If You Can Be Wrong, Someone You Disagree With Can Be Right - Director's Cut
If You Can Be Wrong, Someone You Disagree With Can Be Right - Director's Cut
Based on an article previously published on LinkedIn, November 22, 2022
Any confidence in our point of view must be tempered by the knowledge that we are also capable of being wrong; which means that those who we disagree with might be right.
Much depends on where a person is physically, ideologically and mentally, so to a certain extent a world-view might be incidental to those ‘location’ factors. Between autocracy and democracy there is a spectrum of what can be known by the citizenry; within that, culture and group membership filters much of what is left.
Yet groups can be virtually located and in economically developed and nominally free societies, information is consumed buffet-style; online what is seen is largely bounded by self-imposed limitations - some conscious and others not.
There is little incentive to put ourselves through the trauma of seeing images of conflict zones, child labour or making the connection between exploitation, deprivation and the things we buy. In the comfort of our curated world-view, everything we want to be real can be made so, the rest can go away.
Reality once felt solid, but now truth is a commodity on a information market run by algorithms, priced in units of our engagement. Meanwhile, our aversion to complex subject matter and willingness to scroll mindlessly, cheapens the price of our attention. This our unconscious complicity in narrowing the information available to us.
Climate Policy
In a democracy, climate policy supposedly comes from the demand signal that the voting public give to politicians and consequently, any regional response to climate change must arise from local perceptions. But what if they are wrong?
Public discussions about risk are rarely constructive because what should be a technical conversation is invariably reduced to a matter of opinion. This is problematic because if we collectively underestimate the danger, the signal to power is weak; if the urgency is not believed, impetus is lost; if we don't recognise the role of different solutions in time, those options vanish.
Yet if the risk is over-estimated the mitigation may do needless harm to people and economies, until of course, the pent-up demand within emerging markets is too great to allow it. What if policy is wrong?
Apologetics
The term, 'energy transition' is simultaneously informative and misleading. To move from traditional energy-sources to cleaner, sustainable forms, is not just one giant leap. We can think of it as a problem of getting from A to Z because that reminds us that there should be some letters in between. The ‘energy transition’ is in fact comprised of many other transitions.
Of course, there are complex interdependencies with energy sources, feedstocks and raw materials and many of these transitions must happen in parallel. Recognising their individual importance is key to ensuring the drive to implement them is maintained.
This incremental approach is not the same as saying the process must be slow and I am certainly not defending the lackadaisical efforts that have resulted in such dawdling and unmeasurable climate progress. Decarbonisation and sustainability involve the transition of existing industry, infrastructure, investment, technology, distribution and markets.
Although renewables are making an increasing contribution to energy supply they are not displacing the growing demand for hydrocarbons globally. I provide the evidence for that claim and explain why the first step is to displace emissions in what we are currently using, in the article linked below.
Renewables are not an extraction-less industry and they require the use of finite materials whose acquisition is resource hungry, environmentally damaging and pose major threats to human rights in the African, Asian and South American continents. Pointing this out has frequently gotten me cast as an oil and gas apologist by people who haven’t thought they might be wrong.
Most of the key mineral deposits are in politically, economically or ecologically vulnerable regions, which is rarely weighed in the balance. Yet these are risks that entrenched perspectives can prevent us from seeing.
There has to be a shifting energy mix during the transitional periods so the dilemma is how to remove carbon emissions from our existing hydrocarbon demand. Not only is this technically achievable but there is no bigger contribution we can make to decarbonisation than to physically decarbonise feedstocks , fuels and flue gases.
How can we possibly mitigate the demand-growth coming from Asia and Africa other than by developing the technology to help them produce and use energy cleanly?
The Changes We Need To Want
When we reform anything, be it institutions or culture, rarely is it a good idea to rip everything up and start again. It is for the same reasons that I take issue with ‘transformation’ programs that attempt to reinvent organisations on the back of proprietary templates. What is lost is the informational content of existing systems that have evolved in the operational environment.
Similarly, setting out to destroy industry would be wasteful and tactically naïve, when it should be obvious that the energy transition cannot be achieved without fundamentally changing the industries that are currently satisfying energy demands.
There are sunk costs, including environmental ones, in infrastructures and buildings. What can be reused must be investigated rather than destroying what we have only to build everything with newly acquired resources.
It’s unsurprising that young people in particular are sceptical of any initiative that does not look like immediate action. Yet technological cynicism is perhaps the biggest threat that they could personally do something about. Nothing that works is free of technology.
The real change has to come from engineering and the unsexy nut and bolt details that are popularly ignored. Questions therefore remain unasked, such as what to build and how to do it; the resources required and the justification of their use.
The advocates of ‘Just Stop Oil’ (for example) have the germ of a point that is trivialised by the word ‘just’. It is necessary to have some precision about just what it is that must be stopped i.e. the carbon biproducts throughout the lifecycle of the energy mix.
Were we to ‘stop oil’ overnight it would cause an unmanageable mechanical waste problem with no spare energy to move or process any of it. The idea that we can somehow rip up the past and free ourselves is to ignore the debt we owe to the resources already deployed.
Supporting the necessary rehabilitation of the sector is not to be any more in cahoots with ‘big oil’ than we already are by consuming its products.
Destroying value cannot possibly be without environmental and economic consequence. This should be obvious. To agree that sustainability involves preserving existing assets (for new purposes), opportunity (for capital-light infrastructure) and earned knowledge wherever possible, would be a useful place to start.
Unhelpful Characterisations
Besides the accusation of being an apologist for dirty industries, I have also been called a 'fool' for saying net-zero is not a scam, a 'dupe' for wanting to scale renewable energy and 'idiotic', for believing anthropomorphic climate change is real.
Last year (2022) my advocacy for hydrogen was apparently symptomatic of being delusional and I received similar free diagnoses for other things, including my defence of carbon capture technologies and carbon offsets. You just can’t please everybody.
This sort of rhetoric only serves to wreck the debate and many of our chances and at its centre of those who can’t imagine they might be wrong. Tribalism tricks all sides into an unconscious collaboration against the moderating influence of the centre, because from the extremes, the middle always seems to be too conciliatory.
The Public Understanding Of The Problem
The role of the atmosphere in trapping heat has long been known, but the (largely superseded) term ‘global warming’, was adopted in the early nineteen-eighties when the public was introduced to it as an issue.
Many scientists have said (including Stephen Schneider, Tim Palmer and Sabine Hossenfelder) that the science should inform policy rather than dictate it and as mentioned previously, politicians decide policy in accordance with the signal that voters give them.
None of that solves anything but it creates the remit for engineering and industry. Technology has always responded to demand and this has created the perception that technology is the problem. If you feel that way, consider the possibility you may be wrong, because perhaps the solution is to demand better things from technology. Has technology ever delivered what was not demanded?
If technology is allowed to be demonised by invented slurs such as ‘tech-solutionism’ there will be no alignment between using resources in a sustainable way and remediating the waste that is changing our environment.
The appetite for blame and diversion is infantile because to deny our role in societal demands we opt out of making a real difference. Instead, attention is squandered on things that won’t achieve anything, such as developing taxonomies for 50 shades of greenwashing and campaigns against businesses who are deemed guilty by association, e.g. law firms and advertising agencies who work for ‘big oil’.
The Limitations On Being Constructive
I suggest that we need to be aware of three factors that affect our ability to be constructive: the constraints of time, the devaluation of objective truth and the deterioration of public discourse. Taking these in order:
Time
If the necessity becomes great enough, the developmental pressure of an impending catastrophe will force us to innovate, but to reach that point will cost time that we will never get back. Also, it's the lack of time that is liable to compromise the quality of decision-making and/or, reduce our available options. Even if such imminent danger were to trigger an otherwise effective human response, there is a serious risk that it will be rendered ineffective, simply by arriving too late. Technophobia has an opportunity cost.
Truth
Our skewed sense of truth is not just a result of misinformation, but it also comes from the confusion between scientific proof and value judgement. The public's ability to make value judgements and make them known through political channels, is being conflated with an idea that they are also sufficiently competent to second-guess scientific standards of proof and the assessment of risk.
Even amongst professionals, perceptions of inter-disciplinary risk analysis and mitigation are frequently wrong, not that it stops them arguing from a misguided sense of authority. These are themes I explore in other articles.
Discourse
In public discussion, polarisation quickly emerges, particularly in the case of complex and multi-faceted topics, be it climate change, energy transitions or epidemics. People fear being lured to the side they are demonising, as if to change their mind, they would become what they hate.
Finally
How much more apparent will these limiting factors become as we deal with increasingly complex models built to incorporate massive parameter and data sets. This might not be an issue were it not for news outlets and social media peddling the flattering fantasy that the general population are equipped to assess science and technology rather than being bewildered.
Public discourse has an important function, but the signal generated comes from value judgements, not analysis. Just as value judgements should inform politics and not science, being able to make demands of innovation is not the same as having the competence to specify technology.
Do I take my own advice and consider that I might be wrong? All the time.
Next: Abstractions Of Proof And Why Your Value Judgement Is A Climate Risk - Director’s Cut.