actual tangible phenomenon itself.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80…

19) You see, if the classical economic model incorporated the systems reality of the actual Earth we live on, it would be forced to profoundly change the assumptions it makes about the world we live in. Both @ProfSteveKeen and @KateRaworth recognise this.
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

20) Currently we are trying to think, to operate, when we have two profoundly incommensurate views of the world. This creates pathological compartmentalization, in which people either see the world in economic terms, or in terms of physical reality, but not both.

21) The map of the world in terms of it's dynamics - which the most powerful and influential people have, and indeed a large proportion of the public - is totally at odds with the big picture of the world derived from scientific investigation.

22) These two different world views are mutually incompatible. So people have had to develop pathological compartmentalized thinking, in which they either see the world in economic terms, or the big picture created by science, but not both together.

23) It's a bit like an optical illusion such as a Necker Cube, where we can see one version, or the other, but never both together. In fact, this is how Thomas S. Kuhn described scientific paradigms.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Struc…

24) The problem is that economics is unlikely to make this paradigm shift in terms of the process of scientific revolutions, described by Kuhn, because the academic basis of economics, does not exist in the academic framework of science.

25) Therefore it is quite possible for economics, PPEs that many politicians graduate in, and other academic fields not connected to science, to persist with a totally unrealistic view of the world, not updated by scientific discovery.

26) The antidote to this problem is that all thinking should be coherent and consistent, especially in an academic context. It should not be possible for economists etc, to use ideas, inconsistent with the big picture created by science of the natural systems view of the Earth.

@GeorgeMonbiot @JKSteinberger @NaomiOreskes @NaomiAKlein @GretaThunberg @Peters_Glen @ClimateHuman @Luisamneubauer @jrockstrom

@threadreaderapp Please unroll?