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.

When we practice active hope, when we look at what people are doing, and we share those stories with others and talk about what we can do together, then we realize that the boulder is already at the top of the hill and is rolling down in the right direction, and has millions of hands on it. It’s just not going fast enough.

As the emerging field of energy humanities (168)is beginning to show, the traditions, cultures, and beliefs of contemporary, industrial societies aredeeply 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 offera “radical departure from the past” (171, p. 138).

For low-carbon practices to grow and displace high-carbon ones, integrated action across dis-parate spaces and coordination between many different actors are necessary (161). For example,mobility scholars (166) highlight the extent of reconfiguration required to disassociate academiafrom high-carbon travel, including altered institutional cultures, funding practices, and student re-cruitment 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 ofhigh-carbon practices.

For example, developments in urban infrastructure, everyday routines, and the shifting social sig-nificance of private transport have culminated in the car becoming a dominant mode of mobil-ity (161). Elsewhere, coordinated developments across spheres of production and consumptionhave led to the freezer becoming regarded as a domestic necessity (162), and changing patternsof domestic labor and shifts toward sedentary recreation have contributed to the rise in indoortemperature control (163).

Fundamental features of human psychology can constrain the perceived personal relevance andimportance of climate change, limiting both action and internalization of the problem. Cognitiveshortcuts developed over millennia make us ill-suited in many ways to perceiving and respondingto climate change (152),including a tendency to place less emphasis on time-delayed and physicallyremote 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, tangiblethreat), whereas for most high-emitting households in the Global North, climate change does notpresent itself in these terms, except in the case of local experiences of extreme weather events.

A final cluster gathers lenses that explore phenomena that are arguably more elastic and withthe potential to both indirectly maintain and explicitly reject and reshape existing norms. Many ofthe topics addressed here can be appropriately characterized as bottom-up, with strong and highlydiverse cultural foundations.

Yet, these lenses also point to the power of ideas, to how people can thrive beyonddominant norms, and to the possibility of rapid cultural change in societies—all forms of trans-formation reminiscent of the mythological phoenix born from the ashes of its predecessor. It isconceivable that this cluster could begin to redefine the boundaries of analysis that inform the En-abler cluster, which in turn has the potential to erode the legitimacy of the Davos cluster. The veryearly signs of such disruption are evident in some of the following sections and are subsequentlyelaborated in the latter part of the discussion.

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

10% per annum

With the aid of the concept of opposing pairs of magnetic poles, we can clearly contribute in a significant way to our expression and understanding of basic relationships in the overall magnetic field. We are proposing to look at soma and significance in a similar way. That is to say, we regard them as two aspects introduced at an arbitrary conceptual cut in the flow of the field of reality as a whole. These aspects are distinguished only in thought, but this distinction helps us to express and understand the whole flow of reality.

To date, there is no single accounting of how much money flowed from the slave economy into coffers of American higher education. But Wilder says most American colleges founded before the Civil War relied on money derived from slavery. He suspects that many institutions are reluctant to examine this past. "There's not a lot of upside for them. You know these aren't great fundraising stories," Wilder says. Some people say that institutions must do more than make apologies and rename buildings. They insist that scholarships and other forms of monetary reparations are due. And others argue that whatever colleges and universities are doing to acknowledge their slave-holding past — a campus memorial to slaves, for example — is motivated by public relations and does nothing to ameliorate the legacy of slavery and systemic inequality. Brown University was the first to confront its ties to slavery in a major way. In 2003, Brown president Ruth Simmons appointed a commission to investigate. "What better way to teach our students about ethical conduct than to show ourselves to be open to the truth, and to tell the full story?" she says.

"The story of the American college is largely the story of the rise of the slave economy in the Atlantic world," says Craig Steven Wilder, a historian at MIT and author of "Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities."

At the University of Virginia — founded and designed by Thomas Jefferson — slaves cooked and cleaned for the sons of the Southern gentry.

In so doing we claim to havemade an inroad into embedding the force of normativity into a wide-ranging naturalistframework, 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’sproclamation that spirit (Geist) is the truth of nature.

This is the other huge important theme, which is that technology alone does not lead to a better world. It can only lead to a better world in the context of good moral and social systems. One thing that I do deeply believe is that our scientific and material technology has raced ahead of our moral and social technology. We need some catch-up growth in moral and social technology.

there's a fact of the matter right this minute about whether your high school 00:22:51 sweetheart is thinking about you you just can't tell but the universe knows that fact is there

45.8 percent of global household wealth is in the hands of just 1.1 percent of the world's population. Those 56 million individuals control a mind-boggling $191.6 trillion, as can be seen on the following pyramid.Below that, 583 million people own $163.9 trillion, 39.1 percent of global wealth, despite accounting for just 11.1 percent of the adult population. The base of the pyramid is the most poignant and it shows how 2.9 billion people (55 percent of the world's population) share a combined wealth of $5.5 trillion which is just 1.3 percent of total wealth.

Global air traffic is expected to double to 8.2 billion passengers in 2037, according to IATA, which predicts that aviation's 2019 emissions peak of around 900 million metric tons of CO2 will be exceeded within the next two to three years.At the same time, the window to cut the world's reliance on fossil fuels and avoid catastrophic changes to the climate is closing rapidly. The International Energy Agency forecasts that aviation's share of global carbon emissions will increase to 3.5% by 2030 from just over 2.5% in 2019 in the absence of efforts to further decarbonize.

Exploring the consumption practices of the super-rich begins to highlight that they are best described as 'fast subjects' who dwell in what Castells (2000) terms the 'space of flows' rather than the 'space of places'.

there has been a spectacular rise in luxury consumption, with the consumption patterns of the global elite acting as a marker for those further down the income scale. Robert Frank (2000) describes the process as 'luxury fever', as consumption expectations are ratcheted up all the way down the income scale. The global elite are pushing up people's expectations and assumptions. In the US, for example, the average size of house has doubled, in square feet terms, in the past thirty years. In part it is a function of the positional nature of consumption. We consume in order to position ourselves relative to other people. Not only do the global elite raise the upper limit, everyone is thus forced to spend more just to keep up, but they also become the perceived benchmark, Juliet Schor's work, for example, shows that people are no longer keeping up with the people next door, but the people they see on television and magazines (Schor, 1998). In order to keep up with these raised consumption standards people are working harder and longer as well as taking out more debt. The increase in luxury consumption has raised consumption expectations further down the income scale, which in order to be funded has involved increased workloads and increased indebtedness. It is not so much keeping up with the Jones but 'keeping up with the Gates'.

while the super-rich may move through through world cities, their cosmopolitan practices and lifestyles rarely break out of the exclusive transnational spaces which stand at the intersecting points of particular corporate, capital, technological, information and cultural lines of flow.

Given the fact that super-rich consumption is preoccupied with the importance of sign rather than use values, it is the space as much as the commodity that is consumed by the super-rich.

Developing this argument, Bauman (2000) talks of the super-rich as the 'new cosmopolitans', suggesting that the fundamental consumption cleavage in contemporary society is between these 'fast subjects' who dwell in transnational space and those 'slow subjects' whose lives remain localised and parochial. The fast world is one consisting of airports, top level business districts, top of the line hotels and restaurants, chic boutiques, art galleries and exclusive gyms - in brief, a sort of glamour zone that is fundamentally disconnected from the life worlds of the vast majority of the world's population. Bauman thus equates power with mobility, echoing Massey's notion of unequal 'power-geometries'

it is apparent that the global elite must be regarded as transnational to the extent that they share similar global lifestyles. For Short and Kim (1999) the lifestyles of global managers present perhaps the clearest evidence that the shared consumption of similar goods and images is resulting in the creation of global lifestyles. Moving from city to city, the global managerial class characteristically occupies a series of corporate spaces designed for the international business traveller: international airports, business hotels, executive clubs, corporate health suites, restaurants and so on. The mobility of global managers is, however, eclipsed by that of the global super-rich. They are able to move easily from nation to nation by executive jet (rather than travelling by business class); they stay only in five-star hotels; they are able to access exclusive clubs and restaurants, they frequent ultra-expensive resorts in all continents, and collect the objet d'arts which can only be obtained in the most exclusive shops and auction houses. In short, their space-time routines centre on a globally-diffuse set of spaces regarded as 'the right places to see and be seen'. It is the nature of these spaces that we explore in our next section.

The preceding discussion has begun to suggest that the global super-rich need to be conceptualised as a truly cosmopolitan faction of the global elite.

the global elite (i.e. both global managers and the global super-rich) must be regarded as transnational for three main reasons, as Sklair (1997) outlines.

Nonetheless, as Sklair (1997) identifies, the super-rich play an important symbolic role in the perpetuation of global capitalism, showing that it creates the possibility of a form of consumption based on profligacy and seemingly infinite choice. We might not all chose to emulate the lifestyles of the super-rich, but we all we would all like to have the choice to consume conspicuously.

Machinoia, Machine of Multiple Me: Integrating with Past,Future and Alternative Selves