5,636 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2021
    1. 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.

      The weaponization of economic leverage points means control can be gotten without spilling blood. Why is Africa perpetually poor in spite of its enormous wealth? Look no further than the wealth of management tier individuals of the Global North mining resource companies.

    1. 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.

      Conversation is not happening! There is a leverage point in holding open conversations where we understand each other’s language of different cultural groups. Finding common ground, the common human denominators (CHD) between polarized groups is the lynchpin.

    2. 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.”

      We often talk about the same things, share the same values, have the same common human denominators, but couched in different language. It is critical to get to the root of what we have in common in order to establish meaningful dialogue.

    3. 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

      What first appears as difference may actually emerge from consciousnesses that have more in common than one first realizes. Finding the common ground, what we refer to as the common human denominators (CHD) within the open source Deep Humanity praxis becomes the critical climate change communication leverage point for establishing genuine communication channels between politically polarized groups.

      This is aligned to the Stop Reset Go project and its open source offshoot, Deep Humanity praxis that seeks conversations and personal and collective journeys to appreciate Common Human Denominators that are salient for all participants. It also underscores the value of integrating with the Indieverse Knowledge system, with its focus on symathessy embedded directly into its codebase.

    4. 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.”

      This stresses the importance of applying Deep Humanity wisely by finding the most compelling, salient and meaningful common human denominators appropriate for each conversational context. Which group are we interacting with? What are the major landmarks embedded in THEIR salience landscape?

      The BEing journeys we craft will only be meaningful and impactful if they are appropriately matched to the cultural context.

      The whole mind- body understanding of how we cognitively construct our reality, via Deep Humanity BEing journeys, can help shift our priorities.

    5. 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.

      Deep Humanity, as an open praxis available to any human being to both use and contribute to is a leverage point that, by awakening us to our own sacredness as living and dying human interbeing, can shift our self-perspective from scarcity and poverty mentality, to hsving super powers that emerge from the lived experience of our own sacredness as living and dying human interbeings. The Stop Reset Go linkage between human inner transformation (HIT) and social outer transformation (SOT) are criticsl to recognizing our social transformative potential.

    6. 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.

      Love, or recognizing the other person in the other tribe as sacred, is going to connect with that person because we are, after all, all of us are human INTERbeings, and love is the affective variable that connects us while shame is a variable that DISconnects us. Love is , in fact, one of our most powerful common human denominators.

    7. 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.

      This statement is right on. It has now become a question about the RATE of system change we can achieve to avoid a degraded future. The faster we act, the less degraded it will become.

  2. bafybeiery76ov25qa7hpadaiziuwhebaefhpxzzx6t6rchn7b37krzgroi.ipfs.dweb.link bafybeiery76ov25qa7hpadaiziuwhebaefhpxzzx6t6rchn7b37krzgroi.ipfs.dweb.link
    1. Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven’t We Bent the Global Emissions Curve?

    2. 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).

      Constructing social imaginaries that are alternatives to the petrocutultural, carbonscape ones is critical to shift the mindset.

      Carbon pollution cannot be disentangled from colonialism and social imaginaries must consist of stories that tell alternative futures narratives must address both simultaneously.

    3. 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.

      A new social imaginary of cosmolocality, where we spend most of our time locally, but use information technology as the prime method for nonlocal communication. In other words, replacing transportation with lower footprint communications.

      In the field of production and provisioning systems, cosmolocal production implies designing and sharing designs globally, and downloading the appropriate ones for local clean production, thereby minimizing global supply chains.

    4. 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).

      New stories and narratives, in other world, new social imaginaries of viable low carbon life styles can help bring about a shift. By adopting the viable story, it primes individuals to seek technology elements that are designed to fit that new social imaginary.

      The Swiss 2000 Watt society is an example of such a new social imaginary https://www.2000-watt-society.org/what as is Doughnut Economics https://doughnuteconomics.org/

    5. 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.

      This psychological constraint is worth demonstrating to individuals to illustrate how we construct our values and responses. These constraints can be demonstrated in a vivid way wiithin the context of Deep Humanity BEing journeys.

    6. 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.

      The bottom-up nature of this cluster makes it the focus area for civil society movements, inner transformation approaches and cultural methodologies. Changing the mindset or paradigm from which the system arises is the most powerful place to intervene in a system as Donella Meadows pointed out decades ago in her research on system leverage points: https://donellameadows.org/archives/leverage-points-places-to-intervene-in-a-system/

      The Stop Reset Go initiative is focused on this thematic lens, bottom-up, rapid whole system change, with Deep Humanity as the open-source praxis to address the needed shift in worldview. One of the Deep Humanity programs is based on addressing the psychological deficits of the wealthy, and transforming them into heroes for the transition, by redirecting their WEALTH-to-WELLth.

    7. 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.

      This passage pays homage to Donella Meadows, who identified the shift in mindset or paradigm that supports the system as the top leverage point. If we can shift this mindset in sufficient number of people, it can shift the thinking of the Enabler Cluster identified in the paper. A social tipping point strategy can be adopted to help this to happen quickly. This strategy is being developed by Stop Reset Go and other civil society actors.

    8. 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).

      this suggests that perhaps the failure of the COP meetings may be partially due to focusing at the wrong level and demographics. the top 1 and 10 % live in every country. A focus on the wealthy class is not a focus area of COP negotiations perse. Interventions targeting this demographic may be better suited at the scale of individuals or civil society.

      Many studies show there are no extra gains in happiness beyond a certain point of material wealth, and point to the harmful impacts of wealth accumulation, known as affluenza, and show many health effects: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1950124/, https://theswaddle.com/how-money-affects-rich-people/, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-dark-reasons-so-many-rich-people-are-miserable-human-beings-2018-02-22, https://www.nbcnews.com/better/pop-culture/why-wealthy-people-may-be-less-successful-love-ncna837306, https://www.apa.org/research/action/speaking-of-psychology/affluence,

      A Human Inner Transformation approach based on an open source praxis called Deep Humanity is one example of helping to transform affluenza and leveraging it accelerate transition.

    9. 10% per annum

      Anderson has contextualized the scale of such an impact in his other presentations but not here. A recent example is the temporary emission decreases due to covid 19. A 6.6% global decrease was determined from this study: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00090-3#:~:text=After%20rising%20steadily%20for%20decades,on%20daily%20fossil%20fuel%20emissions. with the US contributing 13% due to lockdown impacts on vehicular travel (both air and ground). After the pandemic ends, experts expect a strong rebound effect.

    1. 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.

      When Bohm writes "These aspects are distinguished only in thought, but this distinction helps us to express and understand the whole flow of reality", it reveals the true nature of words. Their only ever revealing aspects of the whole. They are NOT the whole.Hence, as linguistic animals, we are constantly dissecting parts of the whole of reality.

      Deep Humanity open-source praxis linguistic BEing journeys can be designed to reveal this ubiquitious aspectualizing nature of language to help us all better understand what we are as linguistic beings.

    1. 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.

      This is important research to do so as not to conveniently forget the past. If all were equal today, that would have happened as the proper outcome of proactive, widespread and impactful recognition of the injustice of the past. Inequality has persisted, transmuted into structural inequality, especially manifesting in economic legacy of inherited wealth. It could be interpreted as unconducive for fundraising, but so can opaqueness of a proactive strategy.

    2. "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."

      In this way, the past seeps into the present. This is a literal example of the legacy of structural inequality.

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

      As a species, as we progress ethically to more inclusive social norms, those considered the enlightened leaders of their time, like Jefferson can be seen from two contrasting perspectives, the norms of their time and the norms of our times.

      As we judge others in the past for failures to recognize unjust social norms prevalent in their time, so too will we be judged by our descendants for social norms they will recognize as unjust, but which we collectively haven’t yet.

      How long it takes to shake off the shackles that prevent the recognition of the dignity of each and every human INTERbeing. Each living person of modernity owes his or her existence to all our ancestors, whose social dynamics, for better or worse, shaped the world we inhabit today.

      As we evolve, we are engaged in a constant cultural evolutionary process, as we incrementally recognize unjust social norms and attempt to stop their further indulgence, reset our behavior and go towards new, more just ones.

    1. 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.

      Key insight

    Annotators

  3. Sep 2021
    1. 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 is another even greater theme this article has not touched on, progress traps. Climate change is a direct result of the unintended consequences of progress, a pretty major impact.

    1. 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

      This is the existential reality of humans, that we only know that which is in our own limited sensory bubble. We have zero access to that which lay beyond. Only a fool would argue there is nothing happening out there if we don’t sense it, and yet we have no way to prove it. This is an intrinsic epistemological disconnect with reality that makes each of us feel an intrinsic sense of alienation. Why is our consciousness constrained in this profound way?

    1. 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.

      combine this with Oxfam's 2020 report on carbon emissions and we have the real driver's of carbon emissions, the wealthy. COP26 addresses nation states, not individuals. We need to focus on individuals as well.

    1. 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.

      SRG education campaign for air travellers ( mostly middle class and rich) to do their part and minimize air travel until the breakthrough technologies are here. Temporary abstinence or voluntary lotto system.

    1. 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'.

      Good terminology- space of flows, denoting the necessity of (carbon intensive) travel to move from one place to another. Seen from the 19th century, even the average car-driving citizen of the 20th century is elite. A 100 hp car, which is now almost an average power rating of most internal combustion engines, is the power equivalent to the 19th century analog of maintaining 100 horses.

    2. 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'.

      The elites point the way for those in even the lowest income brackets to follow. This crosses cultures as well. Capitalism trumps colonialism as former colonized peoples reserve the right to taste the fruits of capitalism. Hence, hard work, ingenuity and leveraging opportunity to accumulate all the signs and symbols of wealth, joining the colonialist biased elites is seen as having arrived at success, even though it means contributing to the destruction of the planetary commons. The aspirations to wealth must be uniformly deprioritized in order to align our culture in the right direction that will rescue our species from the impact of following this misdirection for the past century.

    3. 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.

      The elites move in a world of their own. Embedded within the deteriorating spaces all around them, their privileged and exclusive spaces are like self-constructed lotus blossoms floating on a sea of muck, which their lifestyles have disproportionately helped create in the first place. The geographic juxtapostion of these two spaces is stark, as illustrated in images such as those of Cape Town’s elite neighborhoods nextdoor to crowded townships. Wealth and privilege live side by side poverty.

    4. 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.

      This is an important observation that can be used to develop a transformative strategy. There is a culturally-constructed, positive, psychological affect associated with being in these spaces. How can these be deconstructed?

    5. 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'

      Formal, sharply defined terminology to describe this class for academic writing.

    6. 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 Deep Humanity challenge then, is to achieve an education program for these super-elites that shift aspirations from the extremely high carbon footprint lifestyle to a more frugal, within-planetary- boundary one. Without the context of a dedicated trans-disciplinary Human Inner Transformation (HIT) protocol, a scalable approach may prove challenging.

    7. 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.

      Good description: cosmopolitan faction of the global elite. It is a shadow side of the word cosmopolitan and one we can potentially associate with neoliberalism / neocapitalism.

    8. 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.

      Mapping out where they are is a useful exercise in order to identify the wealthy communities they may live in. Of course, citizens who live long enough in an city, town or community get to know where the affluent parts of town are.

      Of course many of the super elite live in exclusive homes far away from population centers. Wealth buys geographic exclusivity snd seclusion from prying eyes.

    9. 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.

      It is this psychological bait of infinite choice that is appealing and aspiring to all classes. Media that celebrates the lifestyles of the rich and famous condition everyone to look in the same consumptive direction. As professor Kevin Anderson advocates, focusing our climate emergency efforts on the elites and super-elites is a worthwhile leverage point. A 2020 Oxfam report validates Anderson’s claim. The top 1% emit twice as much carbon (14% emissions) as the bottom 50% (7% emissions): https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-richest-1-percent-more-double-emissions-poorest-half-humanity

      Oxfam takes the approach of appealing to Top down actors for policy change. Stop Reset Go advocates attacking the problem simultaneously withe a bottom up approach of citizens empathetically approaching the wealthy through a reachout campaign to help educate and transform their attitudes. Make what they can do with their wealth to uplift others and the planet aspirational, especially with the twin climate and i equality crisis. They may feel guilty about being a microcause of the current crisis but they should be encouraged to deal with the present rather than be haunted by the past.

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

      Perform sentiment analysis on text corpus or media of a person and use AI to develop avatar who can represent that person.