Germany and the Netherlands

Imagine a Europe that ran on solar and wind power: whose cars ran on locally provided electricity, and whose homes were heated by electric air-source heat pumps. That Europe would not be funding Putin’s Russia, and it would be far less scared of Putin’s Russia—it could impose every kind of sanction, and keep them in place until the country buckled. Imagine an America where the cost of gas was not a political tripwire, because if people had to have a pickup to make them feel sufficiently manly, that pickup would run on electricity that came from the sun and wind. It would take an evil-er genius than Vladimir Putin to figure out how to embargo the sun.

it’s even less clear if the current war in Ukraine will speed up stalled federal climate policy. But the war might convince some consumers to retrofit their own homes.

Because of the invasion in Ukraine, “people are reminded of the problem, but then they resort to sort of quick fixes, which are not really for the long term,” says Rolf Wüestenhagen, director of the Institute for Economy and the Environment at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.

Mass protests against Russia’s aggression combined with existing political pressure to move more quickly on climate change might lead to new policies to do yet more.

At a global climate meeting Monday, Ukraine’s representative, Svitlana Krakovska, pointed out the connection: “Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots—fossil fuels—and our dependence on them,”

Huge amounts of natural gas are needed to produce ammonia, the key ingredient in nitrogen fertiliser. Yara International relies on vast quantities of Russian gas for its European plants.

quarter of the key nutrients used in European food production come from Russia.

Russia also produces enormous amounts of nutrients, like potash and phosphate - key ingredients in fertilisers, which enable plants and crops to grow. "Half the world's population gets food as a result of fertilisers... and if that's removed from the field for some crops, [the yield] will drop by 50%," Mr Holsether said.

Actually asking people to do this would be something of a last resort, said Ben McWilliams, a climate and energy analyst at Bruegel.<img alt="These US cities tried to cut natural gas from new homes. Republicans and the gas lobby stepped in" class="media__image" src="//viahtml.hypothes.is/proxy/im_///cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/220217094013-01-cities-fossil-fuel-emissions-large-169.jpg">These US cities tried to cut natural gas from new homes. Republicans and the gas lobby stepped in"But who knows? It's an unprecedented situation. I could imagine a kind of political campaign, a real push by European leaders saying, look, if you can help us by turning down 1 degree on your thermostat, it's going to help. And you can see people uniting behind this, against Russian gas," he told CNN. "But ultimately, you'll need much more than this in response."One approach would be to replace around half the gas from other sources, McWilliams said. The United States is already shipping Iiquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe, and EU officials are also looking to countries like Azerbaijan and Qatar. The other half will need to come from cutting demand, McWilliams said, especially as Europe prepares for next winter.Heavy industries, like steelmaking and chemical production, will need to reduce their operations. Homeowners investing in solar panels and heat pumps could help take some pressure off heating systems.Tara Connolly, a campaigner with the international NGO Global Witness who specializes in gas, says that Europe must launch an emergency program to insulate homes, replace gas boilers with heat pumps and accelerate the transition to renewable energy."It is abundantly clear that Europe's gas dependence has provided Putin with the resources to engage in his bloody venture in Ukraine, whilst hampering Europe's response,"

We could see Kyiv in the same situation as Homs, as the same situation as Aleppo, which would be catastrophic, and, again, would plant terrible seeds of hatred for years and decades. So far, we've seen hundreds of people being killed, Ukrainian citizens being killed. 00:47:04 It could reach tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. So in this sense, it's extremely painful to contemplate. And this is why we need again and again to urge the leaders to stop this war, and especially, again and again, tell Putin, "You will not be able to absorb Ukraine into Russia. 00:47:30 They don't want it, they don't want you. If you continue, the only thing you will achieve is to create terrible hatred between Ukrainians and Russians for generations. It doesn't have to be like that."

A few people are asking about the link to the climate crisis, particularly when it relates to the energy flows. Like, Europe is very dependent, part of Europe, is very dependent on Russian oil and gas, which is, as far as we know, still flowing until today. But could this crisis, in a sort of paradoxical way, 00:40:22 a bit like the pandemic, accelerate climate action, accelerate renewables and and so on? YNH: This is the hope. That Europe now realizes the danger and starts a green Manhattan Project that kind of accelerates what already has been happening, but accelerates it, the development of better energy sources, 00:40:49 better energy infrastructure, which would release it from its dependence on oil and gas. And it will actually undercut the dependence of the whole world on oil and gas. And this would be the best way to undermine the Putin regime and the Putin war machine, because this is what Russia has, oil and gas. 00:41:13 That's it. When was the last time you bought anything made in Russia? They have oil and gas, and we know, you know, the curse of oil. That oil is a source of riches, but it’s also very often a support for dictatorships. Because to enjoy the benefits of oil, you don't need to share it with your citizens. 00:41:38 You don't need an open society, you don't need education, you just need to drill. So we see in many places that oil and gas are actually the basis for dictatorships. If oil and gas, if the price drops, if they become irrelevant, it will not only undercut the finance, the power of the Russian military machine, it will also force Russia, force Putin or the Russians to change their regime.

The other thing which is different is that we are talking about superpowers. This is not a war between Israel and Hezbollah. This is potentially a war between Russia and NATO. 00:39:32 And even leaving aside nuclear weapons, this completely destabilizes the peace of the entire world. And again, I go back again and again to the budgets. That if Germany doubles its defense budget, if Poland doubles its defense budget, this will spread to every country in the world, and this is terrible news.

I was struck by what the Kenyan representative 00:38:12 to the UN Security Council said when this erupted. The Kenyan representative spoke in the name of Kenya and other African countries. And he told the Russians: Look, we also are the product of a post-imperial order. The same way the Soviet empire collapsed into different independent nations, also, African nations came out of the collapse of European empires. 00:38:39 And the basic principle of African politics ever since then was that no matter what your objections to the borders you have inherited, keep the borders. The borders are sacred because if we start invading neighboring countries because, "Hey, this is part of our countries, 00:39:03 these people are part of our nation," there will not be an end to it. And if this now happens in Ukraine, it will be a blueprint for copycats all over the world.

as a Jew, as an Israeli, as a historian, that I trust it not to repeat the horrors of Nazism, that's Germany.

And as a historian, I feel ashamed that this is what my profession in some way is doing. I know it for my own country. In Israel, we also suffer from too much history. I think people should be liberated from the past, not constantly repeating it again and again. You know, everybody should kind of free themselves 00:28:56 from the memories of the Second World War. It's true of the Russians, it's also true of the Germans. You know, I look at Germany now, and what I really want to say, if there are Germans watching us, what I really want to say to the Germans: guys, we know you are not Nazis. You don't need to keep proving it again and again. What we need from Germany now is to stand up and be a leader, 00:29:22 to be at the forefront of the struggle for freedom. And sometimes Germans are afraid that if they speak forcefully or pick up a gun, everybody will say, "Hey, you're Nazis again." No, we won't think that.

That part of the Russian fears that are motivating Putin and motivating people around him is memories of past invasions of Russia, especially, of course, in Second World War. And of course, it's a terrible mistake 00:27:11 what they are doing with it. They are recreating again the same things that they should learn to avoid. But yes, these are still the terrible fruits of the seeds being planted in the 1940s.

these are the seeds of hatred and fear and misery that are being planted right now in the minds and the bodies of tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people, really. 00:26:20 Because it's not just the people in Ukraine, it's also in the countries around, all over the world. And these seeds will give a terrible harvest, terrible fruits in years, in decades to come. This is why it's so crucial to stop the war immediately. Every day this continues, plants more and more of these seeds. 00:26:44 And, you know, like this war now, its seeds were, to a large extent, planted decades and even centuries ago.

We’ve built, in the late 20th century, a house for humanity 00:24:37 based on cooperation, based on collaboration, based on the understanding that our future depends on being able to cooperate, otherwise we will become extinct as a species. And we all live in this house. But in the last few years we stopped -- we neglected it, we stopped repairing it. 00:25:02 We allow it to deteriorate more and more. And, you know, eventually it will -- It is collapsing now. So I hope that people will realize before it's too late that we need not just to stop this terrible war, we need to rebuild the institutions, we need to repair the global house in which we all live together. 00:25:29 If it falls down, we all die.

nuclear weapons are -- 00:22:50 in a way they also, until now, preserved the peace of the world. I belong to the school of thought that if it was not for nuclear weapons, we would have had the Third World War between the Soviet Union and the United States and NATO sometime in the 1950s or '60s. That nuclear weapons actually, until today, served a good function. 00:23:16 It's because of nuclear weapons that we did not have any more direct clashes between superpowers because it was obvious that this would be collective suicide. But the danger is still there, it's always there. If there is miscalculation, then the results could, of course, be existential, catastrophic.

the war in Ukraine now, it’s not a natural disaster. It’s a man-made disaster, and a single man. It's not the Russian people who want this war. There's really just a single person who, by his decisions, created this tragedy.

If humans, some humans, start making bad decisions and start destroying the institutions that kept the peace, then we will be back in the era of war with budgets, military budgets going to 20, 30, 40 percent. It can happen. It's in our hands.

You wrote another essay last week in “The Economist”, and you argue that what's at stake in Ukraine is, and I quote you, "the direction of human history" because it puts at risk what you call the greatest political and moral achievement of modern civilization, 00:18:31 which is the decline of war. So now we are back in a war and potentially afterwards into a new form of cold war or hot war, but hopefully not.

You know, when you look at the real power balance, if the Europeans stick together, if the Americans and the Europeans stick together and stop this culture war and stop tearing themselves apart, they have absolutely nothing to fear -- the Russians or anybody else.

I think another very important thing is what has been dividing the West over the several years now, it’s what people term the “culture war”. The culture war between left and right, between conservatives and liberals. And I think this war can be an opportunity to end the culture war within the West, to make peace in the culture war. 00:15:59 First of all, because you suddenly realize we are all in this together. There are much bigger things in the world than these arguments between left and right within the Western democracies. And it's a reminder that we need to stand united to protect Western liberal democracies. But it's deeper than that. 00:16:22 Much of the argument between left and right seemed to be in terms of a contradiction between liberalism and nationalism. Like, you need to choose. And the right goes with nationalism, and the left goes more liberalism. And Ukraine is a reminder that no, the two actually go together. Historically, nationalism and liberalism are not opposites. 00:16:47 They are not enemies. They are friends, they go together. They meet around the central value of freedom, of liberty. And to see a nation fighting for its survival, fighting for its freedom, you see it on Fox News or you see it in CNN. And yes, they tell the story a little differently, but they suddenly see the same reality. 00:17:14 And they find common ground. And the common ground is to understand that nationalism is not about hating minorities or hating foreigners, it's about loving your compatriots, and reaching a peaceful agreement about how we want to run our country together. And I hope that seeing what is happening would help to end the culture war in the West.

I hope, for the sake of everybody -- Ukrainians, Russians and the whole of humanity -- that this war stops immediately. Because if it doesn't, it's not only the Ukrainians and the Russians 00:11:39 that will suffer terribly. Everybody will suffer terribly if this war continues. BG: Explain why. YNH: Because of the shock waves destabilizing the whole world. Let’s start with the bottom line: budgets. We have been living in an amazing era of peace in the last few decades. And it wasn't some kind of hippie fantasy. You saw it in the bottom line. 00:12:06 You saw it in the budgets. In Europe, in the European Union, the average defense budget of EU members was around three percent of government budget. And that's a historical miracle, almost. For most of history, the budget of kings and emperors and sultans, like 50 percent, 80 percent goes to war, goes to the army. 00:12:31 In Europe, it’s just three percent. In the whole world, the average is about six percent, I think, fact-check me on this, but this is the figure that I know, six percent. What we saw already within a few days, Germany doubles its military budget in a day. And I'm not against it. Given what they are facing, it's reasonable. For the Germans, for the Poles, for all of Europe to double their budgets. And you see other countries around the world doing the same thing. 00:12:58 But this is, you know, a race to the bottom. When they double their budgets, other countries look and feel insecure and double their budgets, so they have to double them again and triple them. And the money that should go to health care, that should go to education, that should go to fight climate change, this money will now go to tanks, to missiles, to fighting wars. 00:13:25 So there is less health care for everybody, and there is maybe no solution to climate change because the money goes to tanks. And in this way, even if you live in Australia, even if you live in Brazil, you will feel the repercussions of this war in less health care, in a deteriorating ecological crisis, 00:13:48 in many other things. Again, another very central question is technology. We are on the verge, we are already in the middle, actually, of new technological arms races in fields like artificial intelligence. And we need global agreement about how to regulate AI and to prevent the worst scenarios. How can we get a global agreement on AI 00:14:15 when you have a new cold war, a new hot war? So in this field, to all hopes of stopping the AI arms race will go up in smoke if this war continues. So again, everybody around the world will feel the consequences in many ways. This is much, much bigger than just another regional conflict.

this derails the whole rationale of Putin’s war. Because you can conquer the country, maybe, 00:09:54 but you won't be able to absorb Ukraine back into Russia. The only thing he's accomplishing, he is planting seeds of hatred in the hearts of every Ukrainian. Every Ukrainian being killed, every day this war continues is more seeds of hatred that may last for generations. 00:10:17 Ukrainians and Russians didn't hate each other before Putin. They’re siblings. Now he's making them enemies. And if he continues, this will be his legacy.

his long-term goal, the whole rationale of the war, 00:07:47 is to deny the existence of the Ukrainian nation and to absorb it into Russia. And to do that, it's not enough to conquer Ukraine. You also need to hold it. And it's all based on this fantasy, on this gamble, that most of the population in Ukraine would agree to this, would even welcome this. 00:08:11 And we already know that it's not true. That the Ukrainians are a very real nation; they are fiercely independent; they don’t want to be part of Russia; they will fight like hell. And in the long-run, again, you can conquer a country, But as the Russians learned in Afghanistan, as the Americans learned also in Afghanistan, also in Iraq, it's much harder to hold a country.

The imperial dream was always there, but you know, empires are often the creation of a very small gang of people at the top. I don’t think the Russian people [are] interested in this war. I don't think that the Russian people want to conquer Ukraine or to slaughter the citizens of Kyiv.

The key issue of the war, at least for President Putin, is whether Ukraine is an independent nation, whether it is a nation at all. He has this fantasy that Ukraine isn't a nation, that Ukraine is just a part of Russia, that Ukrainians are Russians. In his fantasy, Ukrainians are Russians that want to be back in the fold of Mother Russia, 00:02:43 and that the only ones preventing it is a very small gang at the top, which he portrays as Nazis, even if the president is Jewish; but OK, a Nazi Jew.

For centuries, Kyiv was looking westwards and was a part of a union with Lithuania and Poland until it was eventually conquered and absorbed by the Russian Empire, by the czarist empire. But even after that, Ukrainians remained a separate people to a large extent, and it's important to know that because this is really what is at stake in this war.

The most crucial thing to know is that Ukrainians are not Russians, and that Ukraine is an ancient, independent nation. Ukraine has a history of more than a thousand years. Kyiv was a major metropolis and cultural center when Moscow was not even a village. For most of these thousand years Kyiv was not ruled by Moscow. They were not part of the same political entity.

This is a moment that we should seize, in all seriousness, in order to take on the two huge existential plagues that face us this morning: the climate crisis, outlined in this new IPCC report, and the fact that we have a madman with nuclear weapons who’s used the revenues from oil and gas to intimidate and terrify the entire world.

Scientists and engineers in the last 10 years have figured out how to make solar power, wind power, and the batteries to store them, the cheapest power on Earth. If we deployed it at scale very fast, we would do the work that the secretary-general of the U.N. said today we must do in order to deal with climate change, and we would also undercut the power of Vladimir Putin, the power of the Koch brothers, our biggest oil and gas barons, the power of the kings and princes of Saudi Arabia, the power of a lot of the worst people on planet Earth.

Europe has been cowering for two decades in response to Putin’s constant provocations because it depends on his oil and gas in order to keep warm through the winter. And even now the U.S. and the EU are unable to take what would be the most devastating economic step, embargoing Putin’s oil and gas in Russia, because they fear that the price of gas will go up enough that American support for doing anything about the Ukraine will evaporate.

The same fossil fuels that are destroying the planet are precisely the thing that undermine — that underwrite the power of thugs like Vladimir Putin.

when we have moments like this that throw the world into stark illumination, we have to seize them.

The Biden Administration official noted that Russia is "incredibly dependent" on the West as a consumer for its energy supplies."This is a long-term vulnerability for President Putin. If he weaponizes energy supply, that's only going to accelerate Europe's and the West's diversification away from Russian energy," Singh said, adding that it would be a "major blunder."

Putin does not need to turn the taps completely off to punish the West. Oil markets are so tight that just a modest decrease in supplies from Russia could have a large impact on prices."Even if Russia cut supplies by 10% to 20%, the price response would compensate Russia for the loss of supply," said Rabobank's Fitzmaurice.

UK-based Shell (RDSA) owns a 27.5% stake in Sakhalin-2, which it describes as one of the world's largest integrated oil and gas projects. Shell says Sakhalin-2 supplies about 4% of the world's current liquified natural gas market.ExxonMobil (XOM)has been in Russia for over 25 years, and employs about 1,000 people there.Its subsidiary, Exxon Neftegas Limited, has a 30% stake in Sakhalin-1 — a vast oil and natural gas project located off Sakhalin Island in the Russian Far East. It has operated the project since 1995 on behalf of a consortium that includes Japanese and Indian partners, as well as two affiliates of Rosneft.

In addition to its stake in Rosneft, BP had three joint ventures with Russia's biggest oil company — a 20% stake in the Taas-Yuryakh oil project in eastern Siberia, 49% of Yermak Neftegaz in Western Siberia and 49% in the Kharampur oil and gas project.

you can't see the beetle in my box nor I the one in yours ludwig wittgenstein use the beetle in the Box analogy to suggest that the meaning of sensation words such as pain isn't given 00:01:10 by referring to some private inner introspected something a sensation to which you alone have access in his view there can't be more to the public meaning of our language than we are capable of teaching each other and the 00:01:23 private something the beetle can't have a role in that teaching because we can't get at

The signs are already there for those willing to see them. When the habitat becomes degraded such that there are fewer resources to go around; when fertility starts to decline; when the birth rate sinks below the death rate; and when genetic resources are limited—the only way is down. The question is “How fast?”

Also, researchers have disputed the empirical observation of mean human group sizes approximately averaging around 150 persons, presenting empirical observations of group sizes indicating a wide variety of other numbers [46–53]. Thus, ecological research on primate sociality, the uniqueness of human thinking and empirical observations all indicate that there is no hard cognitive limit on human sociality. Our reanalysis provides the last piece of evidence needed to disregard Dunbar's number.

Our last, best hope of averting systemic environmental collapse is to use the peculiarities of complex systems to trigger cascading political regime shifts.

As the paper notes, a large body of work suggests that “the power of small groups comes not from their authority or wealth, but from their commitment to the cause”.

we need a mass mobilization to save the constitution if i if i can put it that way that's why this fight that professor lewis so eloquently written and talked about is 00:17:47 important to recapture the discussion and debate of history so that we look and see ourselves for what we've done wrong at the same time we look and see the brave men and women who fought to change it and we can imitate them in 00:18:00 many many ways that goes for lawyers it goes for journalists it goes for everyday people down where what their main contribution is to stand in line and long on a long cold morning and vote that's what we need in this country is 00:18:13 to instill to invigorate to challenge with the whole idea of what democracy is it's about us it's about you and me if we can do that and see the elements that are threatening it 00:18:25 we're going to be okay

On a larger scale, ARSAC’s goal is not to completely extinguish wildfires—or replace firefighters—but to create acoustic boundary lines that prevent such fires from spreading. “We think we’re going to be able to buy those firefighters time, which is the real killer in a disaster situation,” Dhillon says. ARSAC’s technology may prove particularly disruptive because it’s designed as a “sense and respond system,” he adds, rather than a “sense and react” system. The difference? ARSAC’s integrated fire protection system aims to not only detect embers but also track the location and direction of burgeoning fires to prevent them from crossing property lines. ARSAC’s system employs sensors to detect a heat bloom and then send out spikes on a given frequency that can be used to track the fire’s flow, Dhillon explains. Drones can then be dispatched to provide aerial surveillance to monitor the fire, and arrays of sound-wave fire extinguishers along property lines can be pointed in the right direction to create an acoustic fire barrier.

Currently, ARSAC is creating an integrated system designed to specifically fight large wildfires that relies on arrays of acoustic extinguishers, sensing technologies, and an army of ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) drones to detect and contain wildfires.

The acoustic extinguisher works by using sound waves—a type of pressure wave—to push oxygen away from the source of a flame and spread it over a larger surface area. These actions break the fire combustion triangle made up of heat, fuel, and oxygen, the three elements required for a fire to burn. The acoustic fire extinguisher puts out flames using low frequency bass (30 to 60Hz) without relying on water or chemicals. YOU MAY ALSO LIKE: How Big Data is Helping Predict and Fight Wildfires Acoustic technologies were unsuccessfully tested as a firefighting tool by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency back in 2008. Undaunted by past failures, as well as skepticism from classmates and faculty, Robertson and Tran solved the problem by adding vortex rings, which move particles in circles around a center core, to carry sound waves over longer distances without losing mass or kinetic energy.

we'll "need to go full throttle for twenty years or more." As Bill puts it, "We need to accomplish something gigantic we have never done before, much faster than we have ever done anything similar." 

But as Bill notes in his book, even the steep declines in overall economic activity, daily commuting, and air travel that came with widespread pandemic lockdowns did not move the needle as much as is needed. "What's remarkable to me is not how much emissions went down because of the pandemic, but how little," he writes. "This small decline in emissions is proof that we cannot get to zero emissions simply -- or even mostly -- by flying and driving less."

economic realities will ultimately drive adoption curves on a global level. 

nor can we rely on simply reducing usage, increasing conservation, and constraining consumption. 

what companies want is different than what individuals want companies want an invoice companies want something tax deductible 00:24:34 companies want someone that is um keeping the lights on and that is responsive via email so you really have those obligations and one platform that helps with that is open collective 00:24:47 on open collective you can maybe put that burden of being a fiscal host to the maintainers of open collective they have a 501c6 program for 00:25:00 open source projects that acts as a fiscal host which means they will hand do all the invoicing and they will officially be the maintainers and if you as just an open source 00:25:14 maintainer often or a contributor of that project you want to get money from your project you have to send an invoice to open collective and i think that's the best of both worlds again 00:25:26 because it's very transparent progress a process companies are in the loop and you don't have to deal with all the financial stuff at least not yeah 00:25:39 with with companies

oh by the way did i tell you it's hard like probably it's it's also really hard but i really don't want to stop here on a on a low note

a lot of people start with learning and then they build things and then they close the circle but there's one key piece missing here and some people hate the word but you 00:29:54 learn to love it eventually it's called marketing and marketing means a lot of things to a lot of people but what it means to me is getting the word out because someone else will if you don't and 00:30:05 you are awesome you just have to realize that maybe not everyone knows right away so you should really talk about it more maybe at conferences see what i did there 00:30:17 um maybe on twitter maybe you can just tell your friends and maybe you can ask people to contribute and to support you like what's wrong with that somehow it's frowned upon in the community that if you do 00:30:30 marketing you're not doing it for real but i think that's not true um i think that if smart people and patient and um passionate people as well 00:30:44 if they did marketing then the world would be a better place because i'm pretty sure the evil guys do marketing so do your homework

you've used this word evil and you've used the word crime why I have used those words? Why do you think that's appropriate at this point ? it's a crime. It's a crime against humanity. It's actually a crime against all humanity, right? If we start calling it a crime as it is, I call it the crime of all time. 00:28:27 Then, at least we will switch the discussion to a level that people can actually understand, right? You can give people all these numbers but they're just numbers. You can show people graphs but they're just graphs, right? We are now, our business model are perverse, irrational economics, it's destroying us! 00:28:52 It's destroying the planet! Disrupting all the oceans, poisoning the oceans. The entire oceans with acidification with heating, which disturbs and breaks down all the healthy, ocean, currents, and deoxygenation. This is evil! If you don't act against that evil, if you don't call that evil, evil 00:29:20 you are complicit and that's an enormously powerful and emotional realization and I think you're dead right

The 2007 IPCC assessment 00:26:40 stressed over and over and over that emissions had to be in decline by 2015.

So we are headed for a post agricultural world we're changing the climate of the past 10,000 years into a completely different climate which is not an agricultural climate. And when you say a post agricultural world. 00:24:21 What we're saying again, to be blunt, is not enough food to feed people. That's right. And billions and billions of people starving to death. That's right. We're looking at billions of people not able to survive because of starvation, water deprivation. And then, of course, you pile on the diseases for many, many, many years. The Infectious Disease experts. 00:24:50 We just had an experience of it with covid-19, have warned us that actually all of the infectious and communicable diseases are going to be increased by putting up the global temperature. And lots of floods. It's a recipe. It's a suicidal recipe. And the only plans we have are plans for Global suicide.

it was published in some magazines that we are the human race was at a crossroads, that we were looking at what was described as the worst possible future or the best possible future and that was absolutely right, it was described very well. We're not only robbing our children of a decent life. We're robbing them of a what I would call a golden age.

Extinction Rebellion has been at the forefront of a fundamentally new message which is if a government doesn't change, it's your right and as we've identified, your duty, if you're not going to be complicit, 00:34:43 to go into a rebellion a nonviolent civil disobedience against the government in order to fundamentally reduce carbon emissions. It's not actually that complicated, Is it? If you ask the average person who controls the economy, right? They know it's the banks, the big banks, right? And we had the banks, I think they did it pretty deliberately ten years ago. 00:35:12 They pulled our chain and we had the most massive transfer of wealth that the world has ever seen the bank bailout, right? Trillions and trillions of dollars. We're seeing the same thing now with covid and the banks have got to be behind it, right? If the banks wanted and decided that emissions have to decline from today 00:35:36 fast in a matter of years, the banks can do it, right? Because the banks hold the strings. All governments now are in a massive amount of national debt . we have an axis of evil if you want, we have the big banking corporations. We have the big fossil fuel corporations and we have the compliant government.

for example arctic char the fish species that's already 00:09:00 all across the arctic region living at its temperature level about 24 degrees celsius in freshwater ecosystems one fraction of a decree further and we 00:09:13 will enter into a cycle of fish death events that will cascade in food security loss of culture and many other things of this keystone species on the aquatic ecosystems for 00:09:25 communities and nature alike

she pointed out that climate finance to small island states declined by 25 percent in 2019 but she also offered 00:22:36 what she called a sword that can cut down this gordian knot of finance and she reminded us that 25 trillion dollars of quantitative easing has been produced in the last 13 years and that 9 trillion 00:22:49 of that was just in the last 18 months alone in order to deal with the covet crisis an annual increase in special drawing rights of 500 billion dollars a year for 20 years putting trust to finance the 00:23:01 transition is what she suggested is the real gap that we need to close not the 50 billion being proposed for adaptation and she concluded by saying if 500 billion sounds big it's just two percent 00:23:14 of that 25 trillion dollars that has already been created through quantitative easing so my question is is actually not an economic question it's more of a political question really what are the barriers to using that mechanism for the 00:23:28 enormous threat of climate change in the way it's been used for the frankly lesser threat of of covid and what can be done to build support for it

i think we have to be very careful about not blaming the individual and i think that sometimes a lot of the narrative is 01:01:48 well you're using your petrol car you're using your gas spoiler you're basically taking your kids to school you know i think that's really problematic and i think what the rain is saying is we need to move away from that which is then 01:02:01 what we need is we need government to actually provide some infrastructure and some incentives so we can actually all do the right thing again when we're looking at say moving away from meat and having a more plant-based diet then we 01:02:14 need some taxation to remove some of the unhealthy really over processed food we also need to live people out of extreme poverty in the developed world and developing world so 01:02:26 they actually have choices so i think it's a balancing gap between being really positive about behavior change making sure that people are empowered but at the same time not blaming people for climate change

i think the focus was very much on energy supply and to a limited extent on things like um yeah technologies and like vehicle 01:00:07 technologies for example but um much much less in terms of getting people to particularly in developed countries to use less energy and to change diet and to travel less and fly less and all these these things and i think part of 01:00:19 that and it is also reflected in the fact that it was fairly much absent in the uk's net zero strategy is that it is seen as being politically difficult that it might be a you know it might mean that they that politicians lose votes that 01:00:33 it's just too difficult to get people to change their behavior that it's threatening that it might mean lower standards of living um in developed countries etc so i think kind of it's still it's still seen as something and that that was quite explicit i think in 01:00:45 the forward to the uk strategy um so i think in terms of how we move beyond that that's that's difficult but i think it is about reframing behavior change and demand demand management in 01:00:58 much more positive terms to say this isn't a threat there are actually opportunities there are opportunities to improve people's health and well-being to create green jobs to reskill people in new sectors and 01:01:09 and so on and it is not about you know reducing uh quality of life or well-being it's not about people losing jobs etc so this is i think there's a job here to kind of reframe it in terms of those those opportunities and those 01:01:22 co-benefits so that would be my my initial thought

i might add in october 2021 the climate change committee noted that the government's net zero strategy contained an 00:59:28 insufficient amount of demand management to deliver the uk uk's decarbonisation commitments my question to the panel is was there a big demand management hole in cop26 and if so what can be done to engage 00:59:41 politicians and policymakers more widely in this important piece of the decarbonization jigsaw

i would kind of point to organizations like c40 cities italy and the global covenant of mayors for climate energy as um 00:58:12 you know as those kinds of alternative spaces were hugely exciting things are happening at the municipal level that can potentially be scaled up to the level of a nation-state um and so i think there's a great deal we can learn 00:58:24 from cities and cross-collaboration between urban environments is hugely important um not least because cities urban environments and mega cities in particular have more in common 00:58:36 with each other than many nation states do so the potential for collaboration um and uh learning from one another is i think uh more significant at that scale 00:58:48 and i'm very positive and enthusiastic about the level of energy and enthusiasm that currently exists in municipal um politics and entities to deliver net zero commitments

just to put a couple of numbers here on on for context in the year 2020 the world installed about 250 gigawatts of solar 00:48:50 around the world that was about four times what had been installed and a decade before that roughly speaking to be on track for 1.5 degrees we need to increase it again by four times so we need to go from 250 00:49:03 gigawatts to a thousand gigawatts installed every single year um from the year 2030 onwards so we have in the past managed to have this huge ramp up in terms of wind and solar deployment we've 00:49:14 done that four-fold increase we need to do it again now that is not easy as you say but i would kind of turn this around a bit and say there are huge opportunities here whenever we're thinking about this level of deployment of renewables um of 00:49:28 electric vehicles of a lot of the clean energy technologies there are opportunities here for for countries for companies that want to move ahead with this quickly those that move forward first are going to be in a great 00:49:40 position they will get the skills coming through they'll get people coming through and they'll get that domestic industries being developed and that will help them that will provide them with a commercial advantage so i wouldn't see this as a negative thing i think there's 00:49:52 a huge opportunity here there's a huge amount of optimism there should be about the potential for renewables for electric um electrification for many of the other clean energy technologies

my quest is a very practical one to give to you some background we have a new government which comes into power next week and the green party has a major contribution to that and 00:47:14 the renewable energy gain is very ambitious 80 percent to 2030 but it's not enough really to meet the requirements to avoid uh to meet the 1.5 degree 00:47:27 goal but still uh even if you have this less ambitious goal then we have a problems in logistics we 00:47:38 we have to install within the next 15 years about 400 gigawatts of photovoltaics uh that's it's simply not possible even if the politicians signed that there are not enough 00:47:50 engineers are not enough installers and not production capacity and so on and uh uh i see this in many countries in the world there should be some 00:48:02 something to bridge that gap from uh from that uh former times i'm been together with hermann chair which uh set up this uh arena this international renewable 00:48:14 energy agencies just to give numbers out what what is possible and to to give some help to the politicians and i think this is also in this um other challenge now how to implement how 00:48:26 to make this possible that we meet the climate goals

we have a very 00:38:26 unwieldy process of more than close to 200 countries with very stark differences sometimes and very different starting points so i think all of this doesn't really 00:38:39 make a good sort of negotiation process and if we if we go to the next cup my sense is that the process is extremely slow and we are 00:38:50 more or less at say setting ourselves up for failure but also you know we are going to one cup after another we with a great sense of a predictability of something that we know it's not going 00:39:03 to work at the pace at which it needs to work

i 00:35:57 think that's really important but i want to come back to a bigger issue which is the lack of the hundred billion dollars and also loss and damage and i think that actually goes back to a lack 00:36:09 of knowledge and education in the developed world about our history and i think this is incredibly important that we need to think not just about the science but actually educating people 00:36:20 about colonization about how much we've actually admitted i think that if we can get the developed world to actually understand uh the crimes of our past to 00:36:32 be able to understand why there is this trust issue i think that's actually critical and it sounds really strange to deal with history to actually save the planet to deal with climate change but 00:36:44 i've become more convinced having heard politicians who supposedly studied history and politics at university must admit it was a very strange small oxford university you know they're not very 00:36:56 good but again i think we really have that whole education piece to do before we can acknowledge those crimes and move forward

contrasting 00:28:28 climate change against uh the kobe 19 pandemic is very revealing while both of them are now considered to be a crisis and they are very different in nature 00:28:40 the pandemic is an immediate threat and the government failure to respond to the the kubernetes pandemic is in the eyes of the constituencies 00:28:54 a real failure and and they will uh lose their future votes and because of this failure for these politicians while climate change is more of a 00:29:07 creeping uh risks it's coming slowly it is a crisis and uh and it's also everybody's crisis right then this is a a typical 00:29:21 collective action problem failure to come up with the funding for addressing climate change in the eyes of the local and domestic 00:29:33 constituencies is not considered to be such a bad thing so uh and then a lot of politicians will choose to be a free writer on this then 00:29:45 uh you know what happens and we all understand this too well will be the tragedy of the comments i think the it's really the nature of the this uh two problems to crisis are very different 00:29:58 and this is really really the talent the i think the ultimate talent for the human beings to when it comes to solve this collective action problem

until we have a full political understanding of the business and 00:27:11 importance of managing the climate crisis we're not going to get this and that understanding means we're actually all in this boat together it is true that the developing nations are likely 00:27:25 to suffer much more than the developed nations but nevertheless we are talking about a future for humanity that is looking very bleak if we draw a comparison with the 00:27:37 really poor management of this covet 19 pandemic i would say once again there the governments of the world did not understand that if they had acted quickly we could well have seen this 00:27:51 pandemic over in a few months and instead we saw the governments of the world all acting independently and really all over the place there's no real political understanding 00:28:03 and until we get that i think we're really not going to get the action that's needed

a slightly different position i have on this is that how do we if we were to be able to use the sdrs as i have also in my research 00:24:34 recommended we have to think about what is the purpose the purpose i would believe should not be for direct project financing because you will quickly run out of that money 00:24:46 in against the scale of investment that is needed the purpose of spending 500 billion dollars or a trillion dollars how do you spend a trillion would be to de-risk three kinds of 00:24:58 things number one de-risking against the physical challenges of the climate crisis similar to what terror was talking about how do you build up the local capacity to build 00:25:10 the resilience whether it is in the arctic north or whether it is in the tropical south the second kind of de-risking is for investments in emerging markets and developing countries where the sun 00:25:24 shines the most but money does not flow because we believe that it is risky to invest in solar projects or wind projects in the tropical countries now these are these risks might be real they 00:25:38 might be perceived but it has nothing to do with the solar developer it is to do with currency fluctuations and political crises and so forth so if you can de-risk that you bring down the cost of finance and you can crowd in 00:25:51 several fold of that 500 billion dollars in terms of institutional capital investment the third kind of de-risking is that of communities those that are currently reliant 00:26:04 on fossil fuels coal miners oil workers etc we talk about the lobbying by the fossil fuel companies but we talk very little of the conditions of the fossil fuel communities how do we create an 00:26:17 insurance cushion for them how do we create upskilling prospects for them how do we create unemployment insurance for them those are the things that are part of our collective obligation in order to 00:26:30 accelerate the transition away so if we can strategically deploy the sdrs i fully endorse what the prime minister barbados suggested i would in fact argue that the number should be double what 00:26:42 she asked for and we should be imaginative in how we deploy that capital

we have to think of the road between cop 26 in glasgow and cop 00:20:28 27 in egypt we have to think of a development cop a cop that focuses on equity that focuses on the resources and that focuses on how do we 00:20:40 ensure that the trust equation is not undermined in order that we can all collectively deliver on the remaining carbon equation that is left with us

if the trust equation is undermined then there is little hope that the 00:15:22 integrity of the carbon equation will be maintained

early detection

arctic fox is now gone it's no longer nesting in in 00:09:38 finnish army and arctic areas and uh its habitats are overtaken by red fox more southern and boreal species so the species on the move is one of the factors that's really altering the kind 00:09:51 of life that we know here

with its key B customers

the A level activities network vertically with their customers

a super Improvement Alliance.

Slaying the ‘rent dragon’ — by capturing more of the ‘rents’ extracted from communities and using them to eliminate the rents charged to communities — would enable a latent pile of ‘gold’, in the form of money and human energy, to go to productive activities that deliver community and social benefit.

‘Show me a first-generation fortune and I’ll show you a successful partnership between a talented individual and society’s invisible venture capitalist, the commons.’— William H. Gates, Sr

Land rezoning and infrastructure decisions, such as rezoning from industrial or farmland to residential land, or building a new transport hub, generate windfall gains to private owners. While some of this is captured in the form of development contributions, the private value capture is much greater than what it contributes back to public coffers.Rezoning of land and infrastructure investment decisions undertaken by government create enormous amounts of private value:Throughout Australia, when land is rezoned from industrial to high-rise residential, a charge is levied to help fund the required infrastructure. A well-situated industrial site in Sydney’s inner west was bought for $8.5 million, rezoned high density residential, then sold again for $48.5 million. The 470% windfall was the result of a government decision: rezoning.

There is a broken ‘feedback’ loop in both the domestic and commons sphere, where value generated by social reproduction at both the household and community scale is rendered invisible on the books.

Many studies have been undertaken on the value of unpaid domestic and care work, which is also non-market, non-transactional and not included in formal economic accounts. Similarly, the unpaid care work for the wider community is missing off the balance sheet. Both are essential for the functioning of the economy that is counted.In Australia, this was estimated to be almost half of the country’s GDP, with those statistics from over twenty years ago. More recent statistics for the state of Victoria reveal a similar picture.

One reason why citizen driven and community based initiatives struggle is that there is no ‘reverse value capture’ mechanism — a way to capture value for regenerative activity undertaken to improve communities — because it often falls outside the realm of market transactions.

Both dematerialization of production and immaterialization of consumption are important for a transition towards policy goals such as sustainable development, circular economy, and climate change mitigation and adaptation. However, observations of dematerialization or immaterialization do not necessarily ensure that the total use of natural resources has decreased. If economic growth is faster than dematerialization or immaterialization, its increasing effect can override the decreasing effects of dematerialization and immaterialization on the total use of natural resources. In the ASA approach, the effect of economic growth is called the gross rebound effect. If the gross rebound effect exceeds the effect of dematerialization or immaterialization, the total use of material resources and related environmental impact still increases.

Sustainability window analysis is based on the advanced sustainability analysis (ASA) approach. The ASA approach was developed in Finland Futures Research Centre [31,32,33] providing a general framework for analyzing sustainability.

But how does the author know if we can actually provide in all these basic human needs within planetary boundaries and have this wiggle room left?Maybe the stuff needed for the Social Foundation already causes overshoot and the inner circle should actually be outside the outer circle?

Furthermore, I believe the author is spot on questioning the logic in the circular shape of the Doughnut.

Would it not be just if people would be able to explore a bit more of the world than just their own town?

However, I would say that the distributive and regenerative society that Raworth proposes would depend a lot on resilient and self-reliant local communities and local government acting as a ‘partner’ as is nowadays talked about a lot.These communities and government would need to figure out together how to let amongst others local agriculture, manufacturing and managing the Commons flourish. The book instead pretty much leaves out local communities in which the households are embedded and government focus is almost completely on nation states.

social change typically spreads as ‘complex contagions,’ requiring multiple sources of social reinforcement to induce adoption,”

Social convention, which has for so long worked against us, can if flipped become our greatest source of power, normalising what now seems radical and weird. If we can simultaneously trigger a cascading regime shift in both technology and politics, we might stand a chance. It sounds like a wild hope. But we have no choice. Our survival depends on raising the scale of civil disobedience until we build the greatest mass movement in history, mobilising the 25% who can flip the system.

Another paper explored the possibility that the Fridays for Future climate protests could trigger this kind of domino dynamics. It showed how, in 2019, Greta Thunberg’s school strike snowballed into a movement that led to unprecedented electoral results for Green parties in several European nations. Survey data revealed a sharp change of attitudes, as people began to prioritise the environmental crisis. Fridays for Future came close, the researchers suggest, to pushing the European political system into a “critical state”. It was interrupted by the pandemic, and the tipping has not yet happened. But witnessing the power, the organisation and the fury of the movements gathered in Glasgow, I suspect the momentum is building again.

in the old view of enlightenment reason emotion got in the way of reason and motion was the 00:08:34 enemy of reason reason was what you know sort of like mr. Spock on Star Trek you know who is you know super reason no emotion or whatever not true suppose 00:08:49 that you had a stroke or a brain injury that wouldn't allow you to feel emotion and there are such strokes and brain injuries rep Antonio Damasio and his 00:09:01 wife Hana figured out some years ago and published in a book called des cartes error is that you can't reason without emotion emotion is necessary and it's 00:09:14 easy to see why if you cannot feel emotion then like and not like mean nothing to you and you do not know what to want think about it 00:09:27 if you couldn't feel anything if you wouldn't know what it meant to like or not like something or if somebody else or you couldn't tell if someone else would like or not like what you were doing you wouldn't know what to want you couldn't set a goal and this is what 00:09:41 happens to people with such brain injuries they act randomly they don't know how to plan they don't know how to structure their lives or set rational 00:09:53 goals because rationality requires emotion very very deep finding

many of you were brought up with the 00:03:57 idea of Enlightenment reason critical thinking an Enlightenment reason had a number of properties and it turns out that most of them are not true 00:04:10 Enlightenment reason is useful in many situations we'll talk about why it's useful and why it's been popular and so on but it's inadequate grossly inadequate for understanding what hew 00:04:22 means for human beings to understand the world and to think so what we're going to do is talk about real reason which is coming out of the neural and sciences and what the properties are so 00:04:36 there's a certain myth that comes out of enlightenment reason it says you know I think therefore I am says Descartes reason is conscious you know what you think it's just not true for most of 00:04:50 your thought it's unconscious mainly about 98% consciousness is a tip of the iceberg you know how do you get 98% there are two ways one if you look at 00:05:03 what you're conscious of versus what your brain is doing the roll is about fifty to one your brain is doing 50 times as much as you're conscious of and there's another way to look at it if you 00:05:15 take a sentence and you say what can the next sentence be in a paragraph and what do you have to fill in to understand all the possible next sentences the answer is that you need to fill in 50 times as 00:05:29 much as it's in that sentence roughly so it's about 98% unconscious you're not even aware that you're filling this in but you're not moreover consciousness could not in 00:05:42 principle in principle be you know you you couldn't have reason being conscious because most of your reason is done in parallel circuitry but consciousness is 00:05:55 linear so you have massively parallel circuitry but you're tracing out a linear path through it and that is means you can only be aware of a tiny portion of what you're thinking now

meaning is a form and understanding involves mental simulation that is the use of that same part of the brain that you would have 00:45:27 for doing it that's remarkable but it's an interesting theory of meaning and that is the basis of the neural theory of meaning in the neural theory of language and it's crucial for that and 00:45:39 it's profound in many ways

we saw in the mirror neuron cases that action and perception are linked with the same neurons are 00:39:42 firing during actions and perceptions of the same actions that's very important because it turns out that concepts have everything to do with that and so let's 00:39:56 continue as a result that is why there are things called basic level categories so let me tell you about basic level categories it was discovered by eleanor 00:40:09 rosch back in the mid-1970s that category hierarchies like furniture chair and desk chair or like vehicle car 00:40:23 and sports car had different properties that at the middle level of car and chair you could get mental images all right you can all get a mental image of 00:40:36 a chair you can all get a mental image of a car can you get a mental image of a general piece of furniture that is neutral between chairs and tables and 00:40:48 beds and and lamps you can't do it okay can you get a mental image that is neutral between cars and boats and planes and motorcycles and bicycles and 00:41:04 all kinds of vehicles can't do it the highest level of which you can get a mental image is that middle level okay and not only that there are motor 00:41:17 programs you are now eggs and using your motor program for sitting in a chair if you're driving your car you have motor programs for driving a car okay those you don't have general motor 00:41:31 programs for interacting with generalized pieces of furniture you have different ones for chairs tables bed lamps and so on okay so there's a level 00:41:43 at which you have mental images and you perceive things by your stall perception at this middle level called the basic level and it's what it's the level at which children first learn concepts why 00:41:56 should you have what a motor programs have to do with your stall perception and mental images the answer is mirror neurons which link actions motor actions 00:42:08 to what you can see and what you can imagine mirror neurons explain why there should be this phenomenon right very profound result of that that shows that 00:42:22 there's something about the nature of categories themselves that has to do with the neural system

go back to the idea that 00:38:46 meaning is a matter of truth in the world and that if you think about it a sentence like the chair is green in a traditional view coming out of 00:38:59 anglo-american philosophy it would say that's true just in case the entity referred by the referred to in the world by the word chair is in the set of green things in the world there is no set of 00:39:14 green things in the world that account of meaning cannot be true but it's taught in most philosophy classes in the 00:39:25 West it's taught as the theory of meaning but it's false

so let's look at some results from neuroscience and look at some of the brain basics because at this point we want to ask how do we make sense of all of this how does it work 00:37:00 what are we doing and what is the present state of the research on it so here are some basics color is not in the world there are no colors out there in 00:37:13 the world there is no green ingress okay there is no blue in the sky there is no red in the sunset our in the Rose etc 00:37:26 color is our product of several different things there are wavelength reflectances that is each object reflect certain wavelengths but individual wavelengths aren't colors colors are 00:37:41 something new since you know and they go across many wavelengths so there are we wave length reflectances color depends upon things in you in your retina there 00:37:53 are certain color cones that respond to certain ranges of wavelengths you have to have the color cones to see color if you don't have all your color or your three color cones your works called 00:38:05 colorblind next there are neural circuitry connected to those color cones and that neural circuitry is what computes color color doesn't exist without the color 00:38:18 cones the neural circuitry and the reflectances in the world it's an interaction between the world and you and your through your body and brain but the color is only in your mind in your 00:38:32 brain in your understanding of the world it isn't out there independent of you that's wild

it was assumed that rational thought was value free it was just you know about what was true in the world and so 00:26:06 on and it's not because you're concerned with empathy and morality when you're thinking and and with emotion rational thought is really value-based 00:26:19 now whoa let's go back one there's a further view Descartes assumed that all rationality was the same for everybody that it was universal that what made us 00:26:34 human beings was being rational and logical and that therefore everybody had the same mode of reasoning now if that's true then all you have to do let's say 00:26:47 in politics is tell something somebody to facts and everybody will reason to the same conclusion right sure not true that is if enlightenment reason were 00:27:01 right that would happen it doesn't happen it turns out that it is not the case that all concepts are you are universal and that all of them are 00:27:13 accessible to everybody and then there's another view of you coming out of the postmodern thought that says no concepts are universal they're all arbitrary that's also false many concepts are 00:27:26 universal and many are not a very and it's an empirical question which is which and they vary from language to language and that's important you need to know that it is not the case that 00:27:41 everything with all thought is universal and it's not the case that that's all language particular or particular that is you need to know empirically what part is shared with other people who 00:27:53 speak other languages and come from other cultures and what part is not and that is an important empirical study so the big myth is this but there is some objective rational structure to the 00:28:07 world out there and that human reason can fit it directly and characterize it literally without frames or metaphors and reason about it adequately with formal logic alone that's just false the 00:28:21 world is real that is whatever it is our bodies and brains provide understandings of the world which depend on frames metaphors image schemas prototypes narratives all of those things and it is 00:28:35 that that permits us to create

reason can also serve empathy and social connection as well as self-interest and let me tell you how this was discovered 00:21:11 because empathy turns out to be physical back in 1996 in Parma Italy a remarkable thing happened in the neuroscience lab 00:21:24 there and I've been there Vittorio galazy was running an experiment for professor ritsu lottie's in which they had macaque monkeys and they were 00:21:36 training the monkeys too they trained them to push buttons and peel bananas and grab rings and do certain things and then they had probes in the monkeys brains neuron by neuron in what is 00:21:50 called the premotor cortex which choreographed actions it sort of puts actions together and they were looking at which neurons fired when the monkeys did which actions they had it hooked up to a computer so every time the monkey 00:22:03 moved and did this versus peel the banana etc you would see exactly which neurons were firing the monkey breast something you would see which neurons are firing and if he grasped with the right hand to be one set left hand 00:22:15 another set et cetera and this was going just fine then it was lunchtime and in Italy you take a nice lunch so you take a nice lunch for toriel comes back didn't have dessert as a pile 00:22:29 of bananas thank you take a banana he starts to peel it and he finds that the computer is registering click click click click click that the monkey's brain which we're supposed to register 00:22:42 register monkey movements is registering his movements and when they checked it out it turns out these were exactly at least 1/3 of the neurons firing 30% 00:22:54 actually will were the neurons for peeling bananas then they did further experiments and they found out that there was an interesting phenomenon that 00:23:06 there's a connection between vision and action that the same neurons that are firing when you peel a banana are firing when you see someone else peel a banana 00:23:18 well not quite all of them 30% the other 70% are doing interesting variations on that but those 30% are interesting they're called mirror neurons they mirror what you're doing and they link 00:23:31 vision in action and then they found out why there is a neural pathway Direction directly between the premotor cortex and the parietal cortex just behind it that 00:23:45 integrates a vision and they are you know tuned as you're growing up to length vision and action so that vision and action are linked together but then the other interesting thing is that 00:23:58 mirror neurons are connected to the emotional regions and emotionally something wild was discovered back in 00:24:09 the 1950s and 60s by Paul Ekman namely that we have a physiology that corresponds to our emotions Darwin first hypothesized this that around the world 00:24:23 when people are happy they smile when they're sad they frown when they're angry they bare their teeth etc and animals do a lot of the same things 00:24:35 and that basically there are other physiological adji of emotions when you're angry your skin temperature rises half a degree which is why you say my blood boils you know why you get burned 00:24:49 up and so on there's a reason for that those metaphors are for anger are based on your actual physiology and that physiology of anger is tied to the mirror neurons because the physiology 00:25:02 has to do with what your body is doing and if it's connected to vision you can see with someone else's body cuz doing and you can tell if somebody is writhing in pain or deliriously happy or really 00:25:15 sad or whatever you are emotionally connected to other people Briah your brain you have a brain and everybody else has the capacity for 00:25:29 what's called empathy it's a physical capacity linking you to others and that's how social connection works that is a physical thing and actually most 00:25:41 the reason Oh a huge amount is based on social connection and empathy it's not just self-interest and that's important for many reasons having to do with 00:25:52 morality and with politics

how many of those metaphors are there in your brain tens of thousands and then we're going to point out in a little while that they have 00:20:06 elementary metaphors that that make them up there are actually smaller metaphors that fit together

very important to see that those schemas structure bigger schemas called frames 00:14:38 now frames were figured out in the mid-1970s in by a number of people but in particular Charles Fillmore a 00:14:51 linguist in my department and one of the world's great linguists figured out that every word is defined in terms of a structure like the frame and let me tell you what a frame is it's very simple 00:15:05 imagine your understanding of a hospital well there are certain roles played by people in that hospital there are doctors and patients and receptionists and nurses there there are rooms like 00:15:18 operating rooms and reset you know there are instruments like scalpels and so on and there are things you know about hospitals you know for example that surgeons operate on patients in 00:15:32 operating rooms with things like scalpels okay every frame is a structure like that and if I say the word surgery immediately everything about it will 00:15:44 come up you'll know that there's a surgeon there's a nurse there's a patient there's an operation going on etc you know something and a lot what one word is defined relative to a frame 00:15:57 what film are discovered was that every word in every language is defined relative to some frame that is a crucial discovery and what's really important 00:16:09 about that and and important for politics is that well consider the following when I teach this the first thing I do is I give my students an 00:16:21 assignment I say ok everybody ready don't think of an elephant you all can do that right you had a problem because the word elephant evokes an image and knowledge of frame in which 00:16:39 you understand what an elephant is and if you negate the frame you have to activate it anyway okay the word activates the frame even if you negate it and that's important in for political 00:16:54 reasons that we'll come back to in a while but words activate frames and fern frames are a ways in which you structure the world you cannot think without 00:17:05 frames you cannot speak without frames being there and those frames are physical there are circuitry in your brain that carries out all those inferences and imposes that structure and that 00:17:20 circuitry once you learn a frame is there mostly for life

you can only reason about and understand what your body and brain allow you cannot understand just anything at all and this as you'll see 00:07:27 is crucial in politics

thought is physical it is a matter of 00:06:23 brain circuitry

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the next step on the ladder of consciousness is to add some perception at a distance, like vision. Vision adds context and depth to our world. With vision comes a sense of the space we and our food exists in. It adds a whole new dimension to awareness, and is a huge step towards more familiar consciousness. 00:05:01 An optical apparatus, like an eye, enables us to visualise our goal and lock onto it. But even at this stage, a self is only able to pursue its food as long as it sees it. So, the next logical step needs to happen on the inside. To visualise food in its absence, for example, a self needs to create some sort of inner representation of the world. 00:05:28 Now, an animal can continue looking for food, even when it escapes its sensory range. Because of this inner representation of what is relevant in the world, it can remain focused on its food and its desire to get it. Our self now exists in a world it can get familiar with. The ability to remember things has emerged. 00:05:53 Thanks to memory, animals can be distracted from the pursuit for a few seconds, but quickly continue their path afterwards. A related phenomenon is called 'object permanence'. This describes our awareness that things continue to exist even when we can't see them. This cognitive skill is enjoyed by some mammals and birds, and perhaps other animals too. 00:06:18 Human babies tend to develop this ability around the time they turn eight months, while baby chickens show this ability within a day or two of being born. The capacity to remember a thing in its absence suggests at least a basic sense of time. A sense of time is a big step on the ladder of consciousness. It may also enable a self to look forward from the present moment and anticipate the future. 00:06:46 Adult chickens, for example, are able to resist a meal put in front of them if they expect to receive a bigger meal as a prize for holding back for a while. This sort of delayed gratification means there is an ability to visualize a reward that only exists in the future, which can be quite a challenge even for adult humans. Western scrub jays are experts in delayed gratification. 00:07:11 They show an even more elaborate sense of the future when they hide food in a cache to retrieve it at a later date. The scrub jays will even rehide their food if they become aware that a potential thief has been watching them. This means that they know that there are other hungry selves out there, who are aware and see the world from their own, different perspective. Crafty scrub jays can sort of read the mind of their fellow birds. 00:07:38 This ability to mind-read is crucial for complex levels of consciousness. By putting yourself in the position of others, you can outsmart a rich competitor, or empathise with a hungry friend. Language takes the ability to read minds and represent what is absent to a whole new level. Words enable us to construct hypotheses about the world, 00:08:02 make detailed plans, and to communicate them with others.

The original function of consciousness was probably to direct a mobile self that was short of energy to a fresh supply of food. On the smaller scales of life, you don't need to be aware to find food. Trichopax adhaerens - one of the simplest of all animals moves around haphazardly. 00:02:54 It slows down in the presence of food, and speeds up in its absence. This is highly effective, and makes the tiny creature spend more time where there is food spend more time where there is food than where there is not. But it never moves in a particular direction towards a particular target, and there's no need for it to be conscious of its environment.

Detachment, we will have to assume, begins at the beginning, i.e., with the Big Bang. Prior to the Big Bang, all existence (whatever that means) was confined to an infinitely dense, infinitesimally small singularity in which there was no space or time and all four basic forces of nature (as we now understand them) were united into one. The universe was born, space-time emerges, in an explosion of detachment. Without getting too bogged down in the technical details of high-energy physics and cosmology, the take-home lesson is that a logic of detachments-built-upon-detachments is set into motion from... the beginning. It has been theorized that cosmic detachment began with the detachment of gravity from the unity of fundamental forces, resulting in the formation of elementary particles and anti-particles followed by an inflation into space-time triggered by the further detachment of the strong nuclear force. As yet inexplicable asymmetries in the appearance of baryons (matter) versus antibaryons (anti-matter) were a sine qua non for the early persistence of our universe. It is now believed that the possibility of mass was predicated upon the detachment of the particle called the Higgs boson and with that the associated Higgs field. The detachment of the Higgs boson, and thus of mass, then constitutes a horizon for all subsequent material detachments in our universe.Physicists characterize the possibility state space of a simple system in terms of its “degrees of freedom.” For example, a simple atom like hydrogen can respond to a perturbation (such as being hit by a photon) by moving in space along three axes (3), rotating (4), or elevating the energy level of an electron (5). It is thus accorded five degrees of freedom. A simple diatomic molecule, like H2, can also vibrate along its common axis so adds an additional degree of freedom. Detachment is always about the emergence of higher degrees of relative independence.We can already see a reciprocal relationship between detachment and integration. Two atoms each with five degrees of freedom, shed their independent degrees of freedom through integrating, by way of a covalent bond, to form a new entity, the diatomic molecule, with six degrees of freedom. The more degrees of freedom the greater the detachment. As our universe has evolved it has given rise to constituent entities with greater and greater abilities to buffer themselves against “ambient winds” (be that bombardment by radiation or predation by voracious carnivores). Following the same logic, a particle with rest mass that creates a well in space-time is more detached than a particle (like a photon) with no rest mass. A macromolecule, like a protein-based enzyme, whose folding history affects its future actions is more detached than a simpler molecule whose structure is solely determined by thermodynamic necessity (and thus has no history). A major transition in detachment occurred when a system emerged that actively constituted its own boundary (Plessner’s positionality) and actively sustained its ability to do so. We typically associate this level of detachment with what we recognize as “life”.

Plessner included fundaments about biological structure, organization, physiology, ecology, and ethology in his attempt at elaborating a non-dualist, and systematically coherent framework for all forms of life (Plessner 2019).Using positionalilty as a point of departure for elaborating a logic of life, including human life, is in fact tantamount to simultaneously treating the question of integration, or unification, as a point of departure. As Plessner makes clear, it is only with the living state that boundaries become something other than arbitrary and contingent. To the extent that life is defined by anything, it is defined by the dynamic enactment of a distinction between inner and outer, Plessner’s so-called “double aspectivity.” “Positionality” then is the categorical universal and sine qua non of the living state and conceptually defines the boundary between physical phenomena that, for all intents and purposes, are partes extra partes, from those for which some non-trivial level of system unity and integrity has been achieved. Plessner does not specifically take up the language of normativity and yet one can find it to be implicit in his account. The realization of a life, even at the most rudimentary, let’s say the simple, single-celled level, already entails a form of active mediation between reaching outward and enforcing a boundary, that suggests the regulatory enactment of an implicit norm. For Plessner, there is a logic of dialectical building of positional levels upon levels of reflection that culminate in the human level of “excentric positionality” whereby the “shared” (and invariably normative) perspective of the universal Other is always reflexively embodied and reflectively available. Which is to say that Plessner has long since offered a body-mind neutral account in which human-level normativity is located on a natural continuum in which questions of dynamic system integration are at least implicitly fundamental. Where Plessner fell short, I suggest, is in (only) deriving a largely monological account of the emergence of human-level normativity.Footnote 6 The following may be viewed as in part an attempt to offer the complementary perspective, albeit with the full reconciliatory and synthetic engagement to appear in subsequent work.

What we require is an approach that can bring both of these together in some way. In recent work Arran Gare has made a compelling case for how this involves a renewed acceptance and embrace of speculative thinking (Gare 2018). For physicist Lee Smolin and philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger (2015), whose collaborative work over eight years has resulted in a fascinating book entitled The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time, bringing together the big picture of the universe as a whole with the micro-level advances of physics, entails no less than a return to the practice of Natural Philosophy proper. In referring to “normativity as a force of nature”, I have thus far only used as a teaser, or perhaps appetizer, the idea that normativity might be able to span the chasm between the bottom up and the top down, and thus serve as a conceptual lynchpin of a renewed speculative natural philosophy. There will be more to come. But it should also be acknowledged that attempting to bring together a top-down with a bottom-up approach, even to also address questions of integration and unification is not entirely new.

let's stop let's just stop doing it and let's let's find other ways of measuring quality of life other than being flooded 00:21:22 by this great tide of plastic and metal and electronics 99 of which we simply do not need to live a good life

this is a fundamental issue of justice and equity so the top one percent uh in 00:09:22 terms of wealth around the world use 15 produce 15 of the greenhouse gas emissions which is twice as much as the bottom 50 percent whose total 00:09:34 emissions are just seven percent of the total so we're looking at uh a very small number of people grabbing the lion's share of natural wealth they claim to be wealth creators they're actually taking 00:09:47 wealth from the rest of us they're saying we're going to have all this atmospheric space for ourselves and incidentally all these other resources all the mahogany and the gold and the 00:09:58 diamonds and the bluefin tuna sushi and whatever else that they're consuming on a massive scale and this is driven by to a very large extent by their remarkable disproportionate use of aviation 00:10:12 there's one set of figures suggesting that the richest one percent are responsible for 50 of the world's aviation emissions but also by their yachts for example the average 00:10:24 um commonal garden super yacht um kept on standby for a billionaire to step onto whenever he wants um produces 7 000 tons of carbon dioxide per year 00:10:38 if we're to meet even the conventional accounting for staying within 1.5 degrees of global heating our maximum emissions per person are around 2.3 00:10:49 tons so one super yacht is what over 3 000 people's worth of emissions this is just grossly outrageously unfair and we should rebel 00:11:01 against the habit of the very rich of taking our natural wealth from us

um kevin anderson 00:12:43 if you can talk more about this issue both you and george assad raymond and so many other climate activists talking about this issue of wealth 00:12:55 you say per capita is a flawed metric as most polluting industries have been moved to developing nations so it's not reflective of the rich nation's emissions take all of this on 00:13:09 yeah i mean that's a really key issue and i think if i focus in here on the uk where i know it's a place obviously i know much better that what we've done in the uk we've closed down a lot of our industry and then we import the manufactured goods from elsewhere in the 00:13:22 world and then we turn around to those parts of the world and then we blame them for the emissions in manufacturing the goods that we are enjoying and that's everything from our electronic goods to parts for our cars as our clothes so you know the uk is 00:13:35 effectively moved to a bar and banking culture and and and offshore virtually everything else and so we when we looking at our total amount of emissions we have to take account of the carbon footprint of our lifestyles and that 00:13:47 does include the emissions that we associated with things that we import and export i mean you take that into account you tend to find that most wealthy countries have a much larger carbon footprint than when you just look at the energy they use within their 00:14:00 boundaries and i think it's really key again when we think about these issues of equity we we that we take this what's often referred to as a consumption-based accounting method we take that into account because it is unfair to be 00:14:12 penalizing poor parts of the world for them making things to help us have a better quality of life over here and when we do that then the challenges get even more striking in terms of what we have to do and it also also brings out 00:14:25 even further the issues of equity the disparity between the richer parts of the world and the poorer parts of the world but i also think on the equity point it's really worth bringing out that it's not as if everyone in the uk is even 00:14:37 there isn't just one public in the uk there are multiple publics there were those of us who are the wealthy ones in our own country that are responsible for the lion's share of missions within the uk that will be true chain for the u.s for germany for japan australia and so 00:14:50 within all of our countries there are large swathes of the country who are the average and below average consumers and for them the response to climate change is very different from those of us who are in our own countries are responsible for the lion's share of 00:15:03 emissions so i think we have to differentiate not just between countries but even within our countries and my concern there is that who are the people that frame the climate dubai debate they're the climate scientists and the academics they're the 00:15:14 entrepreneurs the business leaders the journalists the barristers they're all the people that are in the very high emitting category so we frame the debate and we never ever frame the debate with equity at its core and with regardless 00:15:26 of our maths or our moral sorry regardless of our moral position the maths tell us if we are to deliver on the commitments then equity has to be a key part of our responses but we never talk about that because we are in that 00:15:38 high emitting group

So to sum things up what caused life's major evolutionary transitions the answer is cooperation major transitions begin when a group of organisms join forces to better survive and reproduce if cooperation continues long enough a new super organism may Emerge one that can then go [on] to reproduce and evolve as a whole and 00:07:42 The pathway that led [to] animals along with humankind [at] least three major transitions have been identified resulting in four layers of Life within your own body

in 00:05:44 1998 researchers set up a mini Ecosystem with small mouths protists and single-celled algae the protists could easily swallow individual algal cells But had trouble eating cells that happen to stick together after reproducing in less than just 20 generations the algae evolved multicellular cooperation they form groups of eight tightly connected cells that could not [be] eaten by the protists [a] 00:06:10 similar experiment on single-celled yeast in 2011 Showed that [just] 32 days after multi-celled colonies evolved clear division of labor also evolved giving rise to unique cell types specializing in different tasks these two experiments show us how multi-celled organisms may have first evolved, but what about mitochondria and their permanent merger with eukaryotes In a long-term study ending in 2008 a protist that normally eats Bacteria was seen swallowing a species of algae 00:06:41 Apparently on accident that it was not able to digest Inside the protists the algae was able to grow and reproduce when the protists reproduced as well both daughter cells contained algae after several years and many many generations researchers found that when Bacteria was scarce Protists containing algae were much more likely to survive than those without They avoided starvation by feeding off the waste products the algae produced This was the start of a [Brand-new] relationship 00:07:14 Strikingly similar to what we find between [our] [cells] and the mitochondria [that] live inside

Each new layer of Life is the result of what scientists call a major evolutionary transition? What was the cause of these transitions the answer is? Cooperation a Major Transition starts when free living creatures team up to form a cooperative group in the early stages of cooperation Participants are free to come and go as they [please] [if] a group sticks together long enough however 00:04:51 Division of labor will often evolve different participants begin specializing in different tasks as time goes on Individuals may become so specialized that they can no longer survive on their own [if] the entire group becomes locked into cooperation Depending fully on one another to survive and reproduce a new super organism has been forged and they made your evolutionary transition is complete 00:05:16 From this point on the entire group will evolve together as one Models describing natural situations that might promote the evolution of major transitions have been put forth by scientists such as John Maynard Smith [fior] Sonck Mary stuart West and w d hamilton using these models Researchers have been able to Mimic natural scenarios in the lab Allowing us to directly witness the beginnings of major transitions [evolved]

Today we tend to shrug this off as common knowledge, but think how amazing this is you are a Colony

two one way to explore these questions is to look at how information has changed due to the human mst and one way that it's changed is the 00:46:59 emergence of a fifth level of information dark information which peter talked about before is info that is generated by abiotic computer software and so this information level is only 00:47:13 possible from inscribed language and the technological innovations that that gave rise to that now can generate this kind of information 00:47:24 and there's two key components to dark information one is that it's produced by computer software with no direct human involvement and the second is that from the processes of 00:47:36 input to generated output can't be replicated or feasibly derived by humans so it's inherently dark even if some of the output were able to apply to real world problems 00:47:49 and so this kind of uh information is gaining traction so unsupervised machine learning algorithms are becoming increasingly capable of generating novel algorithms without added human input and 00:48:03 so here are some of the ways that we're currently applying this technology and we it's still in its infancy so we're likely far away from seeing a met where direct information is involved but 00:48:15 this does have the potential for in the future um helping keep humans alive on earth or expanding our niche even further and maybe far down the line seeing something like a 00:48:29 dependence or an inter mutualistic inter-specific mutualism met between biotic life and abiotic technology

we want to focus on how humans fit into our category goal framework here and we'll use this figure as a roadmap 00:42:18 starting with the center section looking that looks at how events that affect the species and clay level and so what stands out here for humans is our 00:42:28 complex spoken language which greatly enhances our communication and has long been thought of as a met due to leaps in the way that we transmit information between individuals 00:42:40 but this met really wouldn't have been possible without a major competitive transition so the specific regions in the brain that are associated with greater cognition and language ability 00:42:52 and also our larger brain size which is correlated with functionality and our spoken language allows human societies to gather greater amounts of level 3 or learned 00:43:07 information than would ever be possible within any one individual's lifetime and this really turns up the dial on the magnitude at which cultural evolution affects us as a 00:43:19 species and allows us to adapt and construct our environments in different ways cultural innovations are also not dependent on random beneficial mutations but can 00:43:32 arise intentionally and this has major impacts for how quickly and at what level we can affect our ecosystems 00:43:43 so when we come back to the figure and we've layered on complex spoken language now we can look at the level of ecosystem change that's occurred because of this and see if it's enough to bring 00:43:55 us to a major systems transition and here we argue that the answer is no if we would have just stopped at spoken language our global impact would never have reached the level 00:44:07 that it takes to drive an mst but we do argue that this spoken language was actually a facilitating evolutionary transition for events that directly paved the way 00:44:19 for an mst so human spoken language is a facilitating transition for symbolic representation of instructional information so the met and the mechd that make up 00:44:33 complex spoken language are actually a fit for being able to write things down and being able to write things down onto abiotic mediums allows us to increase the amount of information that 00:44:47 we can store the accuracy of the stored information and the efficiency of transmission and this has an especially high impact for oblique transmission because 00:44:59 being able to inscribe information can potentially immortalize it and then individuals far in the future can build upon it and so being able to build upon 00:45:12 uh generations of information through symbolic representation of language is really a key for the expansion of technological innovations that have expanded the realized niche of humans so 00:45:25 we have spread across every continent made major impacts on most ecosystems and a part of what has allowed us to do this is the technology that we've designed uh based upon large amounts of 00:45:39 inscribed language and some of these technologies actually allow us to manipulate or avoid the processes of natural selection and some of the those examples are listed here 00:45:53 and so when we go back to our figure and layer on the potential to inscribe language and then re-look at ecosystem level changes we think that here due to due to the 00:46:06 technological innovations and global expansion that's come with being the only species to store this much level three information that the answer is now yes 00:46:19 and when an mst occurs the context in which this entire cycle takes place completely shifts because now the global ecosystem is playing by a modified set of rules that are 00:46:33 set forth by the mst so this brings us to the question are humans the last mst or are there other mets and mechs forthcoming that will drive a new 00:46:45 major systems transition

our fourth point is that for something like eukaryotes and others where there is no immediate major system 00:25:30 transition we're really sort of saying is that they perhaps are critical to such a transition but not at the time necessarily that they have evolved so in essence we want to amp we want to bring in a new 00:25:43 term which we call facilitating evolutionary transition so it makes it is part of a major system transition but it clearly needs other 00:25:55 evolutionary events to go along with it and the final sort of point is that there are perhaps catalysts that are involved in this process and one of the major catalysts that may 00:26:12 have had effects throughout evolutionary history are viruses so viruses may have been key actors to help the transition from 00:26:23 rna to dna they may have uh produced or helped produce the nucleus in eukaryotes and we'll talk about a little bit later about the key role that viral genes play 00:26:36 in making sexual reproduction possible and even in placental mammals the evolution of a placenta so without viral genes being moved across 00:26:47 horizontally species some of these major transitions could never have happened so now we have sort of the complete integrated process of of our diagram and again the question 00:27:02 that we're really focusing on oftentimes is that last one yes when how and why do we get to a major system transition and how do nets mechs uh 00:27:15 fets and catalysts all play a role in these various transitions

you are looking at major 00:12:17 evolutionary transitions so one can start with the idea that initially what has to happen is individuals kind of have to tolerate each other so in other words competitors 00:12:31 have to be willing to form into those simple groups and those groups have to have some kind of benefit for their existence and continuance then berkshire said well the next step 00:12:44 in this transition is what can go from formation to maintenance so if you go from a simple group to society again there are there are rules there are maybe individuals that belong to certain 00:12:56 societies and rather than sort of a fission fusion kind of uh coming together going apart these societies maintain themselves these groups maintain themselves over 00:13:08 longer periods of time and there are more benefits and there may in fact be more conflicts that have to be worked out to keep the societies to maintain the societies 00:13:19 finally there would be the step into this group transformation again what what what kuala and strassmann might have called organismality so now that the groups subsume their kind of 00:13:32 individual goals into a collective goal for all of them and again the idea here is that that that one has to happen is conflict has to be somehow managed and reduced 00:13:44 such that the groups can actually transform into this coherent whole single individual and some of the key points in in in burke's sort of 00:13:55 pathway to to to transformation is that the first two steps are can truly be bidirectional in other words uh societies can go back to being simple groups and simple groups can go 00:14:10 back to being competitive just competitors so in other words those aren't sort of absorbing states but the argument is that once once you sort of get to that group transformation that last blue arrow you 00:14:23 have transformed in a way that it is hard or impossible to really go backwards and what burke argued is that that process those those various steps and 00:14:34 particularly that last transformative step is strongly driven often by inclusive fitness kin selection so in other words going back to that continuum 00:14:46 of the types of groups that they can form fraternal groups are much more likely to to transform into these higher level organisms than 00:14:58 uh egalitarian groups

so what kuller and strasman then basically were trying to kind of in a way define or look at was how you transition from being a group 00:11:28 to an actual individual organism so at what point at what point do the individuals sort of meld into something that you would call just one individual what they call 00:11:41 organismality

we could look at at these sort of transitions in a sort of a two-dimensional uh graph in a sense and so we can start out and say okay groups can have more or 00:09:22 less conflict within them and groups can have more or less cooperation occurring within them and so if they are 00:09:34 down here in the left hand lower quadrant you basically are looking at more or less individuals so competitors so conflict not so much cooperation 00:09:48 if you move to the right hand side you start to form simple groups again individuals may come together to reap certain benefits and these benefits can be as simple as sort of 00:10:01 a selfish herd reducing predator risk predation risk and so on so not necessarily a lot of overt cooperation not necessarily a lot of 00:10:14 conflict going on then as you move to the upper left-hand quadrant you have groups that are now societies in other words there there might be rules as to who belongs 00:10:27 to the group uh there might be more cooperation within that within that group but also more conflict in the sense that the cooperation is producing benefits 00:10:38 and there may be conflicts over who is required to actually produce the benefits and how those benefits are actually shared within that group and then finally 00:10:49 uh if you can reduce that conflict uh such that everyone everyone more or less cooperates and doesn't doesn't there's the in any senses conflict with each other you can 00:11:02 actually turn the group into or the society into a coherent uh single organism at which point you may go back and start the whole process again

and in that uh i would sort of say that that dave queller and jones strassmann again sort of approached this these problems as to how you transition across social groups and 00:08:18 their emphasis or at least they put an emphasis on the idea of that one way you can look at groups is you can look at their relative similarity or genetic similarity 00:08:32 so groups can range from being you know entirely fraternal in which place we're looking at genetic clones all the way out to what might be called egalitarian 00:08:44 with unrelated individuals or even individuals from from from different species so in essence groups can be placed somewhere along this continuum of 00:08:56 similarity of identity from again completely identical to very very different fraternal to egalitarian

I think the reason that all the spiritual traditions have got this concept of "we are all connected inside of it" is because the societies that actually deeply adopt this idea are the ones that over time deepen their level of consideration, deepen their level of expression, deepen their level of understanding for each other. 00:16:40 This is the reason that this idea pops up over and over at the core of spiritual traditions. And I hope through this talk you see that the reason that it appears at the core of science is it's actually something that is just literally true of the physical universe at every single level of organization and every single manifestation of matter, energy, and life.

Professional musicians, concert pianists get to know this instrument deeply, intimately. And through it, they're able to create with sound in a way that just dazzles us, and challenges us, and deepens us. But if you were to look into the mind of a concert pianist, and you used all the modern ways of imaging it, an interesting thing that you would see 00:11:27 is how much of their brain is actually dedicated to this instrument. The ability to coordinate ten fingers. The ability to work the pedal. The feeling of the sound. The understanding of music theory. All these things are represented as different patterns and structures in the brain. And now that you have that thought in your mind, recognize that this beautiful pattern and structure of thought in the brain 00:11:52 was not possible even just a couple hundred years ago. Because the piano was not invented until the year 1700. This beautiful pattern of thought in the brain didn't exist 5,000 years ago. And in this way, the skill of the piano, the relationship to the piano, the beauty that comes from it was not a thinkable thought until very, very recently in human history. 00:12:17 And the invention of the piano itself was not an independent thought. It required a depth of mechanical engineering. It required the history of stringed instruments. It required so many patterns and structures of thought that led to the possibility of its invention and then the possibility of the mastery of its play. And it leads me to a concept I'd like to share with you guys, which I call "The Palette of Being." 00:12:44 Because all of us are born into this life having available to us the experiences of humanity that has come so far. We typically are only able to paint with the patterns of thoughts and the ways of being that existed before. So if the piano and the way of playing it is a way of being, this is a way of being that didn't exist for people 5,000 years ago. 00:13:10 It was a color in the Palette of Being that you couldn't paint with. Nowadays if you are born, you can actually learn the skill; you can learn to be a computer scientist, another color that was not available just a couple hundred years ago. And our lives are really beautiful for the following reason. We're born into this life. We have the ability to go make this unique painting with the colors of being that are around us at the point of our birth. 00:13:36 But in the process of life, we also have the unique opportunity to create a new color. And that might come from the invention of a new thing. A self-driving car. A piano. A computer. It might come from the way that you express yourself as a human being. It might come from a piece of artwork that you create. Each one of these ways of being, these things that we put out into the world 00:14:01 through the creative process of mixing together all the other things that existed at the point that we were born, allow us to expand the Palette of Being for all of society after us. And this leads me to a very simple way to go frame everything that we've talked about today. Because I think a lot of us understand that we exist in this kind of the marvelous universe, 00:14:30 but we think about this universe as we're this tiny, unimportant thing, there's this massive physical universe, and inside of it, there's the biosphere, and inside of that, that's society, and inside of us, we're just one person out of seven billion people, and how can we matter? And we think about this as like a container relationship, where all the goodness comes from the outside to the inside, and there's nothing really special about us. 00:14:56 But the Palette of Being says the opposite. It says that the way that we are in our lives, the way that we affect our friends and our family, begin to change the way that they are able to paint in the future, begins to change the way that communities then affect society, the way that society could then affect its relationship to the biosphere, and the way that the biosphere could then affect the physical planet 00:15:21 and the universe itself. And if it's a possible thing for cyanobacteria to completely transform the physical environment of our planet, it is absolutely a possible thing for us to do the same thing. And it leads to a really important question for the way that we're going to do that, the manner in which we're going to do that. Because we've been given this amazing gift of consciousness.

Like, the world I came to is exactly the same as the world that I left. But what you wouldn't have understood is that every breath that you took contributed to the possibility of countless lives after you - lives that you would never see, lives that we are all a part of today. And it's worth thinking that maybe the meaning of our lives are actually not even within the scope of our understanding.

That's a picture of it in the background. And this organism has the special trick that we call "photosynthesis," the ability to go take energy from the sun and transform carbon dioxide into oxygen. And over the course of billions of years, so starting from two and a half billion years ago, little by little these bacteria spread across the planet 00:07:08 and converted all that carbon dioxide in the air into the oxygen that we now have. And it was a very slow process. First, they had to saturate the seas, then they had to saturate the oxygen that the earth would absorb, and only then, finally, could oxygen begin to build up in the atmosphere. So you see, just after about 900 million years ago, oxygen starts to build up in the atmosphere. And about 600 million years ago, something really amazing happens. 00:07:35 The ozone layer forms from the oxygen that has been released in the atmosphere. And it sounds like a small deal, like we talked about the ozone a couple decades ago, but it actually turns out that before the ozone layer existed, earth was not really able to sustain complex, multicellular life. We had single-celled organisms, we had a couple of simple, multicellular organisms, but we didn't really have anything like you or me. 00:07:59 And shortly after the ozone layer came into place, the earth was able to sustain complex multicellular life. There was a Cambrian explosion of life in the seas. And the first plants got onto land. In fact, there was actually no life on land ahead of that. Another way to see this is, this is kind of a chart of pretty much most of the animals that you guys are familiar with. 00:08:24 And right at the bottom in time is the formation of the ozone layer. Like nothing that you are familiar with today could exist without the contributions of these tiny organisms over those billions of years. And where are they now? Well actually, they never really left us. The direct descendants of the cyanobacteria were eventually captured by plants. And they're now called chloroplasts. 00:08:49 So this is a zoom-in of a plant leaf - and we probably ate some of these guys today - where tons of little chloroplasts are still trapped - contributing photosynthesis and making energy for the plants that continue to be the other half of our lungs on earth. And in this way, our breaths are very deeply united. Every out-breath is mirrored by the in-breath of a plant,

And it's this process, the gravitational dance of 100,000 galaxies swirling together, 00:05:25 which drive the process of galaxies colliding, which drive massive star formation, which drive the process of creating the iron that courses through each one of our veins with every heartbeat.

today I'm here to describe that everything really is connected, 00:02:02 and not in some abstract, esoteric way but in a very concrete, direct, understandable way. And I am going to do that with three different stories: a story of the heart, a story of the breath, and a story of the mind.

What Morton means by “the end of the world” is that a world view is passing away. The passing of this world view means that there is no “world” anymore. There’s just an infinite expanse of objects, which have as much power to determine us as we have to determine them. Part of the work of confronting strange strangeness is therefore grappling with fear, sadness, powerlessness, grief, despair. “Somewhere, a bird is singing and clouds pass overhead,” Morton writes, in “Being Ecological,” from 2018. “You stop reading this book and look around you. You don’t have to be ecological. Because you are ecological.” It’s a winsome and terrifying idea. Learning to see oneself as an object among objects is destabilizing—like learning “to navigate through a bad dream.” In many ways, Morton’s project is not philosophical but therapeutic. They have been trying to prepare themselves for the seismic shifts that are coming as the world we thought we knew transforms.

In “Dark Ecology,” Morton writes that we must cultivate a “spirituality of care” toward the objects of the world—not just the likable parts but the frightening ones. Morton suggests that, instead of burying nuclear waste, we might store it aboveground, in a visible place, where we can learn to take more responsibility for it—perhaps even building an aesthetically interesting enclosure. The kind of care Morton envisions is as interested in piles of sulfur as in trees; it is concerned with both polar bears and circuit boards. Morton wants us to care for plutonium. At a minimum, Morton thinks that this kind of caring could cure us of the idea that we are in control; it might show us that we are part of a vast network of interpenetrating entities that come to know one another without dispelling their mystery. At a maximum, Morton seems to feel that this omnidirectional, uncanny form of care could help save the world.

Since around 2010, Morton has become associated with a philosophical movement known as object-oriented ontology, or O.O.O. The point of O.O.O. is that there is a vast cosmos out there in which weird and interesting shit is happening to all sorts of objects, all the time. In a 1999 lecture, “Object-Oriented Philosophy,” Graham Harman, the movement’s central figure, explained the core idea:The arena of the world is packed with diverse objects, their forces unleashed and mostly unloved. Red billiard ball smacks green billiard ball. Snowflakes glitter in the light that cruelly annihilates them, while damaged submarines rust along the ocean floor. As flour emerges from mills and blocks of limestone are compressed by earthquakes, gigantic mushrooms spread in the Michigan forest. While human philosophers bludgeon each other over the very possibility of “access” to the world, sharks bludgeon tuna fish and icebergs smash into coastlines.We are not, as many of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers would have it, trapped within language or mind or culture or anything else. Reality is real, and right there to experience—but it also escapes complete knowability. One must confront reality with the full realization that you’ll always be missing something in the confrontation. Objects are always revealing something, and always concealing something, simply because they are Other. The ethics implied by such a strangely strange world hold that every single object everywhere is real in its own way. This realness cannot be avoided or backed away from. There is no “outside”—just the entire universe of entities constantly interacting, and you are one of them.

The next day, I assumed we would begin our quest to find signs of hyperobjects in and around the city of Houston

Recent research suggests that globally, the wealthiest 10% have been responsible for as much as half of the cumulative emissions since 1990 and the richest 1% for more than twice the emissions of the poorest 50% (2).

A final cluster gathers lenses that explore phenomena that are arguably more elastic and with the potential to both indirectly maintain and explicitly reject and reshape existing norms. Many of the topics addressed here can be appropriately characterized as bottom-up, with strong and highly diverse cultural foundations. Although they are influenced by global and regional social norms, the expert framing of institutions, and the constraints of physical infrastructure (from housing to transport networks), they are also domains of experimentation, new norms, and cultural change. Building on this potential for either resisting or catalyzing change, the caricature chosen here is one of avian metaphor and myth: the Ostrich and Phoenix cluster. Ostrich-like behavior—keeping heads comfortably hidden in the sand—is evident in different ways across the lenses of inequity (Section 5.1), high-carbon lifestyles (Section 5.2), and social imaginaries (Section 5.3), which make up this cluster. Yet, these lenses also point to the power of ideas, to how people can thrive beyond dominant norms, and to the possibility of rapid cultural change in societies—all forms of transformation reminiscent of the mythological phoenix born from the ashes of its predecessor. It is conceivable that this cluster could begin to redefine the boundaries of analysis that inform the Enabler cluster, which in turn has the potential to erode the legitimacy of the Davos cluster. The very early signs of such disruption are evident in some of the following sections and are subsequently elaborated upon in the latter part of the discussion.

Fundamental features of human psychology can constrain the perceived personal relevance and importance of climate change, limiting both action and internalization of the problem. Cognitive shortcuts developed over millennia make us ill-suited in many ways to perceiving and responding to climate change (152), including a tendency to place less emphasis on time-delayed and physically remote risks and to selectively downplay information that is at odds with our identity or worldview (153). Risk perception relies on intuition and direct perceptual signals (e.g., an immediate, tangible threat), whereas for most high-emitting households in the Global North, climate change does not present itself in these terms, except in the case of local experiences of extreme weather events. Where strong concern does exist, this tends to be linked to care for others (154) combined with knowledge about the causes and possible consequences of climate change (155).

Perspectives that emphasize lifestyles and consumption help to foreground the fundamental inequalities and injustices in the drivers of climate change (see Section 5.1). There are large variations in emissions between different lifestyles even within similar social groups and geographic regions (not least those with high income versus those without) (2, 129)—and yet, there has so far been a pervasive failure to direct mitigation efforts toward high emitters and emission-intensive practices (156, 158, 162). Confronting such variation and inequality requires demand management practices that target high-carbon lifestyles without disproportionately impacting more vulnerable communities. Such tailored approaches could lead to more effective mitigation policies by focusing on high-emission practices (e.g., frequent flying by wealthier groups). Furthermore, participatory and practice-oriented policy processes, where these involve citizens questioning how to bring about more system-wide change, can engender critique of the very power dynamics and patterns of influence that facilitate unsustainable lifestyles.

Ultimately, high-carbon lifestyles arise from both individual actions and systemic conditions of everyday life.

For low-carbon practices to grow and displace high-carbon ones, integrated action across disparate spaces and coordination between many different actors are necessary (161). For example, mobility scholars (166) highlight the extent of reconfiguration required to disassociate academia from high-carbon travel, including altered institutional cultures, funding practices, and student recruitment to support virtual ways of working. Although novel low-carbon practices may emerge, policy must ensure these stabilize and become prevalent, as well as impeding the circulation of high-carbon practices.

Many high-carbon activities are also highly routinized. From a psychological perspective, this bears the hallmarks of habitual behavior, in that environmentally significant actions are often stable, persistent, and an automatic response to particular contexts (159), e.g., commuting by car repeatedly over many months or years. Theories of social practice offer a contrasting account in which routines coevolve with infrastructures, competencies, conventions, and expectations (160). For example, developments in urban infrastructure, everyday routines, and the shifting social significance of private transport have culminated in the car becoming a dominant mode of mobility (161). Elsewhere, coordinated developments across spheres of production and consumption have led to the freezer becoming regarded as a domestic necessity (162), and changing patterns of domestic labor and shifts toward sedentary recreation have contributed to the rise in indoor temperature control (163). Although such assemblages shift over time, policy and action intended to reduce emissions have been ineffective in coordinating changes throughout these social and material configurations. As a consequence, routinized, commonplace, and largely unconscious behaviors remain mostly unaffected, with many high-carbon activities even growing and expanding (e.g., frequent flying).

As the emerging field of energy humanities (168) is beginning to show, the traditions, cultures, and beliefs of contemporary, industrial societies are deeply entangled with fossil fuels in what have been called petrocultures and carbonscapes (169). Future visions are dominated by such constrained social imaginaries (170), and hence rarely offer a “radical departure from the past” (171, p. 138).

Critical to historical and ongoing carbon lock-in has been the pervasive failure in industrial, modern societies to imagine desirable ways of living that are neither wedded to the carbon economy nor dependent on narratives of progress reliant on perpetual economic growth (see Section 4.1). This scarcity of plausible imaginaries underpins many of the factors discussed in this article and persists for a number of interconnected reasons.

This report is an essential companion for policymakers working at the intersection of society and climate change.”

Dr. Lewis Akenji, the lead author of the report says: “Talking about lifestyle changes is a hot-potato issue to policymakers who are afraid to threaten the lifestyles of voters. This report brings a science based approach and shows that without addressing lifestyles we will not be able to address climate change.”

New report out today reveals the #inequality that is pushing the 1.5C goal of the #ParisAgreement out of reach without urgent action. Together with colleagues at the Stockholm Environment Institute, we estimate the carbon footprints of the richest 1% in 2030 are set to be 30 times higher than the global per capita level compatible with the 1.5C goal. The footprints of the richest 10% in 2030 are set to be nearly 10 times that level, while those of the poorest half of the global population will remain far below it. In absolute terms, the emissions of the richest 10% alone are set to nearly amount to the global total in 2030 compatible with the 1.5C goal, while those of the remaining 90% are set to only just exceed it. The richest 1% are set for an increasing share of global total emissions, reaching 16% by 2030. Evidently it is not the consumption of most of the people on the planet that is driving the global #emissionsgap - but rather that of the richest minority.

2021 has heralded the dawn of a new form of hyper-carbon-intensive luxury travel, space tourism, in which hundreds of tonnes of carbon can be burned in just a ten-minute flight for around four passengers.28

Gösling and Humpe found that no more than 1% of the world population likely accounts for half of aviation emissions.30

Earlier studies also established the major contribution to carbon footprints of the rich and famous from flights, especially via private jets. Gösling’s study constructed aviation emissions estimates based on tracking the international travel of celebrities via their social media postings. Footprints – from aviation alone – were found to be in excess of a thousand tonnes per year.27

The fact that these countries are still not on track to reach the 1.5⁰C per capita level by 2030, and have still not delivered the minimal commitment to mobilize $100bn per year in international climate finance by 2020, is a double indictment of their moral and legal failure in view of the equity principle at the heart of the UNFCCC and its Paris Agreement.

The extreme difference between the expected carbon footprints of a small minority of the world’s population in 2030 and the global average level needed to keep the Paris Agreement’s 1.5⁰C goal alive is not tenable. Maintaining such high carbon footprints among the world’s richest people either requires far deeper emissions cuts by the rest of the world’s population, or it entails global heating in excess of 1.5⁰C above pre-industrial levels. There is no other alternative.

Chancel’s recent paper adds new insights by allocating national consumption emissions associated with capital investments to individuals within each country based on their share of asset ownership, derived from the latest wealth inequality datasets. He finds that emissions from investments make up an increasing share – up to 70% in 2019 – of the footprints of the world’s 1% highest emitters.32

Between 2015 and 2030, the richest 1% are set to reduce their per capita consumption emissions by just 5%, compared with the 97% cuts needed to align with the global per capita level compatible with the 1.5⁰C goal

4 In absolute terms, we find that despite the small total emissions cuts globally from 2015 to 2030, the total emissions associated with the richest 1% are set to continue to increase (see Figure 2). Notably, we also estimate that the total emissions associated with 90% of the global population combined will only just exceed the total global 1.5⁰C-compatible emissions level in 2030, while the total emissions associated with the consumption of just the richest 10% of the world population alone will nearly amount to that level. Figure 2: Total consumption emissions 1990–2030 of global income groups and the 2030 1.5⁰C-compatible total global emissions level Source: IEEP and SEI analysis This growth in the absolute emissions linked to the richest 1% also translates into a continued growth in their share of total global emissions, which we estimate will continue to grow from 13% in 1990 to 15% in 2015 and is set to reach over 16% by 2030 (see Figure 3).17 This continued increase is a reflection of the fact that in countries that are home to most of the world’s richest 1%, the carbon intensity of the economy is not set to improve sufficiently to offset the expected increase in income and consumption of those countries’ richest citizens.

Wilk and Barros drew on 82 databases of public records to document billionaires’ houses, vehicles, aircraft and yachts. Applying carbon coefficients, they found billionaire carbon footprints easily run to thousands of tonnes per year, with superyachts the biggest contributor, each adding around 7,000 tonnes per year, for example.26

Figure 6: Changing geographic source of emissions of world’s richest 1% 2015–2030

The fact that a natural bacterial chromosome could be successfully replaced by an artifactual chromosome only further testifies to the irreducible importance of a naturally integrated unit, the bacterial cell, as the prior condition of possibility for any molecular configuration, natural or artificial, to be a chromosome.Footnote 2

Both more fundamental than the Hard Problem of Consciousness, and more expansive in scope, the problem of integration/unification is also central to the problem of the origin(s) of life.

Granted, how a natural entity can have interiority, i.e., subjectivity, is a hard problem, but if the question of integration and unification is not identical to the “Hard Problem of Consciousness” (Chalmers 1995) it is also inseparable from it and surely a presupposition of the very possibility of interiority. Nor would even an understanding of how subjectivity could be resident to a single cell tell us how consciousness could become an integrated unity across many cells. If we assume consciousness is a physically based phenomenon, and that it draws upon the activity of various parts of the brain, let alone constituent cells, then we must face our deficits in understanding how the experience of a unified consciousness is realized at the level of an integration of some cells but not others albeit in the absence of evident, non-arbitrary, physical boundaries.

In so doing we claim to have made an inroad into embedding the force of normativity into a wide-ranging naturalist framework, to have provided philosophical anthropology with a new (post-individualist) point of departure, and at least playfully, to have given some naturalistic grist to Hegel’s proclamation that spirit (Geist) is the truth of nature.

A common good (CG) process begins with an initiator proposing the production of a common good. Then, during the predefined lifetime of the process, funders who care about this common good may pledge funds for its production, being reassured that their money will only be used retroactively, had the common good been eventually produced — no risk taken. Executors who wish to produce the common good may do so, being reassured that they will be compensated by the pledged funds had they been successful. And profit-seeking investors may buy a portion of the potential reward from executors (in the form of per-executor tokens that are made redeemable against the future reward had they been successful), and by that provide them with liquid funding for operation. Finally, if and when executors achieve the desired outcome, as decreed by a predefined judge, the pledged funds are released as a reward to the successful executors and the investors who bought their tokens. If no success has been reached after some predefined limit of time, the funds go back to the funders who provided them. Executors and investors only see profit, and funders only spend it, if and only when the common good is produced.

In the future envisioned here, decentralized networks play the role of governments, municipalities and intentional commons, fostering common goods. It is possible to produce common goods when a big-enough community cooperates to bear the cost of production and its implementation; but this, correspondingly, requires large-scale coordination, and large-scale coordination is generally a very hard problem. In this article we introduce Common Good, a blockchain-based application that solves this problem by enabling the coordination and motivation of different relevant actors for achieving a desired common good, by providing it with a “business model” just as in the profit-seeking sector. Our solution takes inspiration from the Social Impact Bonds (SIB) model.

Today, countries, municipalities and NGOs are the entities that supposedly take care of common goods, but their capacity to do so is very limited due to their centralized structure. They are limited by the relative ineffectiveness of centralized constructs — in sense-making, scalable action, engagement and alignment of interests, and more severely, by the personal interests of the people steering them, which often override their interest to take care for the benefit of the community they are in charge of steering. Indeed, neglecting such common goods is one of the biggest problems of humanity in almost every possible domain and circle we can think of.

While I think that there is something to embrace and retain in the idea of a bio-logic of the conditions of possibility of a normatively oriented form of life and even in the concept of a transcendental we, I have argued in a number of places that the only empirically, theoretically and phenomenologically adequate way for achieving something along these lines is by focusing, not on the idea of the individual, but rather on the emergence by 'natural detachment' of the normatively integrated hominin group.[6]

Its life out of its center enters into a relationship to it; the reflexive character of the centrally represented body is given to itself. Although the living being on this level is also absorbed in the here/now, lives out of the center, it has become conscious of the centrality of its existence. It has itself; it knows of itself; it notices itself -- and this makes it an I. (pp. 269-70)

The human sphere is defined by a jump from centric positionality to that further level of detachment that uniquely allows for that purchase upon its center that Plessner calls "excentric positionality." The human "I" which is the unique result of excentric positionality becomes the constant companion of human positional positing. It preserves, and inhabits its centered lived body, while also constituting its excentric detachment from its center by way of its reflexive awareness of its posited center.

Plessner tells us that from its center the animal positions itself -- it gains mastery of its own lived body, "it is a system that refers back to itself, a self, but it does not experience-itself" (p. 267).

Next I will focus on and explore what Plessner's method has to offer with respect to its account of the origins and basis of normativity (or "Spirit").

The closed and centric positionality of the animal is characterized first and foremost by the immanent constitution of a self. While not occupying any definitive space, it is spatial inasmuch as it constitutes the non-relativizable "here" of the organism. Double aspectivity is defined for the animal with respect to a separation, and at the same time non-separation, between its core, its here, its self and its whole body of which the core is part. Thus the living thing whose organization exhibits a closed form is not only a self that 'has', but a special kind of self, a reflexive self or an itself. We may speak of a living thing of this kind as being present to the living thing that it is, as, by virtue of its set-apartness from this living thing, forming (not yet 'having', which is why it is not yet an 'I'!) an unshakeable point in this living thing in relation to which it reflexively lives as one thing. In the irreducible oscillation between being inside and being outside that distinguishes the positionality of the closed organism on the ground of simply being the body itself lies the boundary for the referentiality of the thing back to itself. (pp. 220-21) One can anticipate the movement of Plessner's dialectical logic in setting up the conditions for his anthropology. The animal has a self-presence but not a reflective access to it. The animal has achieved a distance to its own body (one might say a "detachment") but does not have a perspective on having such distance. It enjoys a qualitatively new level of agency in its relationship to its surround but it is still fully absorbed in its here and now. The animal is conscious inasmuch as it has awareness of that which it stands in opposition to and reacts to from out of its center (albeit without being able to thematize that relationship). Plessner refers to this as the animal's "frontality."

Plessner's distinction between plant and animal is both an enabling pathway towards his anthropology but also quite distinctive and worthy of consideration in itself. Contrary to the mainstream legacies of botany and zoology, but consistent with the logic he is developing, plants and animals for Plessner are a priori life-categories or modals of the organic based upon filling alternative organizational possibility spaces that follow from the dialectics of positionality and not in the first instance about the distinction between autotrophy and heterotrophy. Accordingly, certain heterotrophic species such as corals, hydroids, bryozoan and ascidians are classed by Plessner into the plant category. In broad terms, the plant-animal distinction is defined by the difference between "open" and "closed" positionalities, a distinction which has much to do with levels of mediation. One may think of this as two alternative basic strategies for achieving the aforementioned balance between assimilative and resistive moments immanent in any form of positionality. "A form is open if the organism in all of its expressions of life is immediately incorporated into its surroundings and constitutes a non-self-sufficient segment of the life cycle corresponding to it" (p. 203). An open form of positionality, we can say, doesn't require mediation by way of a posited center and the consequence of this is realized throughout the morphology, physiology and growth patterns of the plant. Morphologically this is manifested in the tendency of the organism to develop externally and expansively in a way that is directly turned toward its surroundings. It is characteristic of this kind of development that it does not have the need to form centers of any kind. The tissues responsible for mechanical solidarity, nutrition, and stimulus conduction are not anatomically or functionally concentrated in particular organs but rather permeate the organism from its outermost to it innermost layers. The absence of any central organs tying together or representing the whole body means that individuality of the individual plant does not itself appear as constitutive but rather as an external moment of its form associated with the singularity of the physical entity; in many cases the parts remain highly self-sufficient in relation to each other (graftings, cuttings). This led a great botanist to go so far as to call plants 'divididuals'. (pp. 203-204)

Even at the level of a simple organism, the dialectics of double aspectivity suggests the emergence of a non-empirical, enactively posited center or core, the predecessor, for Plessner of the possibility of consciousness.

Plessner finds in the dynamics of double aspectivity the constitution of a kind of self. Living entities develop which means they both lead away into something new and yet persist as what they are. It is in their constant becoming Other that they become themselves and constitute and sustain a "form-idea." Plessner's early concept of development, is capacious enough (unlike some more recent formulations that presume multi-cellularity) to characterize even single celled life-forms.

For Plessner, the living boundary is both a liminal zone that mediates between organism and the outer medium, itself being neither, and yet also an enactively self-defining and enforcing circumference and outer-limit. The organism moves outward in the expansion and assimilation of its liminal zone and moves inward, taking the outer within, re-establishing itself and reasserting its perimeter. The living boundary already introduces a subject-object status that prefigures for Plessner the overcoming of dualisms between inner and outer, interiority and exteriority. The living boundary is an on-going enactment of an exteriority that it defines and yet also reaches into and assimilates and of an interiority that is both sustained and transformed. The motive force of the dynamic living state is this double aspectivity of its existence and the dialectical tension which drives it forward.

Pace Dilthey, Plessner's "Levels" is not about interpreting historical contingencies, nor about the more familiar evolutionary sedimentation of frozen accidents, but rather is about looking to establish transcendental conditions (or categories) of biotic possibility that he refers to as "modals of the organic." As with Hegel he challenges us with a proposed logic of life always mobilized by dialectical tensions, albeit not on the basis of any form of idealism and bereft of a Hollywood ending. For Plessner, that which is both the sine qua non of the living state and that generative 'principle' from which organic modals can be derived is the on-going performance of a self-positioning boundary, and it is highly unlikely that anybody has ever thought as deeply about the implications of what this means.

DAOstack imagines thousands of organizations and applications utilizing the stack in the near future. And the intention is not just to serve each use case individually. It’s easy to imagine how, with a scalable solution for decentralized governance in place, decision-making can become more frictionless not only within collectives but also between collectives.Indeed, this is the broader vision of DAOstack. The platform is designed to underpin an entire ecosystem of decentralized organizations — a community of interoperable DAOs, able to share talent, ideas, and learnings with one another. DAOs will even be able to act as members of other DAOs, creating a fluid “DAO mesh” or “internet of work” in which collectives of collectives are commonplace, and in which any given individual might participate in dozens of different DAOs.

Imagine tens or hundreds of millions of people participating in this kind of collaborative economy — one in which no one wields a disproportionate amount of power, all are rewarded in proportion to the value they contribute, and everyone is incentivized to act in alignment with the common good.

To create DAOs resilient to corruption, DAOstack’s first governance templates implement voting rights using a system called Reputation. Reputation is a score assigned to each user that represents that user’s voter power. Each DAO has a separate ledger of Reputation scores, and so Reputation cannot be directly transferred from peer to peer. Rather, it is distributed through the passing of proposals inside the DAO.Indirect transfers of Reputation that cannot be completely prevented, such as a user transferring selling control of their account, are discouraged by a DAO’s ability to slash Reputation: if DAO voters find that an account has indirectly transferred its voting power, the DAO can pass a proposal to set that account’s Reputation score to zero.

When the originators of DAOstack set about to architect solutions for decentralized governance, they recognized that given the complexity of the problem, the best solutions would emerge only over time, especially since needs would vary across use cases.So, first and foremost, they designed DAOstack to be not a fixed offering in decentralized governance, but rather a sandbox for ongoing experimentation, in which bits and pieces of governance infrastructure can be easily mixed and matched for each organization, like LEGO building blocks or WordPress templates.

Perhaps the biggest one is inefficiency. If you give everyone a voice, things can get very noisy very quickly, like an annoying neighborhood association meeting, multiplied by a thousand. The more you distribute decision-making power throughout an organization, the more you risk either taxing everyone’s attention with a sea of decision-making or creating gridlock among decision-makers — or both.So, if you’re going to coordinate a crowd effectively, you need technology not just for making proposals and tallying votes, but also for managing the collective attention. You need ways to determine who can make proposals and how. You need ways to determine which proposals should actually get the attention of the voters — sort of like means of voting on what to vote on. And you need ways to determine who should be involved in each decision, according to reputation or subject-matter credibility.

One major problem with top-down hierarchies is that they contain concentrated points of failure, since individuals are subject to bias and have limited bandwidth. The interests of the powerful few are often misaligned with those of the less powerful many, leaving the decision-makers frequently incentivized to act against the common good.

And at the end of the day, Gates is not accountable to governments or to communities. He was not elected, and there is no mechanism for him to be recalled, challenged, or held responsible for faulty policies. He could suddenly decide that he was no longer interested in supporting agriculture in Africa. In that case, the new food system Gates is importing to the African continent would collapse. Political and economic systems are being drastically altered, all at the whim of one person, one foundation.In fact, the differences between this situation — powerful individuals and institutions deciding to mess with the social, political, and economic realities of countries — and the earlier form of colonialism are thin. It’s still advertised as “good intent” and the desire to “civilize” an “uncivilized” people. The only difference is that neocolonialism is quieter and more covert. By design, it provokes less outrage. But the essential power structures remain the same.

The fact that someone is a billionaire doesn’t make them more capable of solving any of our problems. In fact, the pursuit of that amount of wealth means that they were able to ignore — and in fact directly profit off of — the exploitation and violation of rights that is required to get there.

espite the foundation’s claims to be investing “within” Africa, The Nation “examined 30,000 charitable grants the foundation has awarded over the past two decades and found that more than 88 percent of the donations — $63 billion — have gone to recipients in the wealthiest, whitest nations, including the United States, Canada, Australia, and European countries.”African groups received only 5 percent of their total funding for NGOs.By withholding critical funding from African institutions, Gates ensures that any technologies developed are owned externally to the continent, keeping power consolidated in Global North institutions.

These corporate “solutions” end up driving more poverty. Whereas farmers previously relied on their own locally-adapted seeds and natural fertilizers, they are forced to continuously purchase inputs from agribusiness corporations. The expensive chemicals needed to grow these “improved” seeds deplete the soil. As a result, they have to purchase more and more chemicals over time to compensate for the degradation. This is not development — it’s a vicious cycle that grows corporate profits by trapping farmers in debt.

It’s a laughably misguided claim, considering that we currently produce enough food to feed as many as 1.5x the world’s population

To do so, they promote “improved” seeds and chemical fertilizers.

The idea of development suggests that communities of Color are impoverished because of some inherent failing, rather than as a result of having their resources pillaged. Development narratives imply that they don’t have the skills, technology, or education to fix things for themselves.

Powerful Global North governments, corporations, and individuals today don’t need to resort to explicit violence — invasion, seizure, genocide, and enslavement — in order to control other countries. Instead, they can use structural violence — leveraging aid, market access, and philanthropic interventions in order to force lower-income countries to do what they want.

Typically, what they want is more control over markets. The initial interventions end up creating debt for lower-income countries (because they give more power to Global North corporations). That debt ultimately becomes the most deadly form of leverage, giving Global North governments the justification for more interventions and allowing them to shape economic and trade policy in the way they see fit.In short, colonialism never ended. It just changed form.

A recent survey found that only 14% of people they surveyed in the United States talk about climate change. A previous Yale study found that 35% either discuss it occasionally or hear somebody else talk about it. Those are low for something that over 70% of people are worried about.

For a talk at one conservative Christian college, Dr. Hayhoe – an atmospheric scientist, professor of political science at Texas Tech University, and the chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy – decided to emphasize how caring about climate change is in line with Christian values and, ultimately, is “pro-life” in the fullest sense of that word. Afterward, she says, people “were able to listen, acknowledge it, and think about approaching [climate change] a little differently.”

Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe stresses the need for finding shared values, rather than trying to change someone’s mind, as a basis for productive conversations

I was speaking in Iowa, and I was asked, “How do you talk to people in Iowa about polar bears?” I said, “You don’t; you talk to them about corn.” If we begin a conversation with someone with something we already agree on, then the subtext is: “You care about this, and I care too. We have this in common.”

What are the biggest barriers to action – for countries or communities or individuals – on climate change? And how do we get past those?It’s psychological distance and solution aversion. We don’t think it matters to us. We think it’s a problem distant in space or time or relevance. And we don’t think there’s anything viable or practical we can do at the scale required.

I am frequently shamed for not doing enough. Some of that comes from the right side of the [political] spectrum, but increasingly a larger share of that shaming comes from people at the opposite end of the spectrum, who are so worried and anxious about climate impacts that their response is to find anyone who isn’t doing precisely what they think they should be doing and shame them.