Gentle Decline 1/12: Scenarios & Scaling

Hi. I said before, in Issue 11:

I've enough thinking - I think - to do a chunk of or all of a future issue on things we can do here and now to reduce inquality, and thereby make the coming slow disasters slightly less disastrous for the 99% of us who can't just pick the nicest, safest spot in the world and move there. But it needs to brew for a bit.

So I've been letting that brew, and it seems like it's ready to go out, not that long after Issue 11. Let me go back over some of the ground that leads to inequality being an issue I'm talking about in the context of anthropogenic disaster, though.

First, climate breakdown stems for the most part from industrial activity, the more so if you consider agriculture to be industrial, which seems fair in the 20th and 21st century. Industrial processes as we know them have long, long roots, going back further than the Industrial Revolution to the Commercial Revolution of the 11th century. This is essentially the start of capitalism. Capitalism drives toward increased profit, which is enabled by industrialisation and optimisation of production on one hand, and reduction and externalisation of costs on the other. Climate damage comes from two aspects of this: the byproducts of industry contribute in many ways to warming, pollution, ozone damage, and so forth, and the externalisation of costs means that industry is encouraged by the nature of capitalism not to compensate for this damage.

(I'm not going to walk through the ways in which atmospheric pollution and CO2 increases lead to the climate heating up; you know this, or you can go look it up.)

There is evidence starting to come to light that this has, in fact, happened before, albeit in the opposite direction, when capitalism had not yet developed globalism as its operating system, and was using colonialism. The arrival of the first settlers in the New World, from their point of view and from the point of view passed down through most history books until the late 20th century, found a veritable paradise of near empty land, with a few bands of natives here and there, making very little use of it. And this may in fact have been the case, for the simple reason that the very first contacts with America, North and South, brought infectious diseases against which the native population had no defences. So when, fifty years or so later, colonists began to arrive, they were looking at the aftermath of epidemics which wiped out huge numbers of people, probably more so than the Black Death had done in Europe a few hundred years before, and before those populations had a chance to recover.

That's bad enough, but the sudden collapse of agriculture across the continents of Americas actually led directly to global cooling, which happened worldwide, and gave rise to the "Little Ice Age" of the 1600s-1800s (there's also a cool spot in the 1300s-1400s, which correlates with the aforementioned Black Death). And why were there contacts with the New World? Why, explorers looking for ways to make more money, preferably with a minimum of actual ongoing work; an output of capitalism.

So, it is reasonably fair to say that capitalism causes climate breakdown. It has done so before, and it's doing so now.

A second detrimental output of capitalism is more fundamental: inequality. I don't think anyone can reasonably deny this; even if you could start out a new capitalist system in a world where everyone is equal, the slightest initial variation in that world's conditions would lead, with the inevitability of chaos theory's storm-causing butterflies, to an accumulation of wealth with a small subset of people. And once wealth accumulates at all, it will continue to do so, until you get to the situation where a large percentage of the world's wealth is controlled by a small percentage of people, and the largeness and smallness both continue to magnify.

Inequality connects to climate breakdown in two ways. First, there's a correlation, as noted last issue, between inequality and CO2 output. Second, inequality will have a direct and immediate effect on how much someone can plan and enact plans to handle a post-climate-disaster world.

Let's look at two hypotheticals. Say they're the same age, late 50s. Consider, for instance, the case of someone who owns a sizeable house in, say, Dalkey, who has a good income from a professional or managerial job, and who has substantial savings or investments, and owns a car. We're not thinking of 1% here, we're looking at maybe the top 10%. Consider also someone who rents a ground floor apartment in Hanover Street, where because they've been there for a few years, they pay a moderate rent, and who works in a local chippers. They don't have a car. Our latter person doesn't have savings, because they're mostly living from paycheck to paycheck, except when they're saving up for a specific thing - a holiday abroad or Christmas or the grandkids' birthday presents.

Both dwellings are near, possibly essentially at sea level. Both people have access to information about the climate crisis. Both can see they're going to need to move, and possibly that they'll need to lay in a stock of food in case of flooding or other immediate difficulty. Both will want to look at flood insurance.

Our Dalkey resident can sell up, probably getting a ludicrous amount of money, because Dalkey has location. They can move somewhere inland, using the money from the house sale to buy a suitable house, possibly bigger and with more land attached, because it'll remain true for a few years yet that houses inland are cheaper. Savings will make the move easier, pay the lawyers, pay for movers, pay for takeaway for the last days of packing and the first days before unpacking. The car means that getting to work isn't really any different; they may even be able to work remotely. And they can put a stock of food and water in the spare room, plant a few potatoes if they feel the need, and settle in comfortably without much disturbance. They probably have flood insurance anyway, because it was bundled in with their house insurance.

Our Hanover Street resident can't do any of that. They can't move easily, because everywhere in Dublin that's available to move into in 2019 has mad rent attached; the kind they can't afford because it's not 30% or 60% of their paycheck, but 150%. And they still need to stay near work. Working in a chipper requires skills, some hard, some soft, so you'd think they could get a job elsewhere, but anywhere else will put them on short shifts or some dodge to pay them the least that can be managed, and there are a limited number of such jobs anyway. Even if they could move, since they don't have a car and can't afford movers, it'd be 20 or 30 trips on a bus to get everything there, which costs money they don't have, and is absolutely exhausting. A taxi might be better, but taxis are really expensive. And forget about putting food by; they need that money to eat now, and to have biscuits in for when the grandkids are over. And insurance? Ha. No.

Now, much of our Hanover Street resident's problems can be overcome with the help of friends and relatives, which the Dalkey person doesn't need (but probably has anyway). We can call this a support network, and it's how most people really get anything done - we get new jobs, lifts to places, help assembling furniture, or whatever through these networks. If you don't have such a network, you are extra special screwed in any kind of crisis, and many people don't. But let's assume our resident does.

So let's add another wrinkle, a very likely one, to the scenarios above: both people have left it a bit late to actually get moving from their sea-level residences, they've already had a serious flood or two from a storm tide, there's often street-level flooding (a few centimetres, say) and they need to move now (this could be as close as 10 years away, or even a little less). Our Dalkey resident experiences almost no difference here; the insurance has paid out, giving them extra liquid cash to use for the move, they put the expensive stuff from the ground floor upstairs when the floods actually happened, and even if a whole bunch of the neighbours are trying to move at the same time, that doesn't really impact them, except possibly having to wait until the movers have a free slot. It might make for difficulty in selling the house, but if that fails, they can rent it out to someone a bit more desperate than they are.

The Hanover Street resident, however, is in a much worse state. Half their stuff has been wrecked by the floods (they don't have an upstairs to which to move stuff). The chipper, also flooded twice, is under pressure of various kinds, and might have to just close. The bus routes have been changed "temporarily" because the buses can't cope with frequently flooded streets or the debris left behind. Some services - electricity, water, sewage - have cut out occasionally, or are still out after the second flood. Their support network is hammered, because everyone is suffering from the same stuff at the same time. And all the neighbours - some of whom are part of the support network, others of whom are competitors for service repairs, transport, and any help that's coming from a state level - all need to get out of there as well.

So that's pretty grim.

I'm not even going to run through the effects of the post-disaster situation, the pressure on housing for the people who move away from the coast, the new jobs that many of them have to find because their old ones were location dependent, the difficulties in getting hold of food - it's obvious here that all of these are problems that are pretty simply solved by having (sometimes not even spending, just having) money. And those who don't have money are going, in some cases, to crash through into Venkatesh Rao's "fourth world", which sounds pretty hellish, but, as per William Gibson, is a future whose uneven distribution means it's already here for some people.

So what can we do about all this? First and foremost, we can plan for it at an individual level, and start getting our 90% asses in motion away from areas that are threatened by sea level rise, flooding, and so on. But we can also start working on reducing inequality, and that will have knock-on effects that both reduce CO2 emissions and improve environmental issues in general. Again, I don't think we can prevent climate disaster, but we can mitigate it.

Most of this can only be enacted at a governmental level, and probably a state level at that. Some of the key issues are increases in minimum wage, the concept of a universal basic income, increased taxation on high income (whether corporate or individual), free education at all levels (grant-aided where necessary to make it actually free, not just a way to incur student debt), adequate housing and public services in general, and public transport initiatives (including making cars more difficult and/or expensive to use in city centres). All of these, with the weird exception of universal basic income, are traditional left positions, leading us once more to the concept that conservatives are a disease. Voting for people who will chase these issues, and asking them about the issues when they're canvassing, interviewing, via open letters and generally in the public view will help.

Still at a non-individual level, there's one particular thing I've come across of late which is germane and useful: the concept of scalability. This is largely coming from an excellent book called The Mushroom at the End of the World, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (which a reader of this newsletter bought me from my Amazon wishlist; you are wonderful). Scalability sounds like a good thing, right? Getting good things done more efficiently, making sure the same processes work at any scale, and so on. Unfortunately, this is flawed in two ways. First, it assumes that all processes can work at any scale, and even a bit of thinking about different people and different places will demonstrate that that just can't work. Try to find any process that will benefit both of our Dalkey and Hanover Street residents above, for example. And second, "scalable" is almost invariably a corporate or governmental code for "same effort, more profit".

A company that I used to work for was shut down because it wasn't scalable; we were doing individual consultancy work. It was good work, we were helping people, the company was making a profit, and everyone was getting paid, all the vendors and 7-10 employees. But the owner wasn't happy with it, because it couldn't be made to grow infinitely, and that was what they wanted. So the company was shut down, everyone was laid off, and the owner moved on to something new, drawing on a lot of the resources and contacts from the company. Most of the people working there found new work reasonably quickly, but the process cost them a fair bit of time and effort and actual money. I know one didn't, and was in a pretty bad way for a few months, because he had rent to pay, and didn't have the contacts to walk into a new job. Another had to move back in with her parents for a few months while she got things sorted. But the company owner went on to make more money from a new scalable company, and the gap in wealth between them and the employees of the new company (and the ones they'd laid off) increased a bit (possibly a lot) more.

Scaling is, in one way, one of the most fundamental aspects of capitalism. It essentially assumes that one size fits all, or a small number of sizes fit all, when in fact most situations (that are not "repairing a machine") need tailored solutions. Custom-designed things always work better, as long as the custom designer understands the broad principles of what they're doing. This doesn't mean reinventing the wheel every time! But it means using a wheel where a wheel is useful, and a hammer where that's needed, rather than being stuck with the situation where only wheels are available, and having and using the whole toolkit for each situation that needs it.

Obviously there are situations where "will it scale?" is a useful question. But mostly it's a disguise for "will this increase inequality?".

Now that I think through it, though, that may be a thing on which individual action can have an effect. Once we understand that scaling processes often does damage, maybe we can look more carefully at where we're implementing that in work situations, be they government or corporate. Instead of just "does this scale?", we can ask "will scaling this cause damage?". And this is something we can do at the individual level. It's probably going to make you stand out in a meeting or a Slack channel, but I feel like it's something we can actually do in our respective situations and make a difference somewhat bigger than ourselves.

It feels like I've more thinking to do about that, so don't be entirely surprised if it reappears in future issues. Your thinking on it is also welcomed.

On other things we can do: I've just today voted in Ireland's local and EU elections. I've done some serious holding of my nose while writing down the single-transferable-vote numbers, because solid environmental policies (or support for EU blocs that have same) can apparently sit alongside some otherwise repulsive stuff. I'm aware that climate crisis has been an issue that came up a lot for canvassing politicians (many of whom seemed surprised), I'm aware that Ireland declared a "climate emergency", and I am further aware that our Great Leader, may his balls drop off, said that was just "symbolic" and "a gesture". I'm also uncomfortable with Fianna Fail rewriting their manifesto to emphasise climate efforts more (as in, I like the rewriting; I fear it's more greenwashing). I suspect a few stiff drinks will be necessary to start coming to terms with that ballot paper.

In similar vein, I am planning to hassle a lot of politicians over the next while. One of the things I want to do is write letters to them; to immediate representatives for the constituencies I'm in, and relevant ministers and such. If you're interested in the text of those letters, let me know. My themes will mostly be "what are you doing about issue x?", but I suspect I'll also have advice to give them. I'll keep you posted on whether I get anything back.

I feel a little like I have more to say on some of these things, but not the words with which to say them. I'm vaguely watching exit polls, and hoping in the manner of a small child on Christmas Eve that Fine Gael get a sound drubbing in favour of the Green party. But we'll see how it goes. As ever, your replies and conversations are valued greatly, and even if stuff doesn't appear immediately, it's all going into the great stew cauldron of information, and will resurface eventually.