# Energy, Climate, Policy: An Epistemological Perspective Depending on who you ask and which news source you consume, it may indeed seem that the verdict is out on climate change. If you look to one camp you hear “Climate change is happening, it is a man made phenomena, and we must do all we possibly can in order to reduce our impact (via the elimination of green house gases)”. And in the other the story goes: “The earth may be warming, blah blah blah” ### Key Deutsch Ideas * The earth is not a hospitable place to begin with (spaceship earth) * Already too late to avoid the disaster (Likely it was already too late in the 1970s)! Actions only postpone the problem * We can’t always know. No precautions and no precautionary principle can avoid problems that we do not already see. Hence we need a stance of problem *fixing*, not just problem *avoidance*. * A common rebuttal is that “an ounce of prevention is equal to a pound of cure”, but that is only true if we know what to prevent! * If you have been punched on the nose, the science of medicine does not teach you how to avoid punches. * If medical science stopped concentrating on cures and only focused on prevention then it would achieve very little of either. * We should be spending our effort on: how to reduce temperature and live better at higher temperatures * Spaceship earth → outside of the universe things are incredibly hostile (but this is not true!) * **Untypical** * “Human beings are chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet, orbiting a typical star” * **Typical** * But they are both *completely false*! * This chemical scum has universality, it is able to embody the causal and mathematical structure of everything else > If we want to be the exception to the majority of species and civilizations that have gone extinct, then logically we need make use of the one feature that distinguishes our civilization from all the others; namely our special relationship with the laws of physics. Our ability to create explanations and new knowledge. ### Key Epstein Ideas * What do you *not see or hear* in the arguments? ### Key Taleb Ideas ### My key lines of reasoning * The argument fundamentally rests on how suitable for life earth is. * Deutsch puts forth the spaceship earth fallacy → he believes it is *not* actually a hospitable place for humans unless we control our environment. However, in the past control has been localized. * Taleb → Puts forth that we only have one planet. Even if it isn’t great for life in the grand scheme of things, it is the best we have *now*. Doesn’t have an issue with controlling our environment, unless the risk is potentially global and makes us vulnerable to a ruin problem * We can further add a distinction between Deutsch and Taleb: * Deutsch: we must go *fast*, almost always. That does not mean being reckless, but in general we should avoid the precautionary principle. * Taleb: when risk of ruin is present we must go slow. * So we see that both of their arguments have a *time* component (in the form of speed of actions) present. * Deutsch would say that we don’t have time. The earth is not static. It is always changing, whether we like it or not. We don’t know what we don’t know. This means we need to be a culture that uncovers those things we don’t know, and be a culture that is scientifically advanced to be able to handle and react to unexpected events. * Taleb seemingly wouldn’t disagree with this, only that we must avoid ruin. He would add that frequently intervening (say, genetically engineered algae) will add more (unexpected) harm. * I doubt Deutsch would disagree with that. * There fundamental difference would be: * Deutsch: Our planet is destined for catastrophe at some point so we must go fast, create wealth, and be able to better control our environment * Taleb: Yes our planet may be destined for a large ruin problem at some point in the future, but we are exposing ourselves to a more pressing ruin problem in the present. * So we are back to time scales. Is the present ruin problem more likely and pressing than those down the line? And what about the impact on our culture/humanism in reducing fossil fuels, reducing wealth, etc? --- Date: 20220727 Links to: Tags: #review References: * []()