The Substance of Sustainability

The Future is Fiction

2026-04-17T00:00:00+02:00

On Progress, Decline and the need for active hope

Reading time: ca. 18–28 minutes

By Levien van Zon

We are so often presented with predictions for our future, that it’s easy to forget that the future hasn’t happened yet. By definition, all stories about the future are fiction. Yet we need expectations about the future, if only to plan ahead and coordinate with others.
In this article, I argue that the future is still undetermined and mostly unknown. Contrary to what many stories suggest, progress isn’t assured and decline isn’t inevitable. We should avoid prophecies and instead build a capacity for active hope. Hope is not passive wishful thinking or blind optimism. It requires agency, engagement and a willingness to confront obstacles. In the face of uncertainty, hope offers a constructive way forward, one that counters both resigned pessimism and uncritical faith in progress. As Rebecca Solnit puts it, hope is not a lottery ticket; it is “an axe you break down doors with” in times of crisis.

Black Swans and future blindness

As a Danish politician quipped in the late 1930s: It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.¹ It is notoriously difficult to predict how well an organisation or an economy will do in the near future. Unexpected things can and do happen. Yet this rarely deters us: businesses and governments produce a relentless flow of forecasts, acting as though we can see into the future. But these predictions actually mean very little, by definition they exclude the unpredictable. And it is the unforeseen that usually has the biggest impact.

Consider Jaguar Land Rover (JLR). At the close of 2024 the British car manufacturer projected a bright outlook for the coming year. Sales were climbing, particularly in the US, and profits were exceptionally high. Two months later, Donald Trump’s inauguration as US president brought immediate tariff hikes on imported vehicles. Not long after that, a cyberattack crippled JLR’s production lines for weeks. Within half a year, the 103-year-old manufacturer swung from record profits to substantial losses. Unsurprisingly, neither shareholders nor management had anticipated this reversal.

What happened to Jaguar Land Rover may seem exceptional, but it is not. The thinker and trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out that unexpected things happen constantly, and we mostly fail to anticipate them. He coined the term Black Swan to describe an unexpected event or trend that ends up having a significant impact, precisely because most people did not see it coming.² Examples include the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks, the 2008 financial crisis and the recent wars in Ukraine and Iran. More gradual examples are the actual long-term impacts of technologies such as the Internet, smartphones and AI, rather than the effects that we imagine beforehand.

Of course there are always people who correctly predict the unexpected, or who cause it to happen. The European powers were surprised when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, but presumably Adolf Hitler was not. “Unexpected” and “unpredictable” are relative terms. Also, they are mostly about the timing and impact of events or trends. We can be certain that recessions, earthquakes, epidemics and armed conflicts will occur, just as they have throughout history. But we cannot know the specifics: where, when and how they will happen, and what their effects will be. We know with certainty that the global climate is changing, but we can’t really predict precise regional impacts, let alone the cascading effects on societies and communities. Similarly, we know that the current military conflict between Iran and the US and Israel will have significant effects, both in the region and on the global energy system and world economy. But at the time I write this we cannot know precisely what the effects will be.

In an earlier article I discussed complex adaptive systems, emphasising their inherent unpredictability.³ Our economies and societies are such systems. We cannot predict their future very well, yet we often behave as if we can. Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls this epistemic arrogance: an overconfidence in our knowledge, especially our “knowledge” of the future. This arrogance also leads us to rationalise surprises after the fact, often insisting, “We should have seen this coming!” While correctly predicting the future is very hard, explaining events in hindsight is easy. We convince ourselves that what happened was obvious all along, a phenomenon known as hindsight bias.

Simulating the future

When we think about the future, we mentally simulate it by imagining “possible worlds”. We draw on selected trends or examples from the past and present, and we project these into imaginary future scenarios. This remarkable human ability is known as mental simulation, mental time travel or mobile consciousness. We construct scenes in our imagination and transport ourselves within them, either as observers or participants.⁴

The scenarios we use to simulate the future are usually based on our experiences, and on the stories we have been exposed to. Our culture and social groups provide a wealth of “grand narratives”, stories that we share and consume, and which act as templates for our mental simulations. Such stories can be about the past, the present, the future or about entirely fictional realms. In every case, they shape our expectations.

Futures better or worse

When envisioning our collective future, we broadly use one of two story templates. One is the narrative of Progress, in which our future will be better than the past. The other is the narrative of Decline, in which the past was better than the present or the future.⁵ The human mind, however, is far from consistent, so we can shift between these perspectives, depending on mood, social context, subject matter, age, etc.

Perhaps the most common expectation we have about the future is that it will more or less resemble the present. But this isn’t really an interesting narrative, so it isn’t shared much.⁶ Of the future-oriented narratives we do share, that of Decline has historically been the most prominent. The Ancient Greeks believed that their society was in decline after a golden age.⁷ Many of the great religions centre around a story of moral decline, and therefore a necessity for saviour, redemption or enlightenment. In 18^th century Europe, Romanticism emerged as a response to perceived social decline driven by the growing influence of money, profit, and trade. Some Romantic thinkers imagined a further genetic and cultural decline due to racial mixing, fueling the 20^th century rise of fascism and ultimately the Holocaust. Today, narratives of Decline remain prominent, focusing on issues such as climate change, mass immigration or artificial intelligence.⁸

Optimism and negativity

In my previous article I explored some of the unconscious mental biases that influence our perceptions and expectations. These biases can profoundly shape our views of the past and the future. For instance, we tend to think more in terms of decline as we get older. Our physical state deteriorates, and we may start to idealise memories from our past. Rapid changes in the world around us fuel uncertainty about what lies ahead. Moreover, negative emotions (such as fear) capture our attention more effectively than do positive emotions. This is known as negativity bias or the negativity effect. It causes us to pay more attention to negative events than to good news. We therefore tend to overestimate the probability of bad things happening. At least, when it comes to the actions of other people or external forces beyond our control.⁹

Interestingly the negativity effect does not apply (strongly) to our own actions. When we feel in control, we actually tend to underestimate the probability of bad things happening.¹⁰ We overestimate our chances of success, and underestimate the risk of setbacks. This is known as optimism bias. It is especially pronounced in children, peaking around ages 8–9, though even adults remain relatively blind to potential obstacles. This helps explain why we often fail to foresee crises, even when warning signs may be perfectly clear to outside observers.

The combination of optimism bias with the negativity effect implies the following: We are at the same time too pessimistic about the world in general, and too optimistic about our own abilities and the success of our social groups. While such a dual bias may seem bad, both do serve important functions. The negativity effect makes us risk-averse in unfamiliar or uncontrolled environments, beyond the protection of our social circle. This is a sensible survival strategy. Meanwhile, optimism bias motivates us to take calculated risks when we feel secure. We invest in our future, even when the actual, objective chances of success are not that great. This is a potent driver of creativity, progress and social change.

Bright futures

The negativity effect drives our tendency to experience society as being in decline, especially as we get older. However there is a second, countervailing story template for thinking about the future: the narrative of Progress.

In our personal lives, we find the greatest fulfillment when we feel we are progressing toward some kind of meaningful goal. But as a major social narrative—an explanatory story broadly shared within society—Progress is relatively new. Medieval Europeans saw the future as largely beyond their influence, shaped instead by fate and divine providence. The Enlightenment however weakened the existing social order and the role of religious narratives. It promoted individual freedom and the development of scientific knowledge. This mainstreamed the idea that we can influence and improve our future, through individual and collective action. One of the consequences was a string of popular revolutions in Europe and the Americas, from 1765 to the mid-19^th century. Another consequence was economic theory.

The Enlightenment gave rise to at least two strands of progress thinking. The first centered on collective action toward social improvement, while the second framed progress more as a natural law. The first, more progressive school of thinking eventually inspired civil rights movements and helped shape the modern democratic welfare state. Historically it has been very important, but it is also inherently a destabilising force. After all, the whole point of social change is to move beyond the status quo, rather than accepting society in its existing form.
A second strand of progress thinking therefore originated with liberal thinkers who did not feel altogether comfortable with the idea of self-determination for the masses, or the social unrest that came with it.¹¹ Rather than seeing progress as the result of social action, they preferred to see it as a natural outcome of economic growth, human ingenuity, and technological advancement. This view of “automatic” progress gained dominance in the West, especially after World War II.¹² Progress became institutionalised as something that is linked to economic growth and that can be measured (and to some degree managed) by experts. The relative stability of the post-war decades also showed that, as long as the majority of the population expects a future increase in their wellbeing, progress can be a stabilising force in society.

This postcard represents a 1908 artist vision of what the US city of Sanford, Maine, might be like in the future. While the future vision does contain some elements common to modern cities (air traffic and various forms of public transport), it is clearly modelled on the "modern" technology of the day. It is therefore quite different from what Sanford actually looks like today.

Problems of Progress

Modern narratives of Progress frequently imply that there is little need to solve problems collectively through forward planning, because most problems will be solved by technology and economic growth. There are however issues with this vision of the future, of which I shall mention two.

First, while technology has undeniably played an important role, it has often been secondary. If we define progress as an improvement in human wellbeing, its primary drivers were mostly not technological. Rather, progress over the last three centuries was largely based on the vast expansion of human knowledge following the scientific revolution, coupled with education, popular emancipation, significant shifts in moral thinking and the development of effective rules and institutions.
The suppression of infectious diseases stands as a remarkable achievement, yet it was accomplished through relatively straightforward measures: handwashing, sterilising medical equipment and separating human waste from drinking water. Antibiotics and vaccination have arguably contributed most to our longevity and health, but both rely heavily on naturally evolved systems and substances.¹³ We didn’t so much invent these as figure out how to use them.
Many other aspects of improved human wellbeing have even less to do with technology. Rather, they result from moral and social progress, shifts in what we collectively consider acceptable and unacceptable. These moral shifts were promoted by the emergence of new concepts, such as “human rights”, and by collective action in the past.

The second issue can be summarised (paraphrasing the great thinker and soccer legend Johan Cruyff) as: “Every advantage has its disadvantage.”¹⁴ Progress is often portrayed as something that occurs along a single dimension, a single line on which we should always move forward.¹⁵ However, a development that is positive in one respect can produce negative consequences elsewhere, even if these are not immediately apparent.¹⁶ Antibiotics, for example, have saved countless lives over the past century, but their overuse has fostered widespread antibiotic resistance. This reduces our future options for suppressing pathogens, a problem that cannot easily be fixed by technology.¹⁷ Similarly, cheap fossil fuels have enabled modern life and current levels of food production. But many of the negative side effects take decades to show up, and changes in global climate will have unforeseen consequences for centuries to come.¹⁸

Like any story about the future, the narrative of Progress is based on a certain, selective way of viewing the past and the present. Much of what we regard as progress now may ultimately undermine our wellbeing in the future. In fact, this latter insight is at the core of many Decline narratives.
Proponents of progress argue that it will occur in the future because it has occurred in the past. But this is an arbitrary extrapolation. The future hasn’t happened yet and it offers few guarantees. Moreover, the past is itself a narrative, a mental simulation of what happened, based on incomplete and selected information.

Motivational expectations

The notion of “automatic” progress may rest on questionable assumptions, yet this doesn’t mean that Progress itself is a bad narrative. Granted, it’s a fiction, but it’s certainly a useful one. The very possibility of progress can provide a motivation to act under uncertainty, which can make progress a self-fulfilling prophecy. Indeed, modern society cannot operate without some faith in future advancement. As the sociologist Jens Beckert argues, most economic decisions are future-oriented and cannot be conducted without holding assumptions about the future. Since the actual future remains unknowable, we base our decisions on “fictional expectations”, collectively imagined scenarios of what the future will be like.

In the context of economics, our shared expectations enable coordinated decision-making in a complex and uncertain economic landscape. We collectively act as if our fictional expectations more or less represent the future. Beckert suggests that economic and technological forecasts are rarely accurate, but also that they do not need to be. They mostly need to be persuasive, inspiring the confidence required for action. Even if future-oriented decisions on, say, investment prove to be misguided in retrospect, we still need them to keep our socio-economic system going.¹⁹ While this is not always a good thing, it is a reality that we must acknowledge before we can deal with it.

As mentioned, the belief that Progress is possible, is in itself empowering. It can motivate us to improve current conditions through individual or collective action. In fact, a similar argument can be made for the narratives of Decline. The prospect of social or natural deterioration may feel disempowering, if we perceive ourselves as having no agency. But the possibility of decline can also motivate us to take action, to solve problems in the present and address likely challenges in the future. Progress and Decline are both narrative fictions, but we do need such fictions to engage with possible futures.²⁰

Capturing the future

Future fictions are essential for decision-making. However, if we grow overly convinced that a fictional scenario is what will really happen—effectively treating it as a prophecy more than a possibility—we become blinded to alternative outcomes. Nassim Taleb calls this tunneling, and he warns that it leads us to ignore real-world risks and opportunities. And if that isn’t bad enough, it makes us susceptible to manipulation, and can ultimately undermine democracy.

Our mental visions of the future are prime targets for marketers, politicians, and propagandists, because our expectations strongly shape our plans and our behaviour. Propaganda frequently seeks to sell us a single narrative of what lies ahead, suppressing uncertainty and vilifying rival perspectives. Decline narratives are particularly potent in this regard, which is why ambitious politicians often focus on issues that are perceived as going downhill. Decline narratives exploit the negativity effect: by tapping into emotions such as fear or anger, they very effectively hold our attention.²¹ When combined with a sense of agency (and the support of a like-minded social group), Decline narratives can become a powerful catalyst for action. As environmental and civil rights movements have shown, non-violent collective efforts may end up enhancing societal wellbeing. But as more conservative commentators often note, collective action can also turn violent, leading to widespread destruction and loss of life, as evidenced by pogroms, wars and ethnic conflicts across history.²²

Problems mostly occur when we are presented with narratives that are too deterministic, and that lack the perspective of an open future in which we have time to act and talk things over.²³ If a decline is presented as imminent, with very little time to prevent it, the need for action becomes urgent. Whether the perceived peril is climate catastrophe, the spectre of a shadowy elite, or the fear of mass migration—the proposed solution rarely includes measured debate or compromise among competing interests.
This issue is not confined to stories of Decline, also the narratives of Progress tend to be overdetermined: If it is already certain that science, innovation and technology will save us in the end, why bother trying to fix social or environmental problems through the complicated, messy and slow process of social dialogue and reform? Better to move fast and break things, or more commonly, to sit back and let progress run its course.

A tale of TINA

While the narratives we encounter are often overly deterministic, another issue is what we might call “story poverty”. In The Narrative Brain, Fritz Breithaupt argues that the problem lies not with stories themselves, but rather with a lack of alternative storylines: we have too few narratives to choose from when imagining the future. This is especially evident when we are asked to envision meaningful alternatives (or even mere structural reforms) to the current socio-economic system. The mainstream response for the past half century or so has become so entrenched that it has its own acronym, TINA: There Is No Alternative.²⁴ Given how widely this belief is held, one might think that there has been some seriously effective propaganda at work?

In fact, little explicit propaganda was required. What happened was a cultural shift, which the British political scientist Jonathan White calls “the privatisation of the future”. During the second half of the 20^th century, the Western world increasingly shifted its focus from collective to individual futures. This was partly a push-back against the more collectivist ideologies of fascism and communism, and partly driven by the rise of mass production and consumer marketing. Rather than changing society, which is a long-term collective effort, the dominant goal became to advance ourselves within its structures as individuals, within our own life span. And rather than seeking power (which is always scarce), most people came to pursue happiness through the acquisition of objects, experiences and self-improvements. The promise was that we could buy our way into happiness, provided we were sufficiently enterprising (or lucky). This cultural shift fostered a competitive mindset. It also made us increasingly skeptical of ideology and collective organisation toward common goals, especially if these involve long-term projects that extend beyond our own lifespan. Institutions adapted accordingly: citizens were recast primarily as consumers and voters, in a world of short-term personal choices rather than substantive collective ones. This shift toward a privatised future eventually occurred globally. It has made it very difficult to imagine an alternative society, one that does not revolve around fulfilling our immediate personal goals through consumption.

Of course, even if we are focused on our personal lives, we still harbour hopes and fears for our collective future. This is evident from our shared narratives of progress and decline, as well as in the widespread consumption of future-oriented fiction in books, films and series. The trouble is that we remain mostly passive in the face of these possible futures. We are preoccupied with our personal goals and too focused on choices that revolve around work, family or consumption. The agency we feel for shaping our shared future feels limited to occasional voting and choosing which things to purchase or avoid. It feels as if we are free to choose our personal path but not our collective future. The latter appears governed by all kinds of impersonal forces and structures. We seem to have returned to a medieval mindset: we feel powerless to challenge the fate of society, which seems destined to either go forward or backward.

Agency over prophecy

It seems we are in a difficult spot when it comes to envisioning the future: on one hand our outlook is moulded by deterministic stories of progress and decline, and on the other it is constrained by a lack of collective imagination and a requirement for endless economic growth. Where, one might ask, is the scope for genuine agency, for shaping our shared wellbeing beyond our role as voter, consumer or employee?

One way forward is to cultivate story awareness. When we recognise the narratives that frame our expectations of the future, their grip on us weakens. Our emotions become less of a slave to future expectations, and we can start to see future fictions for what they are: useful collective tools for anticipating problems, aligning goals and generating motivation.

Our mental simulations of the future are not the future itself. Reality is complex, and what lies ahead remains undetermined. We should avoid fixating on any single account of what is to come. What we need isn’t prophecy, in the form of some naive, oversimplified or deterministic narrative of what things will be like. Aspects of the future will be better than the past, other aspects will be worse. In the real world outside of simplified stories, our societies and lives oscillate between periods of flourishing and periods of instability.²⁵ While death is inevitable for individuals, societies themselves are remarkably resilient. Empires, governments and institutions may fall apart, cities may be abandoned and economies may crash, yet total social collapse is exceedingly rare. This resilience is cause for optimism. The bad news is that, historically, endless growth also does not occur. Our societies will inevitably run into difficult times, although these are seldom the end of the world.²⁶

Rediscovering possibility

The narratives of Progress and Decline have a tendency to downplay human agency. They depict societies as being pushed around by big forces that we common people cannot really control. Yet one of the key reasons why we cannot predict social systems very well, is that at any point we do have agency. You can act to alter the future, and so can other people, for better or for worse. The social future is always still open and we cannot say what it will be like, only what we aspire to, and what we fear for. Collectively, humans can do incredible things, or terrible and stupid things. But crucially, we have choices, which brings us to the subject of hope.

Hope is based on the sense that things may perhaps be bad, but they could get better. Hope requires us to acknowledge that the future is uncertain, but also that, in principle, we can act to change it. As used here, the term differs from optimism, wishful thinking or faith. Optimism and pessimism say something about the expectations we have. The same is true for faith or wishful thinking, which entail the expectation that things will turn out well, regardless of our own actions. Hope on the other hand is an active stance, and it requires a sense of agency and possibility.

Crucially, there’s only so much a single person can do, especially in the face of collective systemic problems. This is why it often requires many people acting collectively to change our shared future in a meaningful way. According to the psychologist Jamil Zaki, the main enemy of hope is cynicism, a conviction that other people generally have bad intentions. To a cynic, there is no point in trying to change the world for the better, because most people are out for themselves and thus have no interest in working toward a better future for others. History, however, demonstrates otherwise. People can and do act against their own narrow interests. We can collectively act to improve the wellbeing of large groups of people—this is precisely the point of the narrative of Progress, at least in its active, non-automatic form. Successful outcomes of collective action include the abolition of slavery, the establishment of workers’ rights, the expansion of voting rights to workers and women and the introduction of basic environmental regulations.

Hope, then, means acting, ideally with others, toward shaping a future we desire, while recognising that there might be difficulties, setbacks and failures. This requires not only a sense of agency, but also a form of determination, a motivational driving force to keep us going in the face of difficulty. Often, this force is fuelled by “righteous anger” at a moral injustice.²⁷ Faith or optimism can certainly help as well, although positive expectations are by no means required. What effective hope does require is a degree of epistemic humility. This means that we should be skeptical of our own beliefs and expectations, especially regarding the future, or the supposed bad intentions of other people.

Hope and humility in practice

What lessons can we draw from all this? First, the future of our societies is inherently unpredictable. We must recognise this and bear it in mind. Narratives about the future are, by their nature, fictions, even when they feel like inevitable realities. We should acknowledge complexity and try to practise an awareness that our knowledge is provisional and may well be flawed. This is particularly true when it comes to our “knowledge” of what lies ahead.

We are often attracted to future fictions because they seem to offer certainty. Uncertainty feels uncomfortable²⁸, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Accepting it however, requires practice. By accepting a degree of uncertainty, we enhance our ability to adapt to unexpected developments. It also opens the way to hope, which, in essence, is a practical application of uncertainty: it recognises that the future may bring challenges, but also opportunities for positive change. Moreover, research in behavioural science suggests that hope is a far more effective motivator than fear.²⁹ Scaring us into action may work in the short term, but the effect of fear eventually wears off as we get used to it or find ways to avoid it, and worst-case scenarios fail to materialise. Hope, on the other hand, is much more durable.

To practise hope we must do more than just accept uncertainty and the possibility of obstacles. We must also feed our imagination with possibilities of what we can achieve, especially if we work together with others. The news tends to focus on what goes wrong in the world. This is understandable given the negativity effect: positive news just doesn’t capture our attention very well. So to counter cynicism, we should actively seek out examples of people and groups making a positive difference. One good place to start is the Solutions Story Tracker, a resource created by the Solutions Journalism Network.³⁰ Of course, we should also avoid naivety and wishful thinking, remembering that progress often demands hard work and will encounter setbacks. But this does not diminish the value of such efforts. Effective anticipatory thinking requires us to see both possibilities and possible obstacles, so we should pay attention to both.

If we wish to contribute positively to the future, there are many places to start. A logical first step is to exercise agency within our own “privatised future”: what can you do in your personal and professional life to improve the wellbeing of others, human or otherwise? We should however keep in mind that as individuals we cannot take full responsibility for solving complex, collective problems. What we can do is contribute to their resolution, alongside others. The notion that we can solve systemic issues simply by buying the right products is absurd, as is the belief that technology by itself can solve such problems for us.³¹

Cooperative change

Cooperative problem-solving is difficult and does not happen spontaneously. Yet humans excel at it, and we have developed numerous social mechanisms to make it work—a topic I will explore in my next article. Some readers may be fortunate enough to work in an organisation that directly addresses societal challenges, big or small. But for many people, this is not the case. As Jonathan White describes in his history of the future as a political concept, collective action for social change historically took place outside work, in labour unions and mass political parties. In general, while social decline can be rapid, constructive social progress is usually slow. It often unfolds in fits and starts over generations, because it has to contend with established interests and power relations. It is a collective endeavour requiring patience and determination, so some form of organisation is essential to drive social progress. In the past, mass political parties often filled this role, but today many parties focus more on catering to voters as consumers. Modern voters share some of the blame for this: we have grown so accustomed to acting as consumers rather than active citizens, that we treat party manifestos as shopping lists of short-term promises. Still, this is no reason to dismiss democracy entirely. It may be imperfect and can certainly be improved, but it remains the least flawed system we have for collective problem-solving in large, complex societies.³²

Engaging more actively in local or national politics, directly or indirectly, is one way to help shape our collective future. But politics is not the only arena for action, and when it comes to social change, it often follows rather than leads public opinion. So participate in local communities, join discussion groups, cooperatives, NGOs, activist groups or contribute to education, to name just a few options. Ideas on what is valuable and how to improve society need to spread before they can make an impact, and true social interaction and discussion is still the best way to do that.³³ Moreover, as I will discuss in my next article, rebuilding trust and building community are vital for effective cooperation.
The key is to take responsibility and avoid both cynicism and naivety. We cannot see into the future, but we can contribute to it. Stories of decline may be highly useful as warnings, but they are not prophecies. Technology and economic growth are valuable, but not sufficient, and come with unintended side-effects. Progress, understood as increased wellbeing, is possible—but it does not happen by itself.

“Red thread” images by Io Cooman, based on photos from the Library of Congress.
Sanford postcard by F.C. Philpot, 1908, currently in the collection of Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Penguin Books, 2007 (revised edition 2008).
One of Taleb’s most influential books, The Black Swan investigates the profound impact of unpredictable events. The book highlights a fundamental human blindness to randomness, asserting that our minds are “explanation machines” that use narrative fallacies to create a coherent, but false, sense of understanding the past. History, according to Taleb, is disproportionately driven by “Black Swans”, rare and unpredictable but very consequential events or trends. Because such events can disproportionately dominate outcomes, standard statistical tools like the bell curve are dangerously inadequate for describing the future as well as the past. Rather than naively attempting to forecast the future using limited past data, we should focus on what we do not know—and build robustness against negative Black Swans, while maximising our benefit from positive ones. This forms the basis of a strategy that Taleb calls “antifragility” in his later work.
The Black Swan forms the second part of The Incerto, Taleb’s philosophical investigation into the nature of uncertainty, the (mostly inadequate) ways in which we currently deal with it, and how we can do better. Other books in this body of work include Antifragile, Fooled by Randomness, Skin in the Game and The Bed of Procrustes. The core ideas of Incerto are explained by Ryan Faulkner in this summary on YouTube, and are expanded upon in The Incerto Podcast (listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts). The core ideas of The Black Swan are explained in this 5-minute animated summary and by Taleb himself in, among others, a Forum Network lecture.

Taleb, N.N. et al. (2014) ‘The precautionary principle: fragility and black swans from policy actions’, NYU Extreme Risk Initiative working paper, pp. 1–24.
In this technical paper, Taleb and colleagues formalise the precautionary principle as a tool for preventing systemic ruin in cases where potential harm is irreversible and scientific knowledge is incomplete. The paper asserts that for activities carrying a risk of global catastrophe, the burden of proof regarding safety must fall on those proposing the activity. Standard cost-benefit approaches to risk management only make sense if risks are limited and localised, or when potential damage is reversible. If global, irreversible damage is a possible outcome, the cost is effectively infinite and cannot be balanced against finite potential benefits. Also the argument that the probability of global ruin is very low doesn’t make sense, because even tiny risks can lead to a mathematical certainty of damage, given sufficient exposure. Systemic global threats must therefore be treated as if they can happen eventually, and steps must be taken to avoid them.

Fritz Breithaupt. The Narrative Brain: The Stories Our Neurons Tell. Yale University Press, 2025.
Breithaupt explores how humans have developed narrative thinking to transform individual perceptions into shared experiences. He posits that our minds possess a unique “mobility of consciousness”, which allows us to mentally transport ourselves into different situations to co-experience the worlds of others. In narrative thinking, the ending functions as a reward: engagement in a story is motivated and rewarded by specific emotions (e.g. triumph, wonder, or satisfaction) at an episode’s conclusion, providing a signal to the brain that the sequence is complete. This is why we are so captivated by the ending of a story, even when the concept of an “ending” is much less relevant in real life. Narrative thinking is further defined by “multiversionality”, the ability to simultaneously contemplate multiple contradictory versions of a story. The various narrative possibilities create suspense in fiction, but also help us overcome crises and prevent us from being trapped by singular, rigid identities in real life.
Fritz Breithaupt explains the essence of storytelling in this 60-second video, and also discusses his work in this MindCORE seminar. He talks about the role of future-oriented fictions here.

Jonathan White. In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea. Profile Books, 2024.
This book discusses “the future” as a political idea. White describes the 18^th-century emergence of an “open future”, the belief that history is susceptible to human influence. This belief helped galvanise mass political participation, and the development of ideologies like socialism and liberalism. However, White argues that the feeling of an open future has receded and we now live in an “age of emergencies”, in which time always appears to be running out. This perceived urgency can marginalise democratic processes in favour of either an authoritarian approach or a managerial, calculative outlook, managed by experts. The decline of traditional mass political parties has traded long-term collective projects for short-termist, personalised projects, in a process that White calls the “privatisation of the future”. Ultimately, democracy depends on an expectation of continuation and social progress. We must move beyond an obsession with imminent endings to recapture a sense of temporal depth in which we can collectively work on our shared future. Moreover, resolving collective problems requires debate and compromises, and democratic institutions are required to mediate this process. Contemporary democratic institutions are far from perfect, but this does not mean that we should get rid of them in favour of non-democratic decision making. Rather, it means that democratic institutions need to be strengthened and improved, and White outlines several proposals for this.
White also discusses these ideas in a 24 minute coffee break talk, on the Ink & Insights podcast, in this seminar, and in interviews with Aaron Bastani (at Novara Media) and at the Bath Institute of Policy Research.

Jens Beckert. Imagined Futures: Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics. Harvard University Press, 2016.
Beckert presents a sociological analysis of decision making in modern economies. History matters, but many of our actions are future-oriented. They thus cannot be conducted without assumptions about the future, even if the future is unknowable. In practice, this problem is solved by acting on “fictional expectations”, imagined scenarios of what the future will or may be like. These fictional expectations are produced by expert opinions, theoretical models and various kinds of forecasts. Economic and technological forecasts are rarely accurate, but Beckert argues that accuracy is not their main function. Forecasts mostly need to be convincing: what matters is the momentary belief in accuracy. Forecasts help actors make sense of seemingly chaotic or incomprehensibly complex situations, and give them the confidence to make and justify decisions. Economies need fictional expectations in order to operate, they help economic actors work in concert in the face of uncertainty. Though the future cannot be known, it is possible to know what other people think about it. If many people share a conviction that the future will develop in a specific way, they end up behaving in foreseeable ways and their actions become coordinated to some degree. Positive imagined futures can drive economic growth, and bleak ones can trigger economic crises. By continuously telling stories about the future toward which they are headed, economic actors effectively help create the future.
Jens Beckert also discusses some of these ideas in this 2019 talk at the Watson School of International and Public Affairs.

Jamil Zaki. Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness. Grand Central Publishing, 2024.
Jamil Zaki’s book characterises cynicism as a pervasive “disease of social health” rooted in the mistaken theory that humanity is inherently selfish, greedy, and dishonest. The book explains how cynicism can function as a self-fulfilling prophecy, where “preemptive strikes” of mistrust provoke the very selfishness that is assumed. On the other hand, “leaps of faith” and a “reciprocity mindset” can transform social interactions into virtuous cycles. To counter cynicism, Zaki advocates for “hopeful skepticism”, an approach that replaces knee-jerk mistrust with a curiosity-driven commitment to empirical data. Most people consistently underestimate the altruism and trustworthiness of others. Inequality and elite abuse tend to foster a negative view of other people. Zaki suggests that rather than assuming the worst, we should pay more attention to how most other people really are, which is only possible if we interact with them in person. Moreover, we should actively seek out positive examples of cooperation and human action, to balance negative news. When combined with local community-building, such efforts can restore the “psychological glue” of trust. Hope is not a naive evasion of reality, but can be a practical tool for effective activism and collective progress.
Zaki discusses these ideas and more in a TED-talk, on the Psychology podcast, the Huberman Lab podcast, EP502 of the Passion Struck podcast, in a conversation with Robert Sapolsky and at an Action for Happiness event.

Rebecca Solnit. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Haymarket Books 2016 (first edition 2003).
Jane Goodall, Douglas Abrams, Gail Hudson. The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times. Celadon Books, 2021.
Sumit Paul-Choudhury. The Bright Side: Why Optimists Have the Power to Change the World. Canongate Books, 2025.
Similar in spirit to Jamil Zaki’s Hope for Cynics, these three books make the case for hope as an aspirational and practical approach for dealing with problems in the present and the future.
Rebecca Solnit offers a defence of hope as an active commitment to engage with an uncertain and unknowable future. She contrasts this approach with both passive optimism, which assumes positive outcomes without effort, and pessimism, which treats failure as inevitable. Both, she argues, serve as excuses for political inaction. Solnit documents a long record of transformative grassroots victories (including some like the Arab Spring that, unfortunately, have since been reversed). By remembering and reclaiming the stories of past successes, civil society can find the “axe” needed to break through the walls of the present and shape a better world.
Similar to Solnit, the late Jane Goodall also characterises hope not as passive wishful thinking, but as a crucial survival trait that demands active engagement and hard work. Goodall argues that the same intellect that created environmental crises is capable of devising the creative solutions needed to help repair the damage. She also emphasises the importance of empowering the next generation, for instance through initiatives like her Roots & Shoots programme. Showing young people that they can make a difference, fosters the agency and purpose they require to help tackle future challenges.
Sumit Paul-Choudhury takes a somewhat different approach, using a different terminology but coming to broadly the same conclusions. Spurred by the personal tragedy of his wife’s death, he investigates how optimism functions as a biological motivator that drives humans and animals to act when outcomes are uncertain, thereby avoiding self-fulfilling “pessimism traps”. Paul-Choudhury explores the neurobiology of the optimism bias and positive illusions, the rational basis for progress and our ability to anticipate and improve the future. In the end he concludes that while passive optimism or pessimism is counterproductive, we should treat a “better future” as an objective to be realised through the active exploration of scenarios. Ultimately, Paul-Choudhury asserts that what he calls aspirational optimism (and what the other authors call hope) is a “shared duty” and a form of true moral courage, essential for solving collective global challenges like climate change.
Solnit talks about hope in this 2023 discussion and on The Left Hook podcast. The Jane Goodall Institute hosts the Hopecast podcast dedicated to the hopeful vision of Goodall, and National Geographic made a freely available documentary about her life and work. Paul-Choudhury discusses his view on optimism on the BBC Science Focus podcast.

C. Richard Snyder (editor). Handbook of Hope: Theory, Measures, and Applications. Elsevier Science, 2000.
Richard Snyder. The Psychology of Hope: You Can Get There from Here. Simon and Schuster, 1994.
The late psychologist and hope researcher Richard Snyder postulated that three main elements make up “hopeful” thinking: approaching life in a goal-oriented way, finding different pathways to achieve your goals, and believing in your agency, your ability to instigate change and achieve goals. Snyder argued that individuals who are able to realize these three components and develop a belief in their ability are what he calls hopeful people. Such people can establish clear goals, imagine multiple workable pathways toward those goals, and persevere, even when obstacles get in their way. Snyder also stressed the link between hope and mental willpower, as well as the need for a realistic perception of goals.

Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
Tali Sharot. The Science of Optimism: Why We’re Hard-Wired for Hope. Ted Conferences, 2012.
Kahneman’s work forms an important basis for examining the limitations of human reason and the fallibility of experts. Where Nassim Nicholas Taleb introduces the concept of epistemic arrogance to signify that we overestimate our knowledge in the face of a volatile future, Kahneman identifies and describes the cognitive biases and mental shortcuts that lead individuals to overconfidence. He shows how our brains frequently prefer coherent narratives over complex truths.
Kahneman characterises the “optimistic bias” as a pervasive tendency to perceive the world as more benign, one’s own attributes as more favourable, and one’s goals as more achievable than is realistically the case. He labels this the “engine of capitalism”, because it increases the willingness to seek challenges and take risks. While such optimism provides critical resilience and is often essential for scientific success, it also fosters a dangerous collective blindness to risk and uncertainty. To mitigate these effects, Kahneman advocates for the “premortem”, a technique where teams imagine a project has failed and reconstruct the history of that disaster to identify neglected threats. Tali Sharot further examines the optimism bias, first identified by Kahneman and Tversky. In this short book that accompanies her TED-talk, Sharot states that this bias is hard-wired into the brain by evolution as a critical survival mechanism, facilitating the ability to envision and plan for a better future. This rosy outlook persists because the brain selectively incorporates desirable information, while often discounting bad news. Like Kahneman, Sharot notes that this mindset fosters resilience, improved health, and professional achievement, but can also trigger disastrous miscalculations.

Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert (2023). “The illusion of moral decline,” Nature, 618(7966), pp. 782–789.
John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister. The Power of Bad: How Our Negativity Bias Rules Us and How We Can Rule It. Penguin Books, 2019.
Mastroianni and Gilbert examine the feeling that morality is declining in society, and find it to be nearly universal across time and space, even citing a written example from Roman times. They propose that this illusion of moral decline is caused by a combination of two mental biases. One is the “negativity effect”, the psychological principle that negative events and emotions affect us more profoundly than positive ones. The second is the “biased memory effect”, which implies that in the longer term, negative memories tend to be less sticky than our recollection of positive experiences. As Jamil Zaki also points out, the illusion of moral decline mostly applies to our view of “people in general”. It does not apply strongly to our view of the people around us, with whom we regularly interact.
Tierney and Baumeister explore the negativity effect in more depth, in their very readable “Power of Bad”. They note that in the short term, it typically requires four positive experiences to offset the lingering impact of a single negative one. Ultimately, while negative information and feeling is immediately more potent, we can counterbalance this bias through persistence and conscious effort. Moreover, bad feelings can be leveraged in a positive way, as incentives for improvement. Unfortunately, near the end of the book Tierney and Baumeister seem to discount the possibility that alarmism and precaution can in themselves be useful. Instead, they put their faith in science and technology to solve all future problems. For a more balanced approach to risk management and the precautionary principle, see Taleb et al. (2014) above.

Dorian Lynskey. Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell about the End of the World. Pan Macmillan, 2024.
This rather exhaustive book investigates the appeal of stories about the end of the world, exploring how existential dread interacts with fiction, politics, science, and the public mood. Lynskey distinguishes between religious eschatology, which focuses on divine judgment and transformation, and secular eschatology, which encompasses planetary demolition, human extinction, and the collapse of civilization. Lynskey maps an “inexhaustible stockpile” of doomsday scenarios, ranging from comet impacts and nuclear winter to rogue artificial intelligence and pandemic-induced social breakdown. Lynskey critiques the numbing effect of “apocalyptic overload” and warns against the defeatism of “doomerism,” arguing that narratives of the end should inspire prophylactic action rather than psychological surrender.

Arthur Herman. The Idea of Decline in Western History. Simon and Schuster, 1997.
Robert Nisbet. History of the Idea of Progress. Routledge, 2017.
The historian Herman examines the idea of decline and sets out to explain how the conviction of civilization’s inevitable end has become a fixed part of the modern Western imagination. His book traces the roots of declinism and cultural pessimism. Herman notes that cultural pessimists often view catastrophic events with “barely concealed glee”, as they believe the destruction of “sick” Western culture will clear the way for a better future.
Nisbet traces the history of the belief in humanity’s continuous advancement. He describes the influence of the Enlightenment, but notes that the idea of progress in Western thought is much older. St. Augustine already used Greek and Jewish concepts to establish a linear narrative of the “education of the human race,” viewing history as a series of necessary, cumulative stages leading toward a final, redemptive state.
Both Herman and Nisbet argue that the idea of decline is the “reverse image” of the idea of progress; both frameworks rely on the flawed assumption that societies are singular organisms governed by inexorable historical laws.

Peter Turchin. End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration. Penguin Publishing Group, 2023.
Based on empirical data, Turchin shows how there are patterns to history, driven by common social mechanisms. Social systems are broadly predictable in some of their large-scale dynamics, although each historical case is unique. Periods of growth and decline are largely determined by social stability. Stability in turn is linked to successful coordination and trust. Periods of instability on the other hand result from an increase in inequality, because “wealth pump” mechanisms transfer wealth from the working class to the elite. As the class of aspirant “power holders” grows and popular emiseration deepens, increasingly violent struggles for power develop and social cooperation starts to break down. Turchin uses a wealth of case studies to show that such instability can escalate into large-scale violent conflicts. However, sometimes conflict is averted and stability restored, by switching off the “wealth pump” and re-establishing elite cooperation to rebalance the social system.

Addie Schulte. De strijd om de toekomst: Over doemscenario’s en vooruitgang. Cossee, 2019.
In “The Struggle for the Future” (written in Dutch), Schulte discusses several “theories of decline” (neergangstheorieën). The modern decline narratives he examines are about migration, neoliberalism, robotisation and climate change. These are examples of what Dorian Lynskey calls “secular eschatology”, doomsday scenarios in which society is predicted to spin out of control, but which include the possibility of redemption. The message of these narratives is that if we listen to their warnings and take immediate, drastic action, we can still avert catastrophe and create some form of utopian society. Schulte points out the political usefulness of such narratives, and the rise in their political use in recent decades (especially on the political right, which has managed to successfully translate fears of migration into political power). However, in The Idea of Decline in Western History, Arthur Herman shows that this is hardly a recent phenomenon, so perhaps it’s better to speak of a “decline story renaissance” rather than a new development. Schulte suggests that we should counter this trend by making more room for uncertainty, doubt and unpredictable developments.

Bas Erlings. Het spel van de populist: hoe zij het spelen, hoe wij het winnen. Alfabet Uitgevers, 2025.
In another Dutch book, “The Populist Game”, the former campaign strategist and behavioural psychologist Bas Erlings analyses how populists operate and why their methods are so effective. His central argument is that all populists follow more or less the same script, which makes very effective use of various cognitive biases and mass psychology. Populists exploit emotional triggers and simple, powerful narratives to sway public opinion, often bypassing facts and logic. But Erlings shows that several mainstream politicians, including Barack Obama and Jacinda Ardern, have managed to successfully counter populism by adopting some of its strategies, while avoiding some of its downsides. The crucial difference is that populists tend to exploit loss aversion and negativity bias, basing their narratives on powerful negative emotions such as fear and anger. Moreover, they leverage social feelings by strongly emphasising group identity (e.g. national identity or class), suggesting positive ingroup traits (e.g. national superiority, work ethic) and contrasting these with outgroups (e.g. migrants, “wokes”). Successful politicians who refuse to follow the populist script, counter this by leveraging more positive emotions such as hope, by respecting facts and by emphasising the commonalities of groups rather than their differences. While their message is very different, focusing on connection and cooperation rather than division, they also use some of the techniques that make populist messaging so effective. They avoid complex arguments, repeat simple, hopeful messages and address real problems experienced by common people. Effective messaging is by no means a guarantee for electoral success in the short term (or political success in the long term). But the landslide victory of Péter Magyar over Viktor Orbán in the 2026 Hungarian elections shows that there is a limit to the viability of the populist script based on misinformation and fear, especially in the long term, and that hope is a powerful motivator. The 2025 re-election of Trump was a demonstration of how effective the populist script can be, but his precipitous drop in popularity since then suggests that populism may actually be quite fragile in the long term, especially if it disregards reality in favour of narrative fiction.

Mark Fisher. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. Zer0 Books, 2022.
Fisher introduces the concept of capitalist realism, the widespread sense that free market capitalism is the only viable political and economic system and that a coherent alternative is impossible to even imagine. Drawing on the phrase that it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” Fisher describes a worldview in which it is considered obvious that everything in society, from healthcare to education, should be run as a business. The book explores how capitalist culture has even managed to pre-emptively format our desires and hopes, turning even rebellion into a marketable style. Fisher identifies a pervasive condition of “reflexive impotence” among the public, a knowledge that the system is dysfunctional coupled with the belief that nothing can be done about it. Rather than being seen as a systemic problem, the resulting distress is subsequently “privatised” and treated as an individual pathology.

Ha-Joon Chang. 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism. Penguin, 2010.
William Skidelsky. ‘Ha-Joon Chang: The net isn’t as important as we think’, The Guardian, 28 August 2010.
While the economist Ha-Joon Chang is an advocate of capitalism (“To paraphrase Winston Churchill, I think it’s the worst economic system except for all the others.”), in this book he criticises extreme free market capitalism. Moreover, Chang points out that we suffer from recency bias when it comes to imagining the role that technology plays in social and economic progress. The technologies that were truly important in shaping modern society are not the ones we usually think of, like the computer or the internet. Rather, more mundane technologies like piped water, the washing machine, vacuum cleaners and the electric iron had a much greater impact. Time-saving household appliances allowed women to leave the home and join the workforce, nearly doubling potential economic productivity. Also the invention of the printing press was one of the most important events in human history, and the telegraph had a much more significant impact than the internet. Before the invention of the telegraph in the late 19^th century, it took two to three weeks to carry a message across the Atlantic. The telegraph reduced it to 20 or 30 minutes, a more than 2,000-fold speed-up. While the internet has sped things up further and has greatly increased the volume of information we can rapidly transport, its positive impact on society has so far been fairly limited. Moreover, we tend to ignore its downsides: there is now so much information out there that it has become hard to find reliable information, and even if we find it we don’t actually have time to digest it. As Herbert Simon already argued in the late 1950s, our problem now is that we have limited decision-making capability, rather than too little information.

Freddie deBoer. “The Rage of the AI Guy — I’m only asking you to observe the world around you”. Substack, 4 August 2025.
David William Silva. “I’m Sorry to Burst Your Bubble: You Are Being Fooled About AI, and You Will Soon Feel Really Stupid”. Substack, 9 February 2026.
Another good example of recency bias and epistemic arrogance is the future potential of artificial intelligence (AI), as it is currently portrayed by tech company leaders, as well as in many books, blogs and in the media. Most current incarnations of AI are powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), an impressively effective and very useful technology that is explained in some detail by Stephen Wolfram in his book and blog article What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?. As with computers and the internet, here is little doubt that the application of LLMs and AI in general will have an impact on the way we work, especially in jobs that involve producing or rewriting text or computer code, or that involve analysing large amounts of data. However, as Freddie deBoer points out, the current public discourse on AI is saturated with extreme, unsupported claims about AI’s transformative power. Even “serious” publications like The New York Times uncritically promote determinist visions of AI utopianism or doom. DeBoer reminds us that humans naturally believe they live in a uniquely important time. He suggests that many people are frustrated with modern life and the slow pace of positive change, and that they therefore seek revolutionary solutions. Like Ha-Joon Chang, he points out that truly transformative technologies and developments such as automobiles, electrification and effective medicine visibly reshaped daily life, and that AI has not yet done so. The current hype around the potential of AI not so much reflects reality, as more a wish to escape the mundane realities of student loans, traffic, aging, and death, by imagining that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is around the corner and will profoundly reshape our lives. But for the time being, such scenarios are pure fiction, and we will have to deal with the mundane realities of our actual lives. While AI may indeed end up having an impact, we cannot currently predict what its impact will be, and whether it will be positive. And as David Silva points out, LLMs are unlikely to produce anything akin to true human intelligence, and suggesting that it will is mostly a clever marketing ploy by companies like OpenAI and Meta toward the rather more mundane goal of raising funds from investors.

Richard G. Olson. Scientism and Technocracy in the Twentieth Century: The Legacy of Scientific Management. Lexington Books, 2015.
Olson traces the history of one of the most influential progress-oriented intellectual (and practical) movements of the past century, that of scientific management and technocracy. The resulting drive for industrial efficiency shaped global policy and labour relations throughout the twentieth century. Scientism, the importation of “scientific” (i.e. empirical and experimental, at least initially) attitudes and methods into social and political domains, came to dominate global governance and industry. According to Olson, the starting point for these trends was Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Scientific Management, which subsequently moved beyond the factory floor to shape public administration (technocracy), the arts (Modernism) and diverse political systems ranging from capitalist democracies to socialist and fascist regimes. Olson characterises the “technocratic mentality” by its confidence in “scientific” problem-solving, its dislike of traditions and distrust of traditional ideological politics, and its commitment to material productivity and efficiency over considerations of social justice or democratic equality.
For a short overview of how Taylorism influenced European policies, politics and ideas in the decades leading up to the Second World War, see the essay Between Taylorism and Technocracy by Charles S. Maier (1970). For a less historical and more critical view of scientism and technocracy and the widespread damage caused by their application, see James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State.

Jared Diamond. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail Or Succeed. Viking, 2005.
Patricia A. McAnany and Norman Yoffee (editors). Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience, Ecological Vulnerability, and the Aftermath of Empire. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
In his influential study “Collapse”, Diamond argues that past civilisational declines were often driven by “ecocide”, unintended ecological suicide, in which societies inadvertently exhausted or destroyed the environmental resources upon which they depended. Diamond concludes that survival is a “choice” dependent on a culture’s capacity for long-term planning and its willingness to jettison maladaptive core values. In contrast, McAnany and Yoffee’s Questioning Collapse criticises this thesis, asserting that human resilience and regeneration, rather than absolute, apocalyptic failure, is the dominant pattern in history when a social system fails. The critics reframe the abandonment of settlements as flexible mobility strategies used by common people to survive environmental or political crises. Furthermore, they argue that Diamond’s “ecocide” narratives sometimes downplay other documented pressures, such as colonialism and disease. Moreover, his focus on societies having a “choice” overlooks uneven power relationships that may severely constrain the agency of many people in a given society. Still, Diamond’s work is valuable, especially because he compares his case-studies of societies that collapsed with those of comparable societies that that managed to deal reasonably well with similar pressures. Examples of the latter include Tikopia Island, the New Guinea Highlands, the Hopi and Zuni Pueblos, Tokugawa Japan and Iceland. The positive examples highlight the constructive role that forward-looking communities and social leadership can play in preventing decline and in stopping or even reversing resource degradation. Notably, long-term planning is important, as is the presence of effective institutions, the establishment of new norms and values and the alignment of the ruling elites with common interests.
For more perspectives on the subject of historical social collapse, see Understanding Collapse by Guy Middleton, and the academic volume Beyond Collapse edited by Ronald K. Faulseit. See also the work of Peter Turchin above, and Paul Cooper below.

Paul Cooper. Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline. Duckworth, 2024.
Based on his popular and extremely well-researched podcast Fall of Civilizations, Cooper characterises civilisations as large, organised societies and focuses on historical episodes where the social fabric disintegrated, leading to the significant abandonment of population centres. Success and persistence typically stem from ingenious resource management (such as the Khmer’s complex water networks), strategic trade interdependencies, and the religious or divine status of rulers. Cooper argues that eventual decline often occurs when these once-nurturing productive forces turn into liabilities and the society proves unable or unwilling to change course. This collapse is frequently driven by a “perfect storm of calamities”, including environmental degradation, unforeseen climate shifts (e.g. extended droughts) and staggering levels of inequality that destroy social cohesion and the ability to react to crises. Additionally, the disintegration of exchange systems and bad treatment of neighbours can accelerate the unravelling of empires, leaving behind mysterious ruins as an empire’s glory passed from common memory within a few generations.

Footnotes

It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.
According to Quote Investigator, the first written record of this saying is from 1948, in Danish: Det er vanskeligt at spaa, især naar det gælder Fremtiden. It is thought to originate with a Danish politician from the 1930s . The quote is often attributed to the physicist Niels Bohr, who, being Danish, may indeed have been aware of this expression and may have used it himself (although there is no recorded evidence of this). It has also been attributed to the American baseball player Yogi Berra (e.g. by Nassim Nicholas Taleb), again without much evidence (Taleb acknowledges this, but likes Berra so cites him anyway). I prefer to stick with interbellum Denmark. Europe in the late 1930s provides an excellent illustration of how hard it is to predict even the near future… ↩
The thinker and trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out that unexpected things happen constantly, and we mostly fail to anticipate them. He coined the term Black Swan to describe an unexpected event or trend that ends up having a significant impact, precisely because most people did not see it coming.
The term Black Swan originates in the fact that people in the West long assumed that all swans were white, and thus a black swan was either impossible or at least highly unlikely. Romans already spoke of unlikely or impossible situations as being “a bird as rare upon the earth as a black swan” (rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno). However, in 1697 Dutch naturalists discovered a species of black swan (Cygnus atratus) in Australia, thus invalidating the previously held “common sense” assumption that all swans were white. The main lesson that Taleb draws from this is that past observations are not always a reliable basis for assumptions about future, because past experience may exclude rare events and will exclude new developments or discoveries. As a nice illustration of this principle, in 2021 it turned out that some black swans are actually white. ↩
In an earlier article I discussed complex adaptive systems, emphasising their inherent unpredictability.
Not all complex systems are equally complex, and not all unpredictability is equally unpredictable. Systems can be considered complex when they have many interacting parts, and their interactions determine the behaviour of the system to a large degree and cannot easily be “averaged out”. In complex physical systems, the interacting parts have limited diversity and do not change rapidly. Examples are weather, climate and various other geophysical systems. Because their processes and interacting parts do not change much in the short term, such systems are predictable to some extent: we can at least calculate probabilities for rare events (e.g. storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions) or long-term trends (e.g. climate change). Given sufficient data we can even see such events coming some days in advance, or predict the behaviour of a system for a limited period into the future (e.g. weather forecasts, which can be accurately made at most a week or two ahead).
The class of complex systems we are interested in here is however a different one: In complex adaptive systems, the interacting parts can change their behaviour (relatively rapidly) over time. This means that interactions and large-scale processes can change in significant ways as well. All living systems are in this class, which includes all social systems. Because humans and other living beings have agency, they can suddenly change their behaviour, depending on their context. They can also develop completely novel behaviour. Moreover, complex adaptive systems often feature strong feedback processes that can either amplify or attenuate changes in the system. Attenuating “negative” feedback loops can counteract changes, and therefore stabilise systems and make them more or less predictable. Amplifying “positive” feedbacks on the other hand, may make the behaviour of a system even harder to predict, and these are especially prevalent in some human social systems (e.g. capitalist economies). ↩
This remarkable human ability is known as mental simulation, mental time travel or mobile consciousness. We construct scenes in our imagination and transport ourselves within them, either as observers or participants.
Mental simulation comes so naturally to us that we tend not to notice it. We use future-oriented mental time travel (FMTT) to imagine the future or counterfactual scenarios. We also use past-oriented mental time travel (PMTT or simply MTT) for constructing the past. Even our experience of the present isn’t generally based on observation of “what is”, but is to a large extent based on memory and simulation. We don’t experience what is there, but what we expect to be there, something I touched upon in my previous article.
Simulation is also central to the way we process narratives: we process a story by mentally experiencing it, and then we transmit these experiences when retelling a story. This is why emotion is so important in narrative, it is an important part of the experience of story. The aspect of mental simulation that allows us to put ourselves mentally in different places and situations is called “mobility of consciousness” by Fritz Breithaupt in his book The Narrative Brain. It is easy to demonstrate, as we use this ability every time we read a text. Consider the following story, which is only one sentence and has a very minimal plot (describing cause and effect): Laura kicks the ball, the ball goes into the goal. Upon reading this minimalist narrative, most people will (visually or otherwise) imagine a scene with someone kicking a ball. Aspects of this scene will be drawn from memory, because it is likely that you have observed similar scenes in reality (or on television, or in pictures). We can also imagine scenes for events that have not happened because they are completely fictional, such as in the following narrative: Laura shoots the alien out of the sky. It is unlikely that you will have experienced such an event yourself, but still you can mentally simulate it (probably aided by the various movies and illustrations you have been exposed to in the past).
There is considerable overlap between the neural regions engaged during episodic memory (i.e. when relating to the past) and future simulation. Both strongly engage a set of neural regions known as the default mode network. This network is so named because it is engaged most of the time when we are awake (or dreaming) and are not strongly focused on some task. This set of brain regions is believed to support mental simulation, or what we often think of “daydreaming”. In other words, mental simulation seems to be our default resting activity. This also explains why mindfulness meditation is so hard, at least initially: Our mind naturally drifts to simulate other times and places, especially when it isn’t occupied by some other task that requires our full attention. It takes significant effort and attention to remain in the “here and now”. It is difficult to suppress the tendency of our mind to wander off and simulate things. (It is even hard to notice that we’re doing it!) The default mode network also seems to be important in creativity and association, as well as in determining what is important to us right now, and how this connects to our long-term values and our sense of identity. For a nice discussion of this subject, listen to the interview with researcher Taylor Guthrie in episode 191 of The Great Simplification podcast.
For a detailed discussion of future-oriented mental time travel, see e.g. Klein (2013, PDF) and Michaelian, Klein & Szpunar, Seeing the Future (2016). ↩
the narrative of Decline, in which the past was better than the present or the future
There are different variations on the Decline narrative, and distinguishing between them can be useful. In his book Everything Must Go, Dorian Lynskey discusses a wide range of Decline-narratives that all involve some form of “end of the world”. For instance, apocalyptic narratives are a class of religious (and quasi-religious secular) stories. The biblical Book of Revelation is one of the more familiar examples, although the genre itself predates this text. In apocalyptic narratives, things must first get worse before they can get better. The end cannot and should not be averted, because it is needed to punish wrongdoers and purge evil. Only then can a Utopian society emerge for the “chosen” people.
The enduring appeal of Revelation and similar apocalyptic stories reflects a deep-seated human need for narrative structure, which ends with some form of closure, as Fritz Breithaupt argues in his book The Narrative Brain. Embracing apocalyptic predictions is also a form of recentism, the belief that ours is a special time at the end of history, and that the final crisis will be upon us within our lifetime. Moreover, it seems to reflect a wish for the destruction of the old world (with all its failures), to make space for rebirth and change.
Secular variants of apocalyptic narrative also exist, devoid of ultimate meaning or eternal utopia. These are sometimes labelled doomerism. Doomerist stories likewise present an inescapable end, typically at the hand of natural forces and/or human folly. Dorian Lynskey traces this tradition to the Romantic period, noting its rise as a plausible future scenario in the 20^th century. The two world wars and the Holocaust made everyone aware of humanity’s capacity for mass destruction, while nuclear weapons and the Cold War rendered near-global annihilation a very real possibility. Lynskey notes that both doomerist and quasi-religious apocalyptic narratives are different from alarmist narratives of decline. The latter may also warn of looming catastrophe, but they assert that disaster can and should be averted. Unlike the fatalist apocalyptic or doomerist visions, which encourage passivity (because the end is unavoidable), alarmist narratives offer practical value: they highlight potential dangers and propose actionable solutions. ↩
Interesting narratives tend to be about change, both positive and negative.
According to Breithaupt “uneventful” stories with too much uniformity are perceived as boring, and are thus unlikely to be shared. Although narrative seems to be a natural form in which we think and experience, immersing ourselves in a story through mental simulation does require effort and energy. If engaging with a story does not imply some kind of emotional reward, we generally do not consider it worth the effort. To be emotionally interesting, a narrative needs to be relevant and somewhat unpredictable (there should be various possible outcomes). It should ideally focus on some kind of transformation (e.g. of the protagonists, or of the world). It also helps if there are challenges to be overcome. The episodes that make up an immersive story, fictional or otherwise, tend to end with a rewarding emotion, such as triumph, love, wonder or moral satisfaction. Breithaupt argues that the anticipation of such emotional rewards provides our motivation to invest in a story. ↩
The Ancient Greeks believed that their society was in decline after a golden age.
As Paul Cooper points out in his excellent Fall of Civilizations podcast and book, the decline stories of the ancient Greeks may have been inspired to some extent by the Late Bronze Age collapse. In the century starting around 1300 BCE, a combination of pressures wiped out much of the surprisingly complex social world of the Eastern Mediterranean. Factors thought to have contributed to this regional crisis include climate change, volcanic eruptions, droughts, invasions, disease and economic disruption. The destruction and abandonment of practically all major cities in the region (places like Ugarit, Hattusha, Mycenae and Troy) marked the start of the so-called Greek Dark Ages. Cooper suggests that the epic poems of the Iliad and Odyssey may have functioned as oral vessels for retaining the memories of this traumatic era, before they were written down several centuries later.
Also other ancients myths of decline, collapse and destruction may have been based on the memory of ancient cultures or city states that existed at one point, but that were wiped out or abandoned. But as Guy Middleton argues in his book Understanding Collapse, what we often call “collapse” was often a gradual process and was usually not due to a single cause. Many instances of decline or collapse involved some combination of climate change (e.g. prolonged drought leading to multiple crop failures), environmental decline (e.g. salinisation and erosion leading to loss of agricultural land), internal political instability and external military pressure. Examples described by Paul Cooper in his podcast include ancient Sumer and the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The eventual destruction of both these empires was at the hands of foreign armies, but they had already been weakened beforehand due to other pressures. It is worth noting however that by the time of their fall, complex urban societies in ancient Sumer had existed (and had mostly been successful) for around two thousand years (roughly from 4000 BCE to 2004 BCE). Sumerian culture itself was much older, with the first city (Eridu) being founded as early as 5400 BCE, fed by irrigation agriculture. The Neo-Assyrian empire held out for nearly 400 years (ca. 1000–612 BCE), although two previous Assyrian empires preceded it. For comparison, modern industrial society has only been around for three centuries or so, and has existed for less than a century in its current resource-intensive form. ↩
Today, narratives of Decline remain prominent, focusing on issues such as climate change, mass immigration, or artificial intelligence.
Fears of the “unknown other” have probably been present in human societies since ancient times. Sumerian texts already describe a foreign nomadic tribe (the Martu or Amorites) in fearful, contemptuous terms. The Ancient Greeks established a rigid dichotomy between themselves and the “barbarians,” a term encompassing nearly all non-Greeks. Also narratives that link mass migration to presumed social decline aren’t a recent phenomenon. London in the 16^th century was generally hostile to foreigners, and starting in the 1830s, US nativists attacked Irish immigrants, driven by anxieties that “foreign elements” would destroy the nation’s Protestant “chosen people”. In Europe, 19^th century racial pessimism and degeneration theories gained popularity, eventually providing the intellectual framework for the German Nazis. The history of these ideas involved key figures such as Arthur de Gobineau, Richard Wagner, Ludwig Schemann, Paul de Lagarde, H. S. Chamberlain and Vacher de Lapouge, and is described in detail by Arthur Herman in The Idea of Decline in Western History.
Social fear of new technologies also has a long history. In the Victorian era, the vibrations of train travel were believed by some to cause “railway madness”, while bicycles would lead women to “lose their morals”. In the early 20^th century, critics warned of the degenerative effects that radio would have on culture, education, family life and even the consciousness of its listeners, and the term radiophobia was coined to describe widespread fears about the effect of invisible radio waves. Starting in the 1920s, fiction (such as the film Metropolis) explored the replacement of humans by soulless machines, and predictions of robot take-over have continued into the present era. In hindsight, most technology-related Decline narratives are examples of “epistemic arrogance”, based on extrapolating inaccurate assumptions and predictions. Many also seem to involve a form of recentism or chronocentrism, the belief that the current age is somehow more special than past ages. This belief is quite visible in current fears of artificial intelligence (AI), many of which seem to revolve around the assumption that we are living in some kind of utopian or dystopian “end time”.
What many AI narratives fail to recognise is that our time is unlikely to be special, and also that they are using the wrong metaphor: AI isn’t intelligence. Current LLMs and similar technologies are useful and promising tools that leverage complexity, human knowledge and the information structure inherent in human language, inspired by (but also very different from) neural networks in living systems. Moreover, current training methods are very resource-intensive and are limited to a large degree by the quality of training data. AI as a tool certainly opens up interesting new possibilities. It is promising but in its current form it also has significant limitations and negative side-effects (e.g. in terms of energy use and associated emissions). Moreover, we cannot predict very well how AI will develop, how it will be applied and what its social effects will be. If the history of technology (as well as common sense) is any guide, AI is unlikely to fix all our problems, and it is also unlikely to destroy humanity. This of course is no excuse to disregard the possible risks associated with the technology and its applications. Nuclear weapons also didn’t destroy civilisation (so far), but they certainly have the capacity to inflict significant destruction, and the Western world came scarily close to nuclear war on several occasions.
Climate change is another “Decline narrative” that is probably unwise to ignore. Social systems are unpredictable and their mechanisms are mostly opaque and subject to change. In contrast, we understand the mechanisms of climate change quite well, and they involve long-term, large-scale physical processes and feedbacks over which we have little control, and for which we cannot easily compensate. Moreover, we know that larger and smaller changes in climate have already happened on several occasions, both in human history and in the pre-human past, and they have had significant effects on human populations, ancient civilisations and life in general. ↩
the negativity effect. It causes us to pay more attention to negative events than to positive news. We therefore tend to overestimate the probability of bad things happening. At least, when it comes to the actions of other people or external forces beyond our control.
John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister discuss the negativity effect at length in their book The Power of Bad. One of its consequences is the so-called illusion of moral decline, the feeling that morality is declining in society. As discussed by Mastroianni and Gilbert) (2023), this impression seems to be universally present in nearly all societies throughout history, and it is probably caused by two biases. One is the negativity effect (negative events affect us more strongly than positive ones in the short run), and the other is the biased memory effect (positive memories are more sticky than negative ones in the long run). We pay too much attention to the things that seem to go wrong around us, and especially as we get older we forget that this was always the case. It therefore seems that things were better in the past, and that society is in decline. This illusion is further strengthened by the fact that news media tend to focus mostly on bad news (which is simply more “newsworthy”, precisely due to the negativity effect), and the fact that social media algorithms tend to amplify outrage. Both negative events and the argument that things were better in the past are also emphasized by certain politicians, to promote regressive and often authoritarian political agendas, further strengthening the perception of social and moral decline. ↩
When we feel in control, we actually tend to underestimate the probability of bad things happening.
An impressive illustration of optimism bias was the recent military campaign of the United States and Israel against Iran. Benjamin Netanyahu managed to convince Donald Trump that an attack on Iran would lead to a rapid overthrowing of the Iranian regime. Trump went ahead with Operation Epic Fury, expecting a swift victory and ignoring warnings that Iran may respond by closing the Strait of Hormuz. The latter was exactly what happened, following a stubborn refusal by the Iranian regime to collapse when faced with a crisis. ↩
A second strand of progress thinking therefore originated with liberal thinkers who did not feel altogether comfortable with the idea of self-determination for the masses, or the social unrest that came with it.
Because the prospect of social change inherently threatens the current power relations in a society, it is often unattractive to people who feel they have something to lose. This is why people and groups tend to become more conservative (and often repressive) as they gain power. This is well illustrated by the careers of many successful revolutionary leaders, including the likes of Stalin, Mao, Gaddafi, Mobutu, Saddam Hussein, Hugo Chávez and many others. All these leaders started off fighting for revolution, and they mostly did enact sweeping social reforms. However they also ended up being remembered as dictators, opposing any challenges to their absolute authority once they were firmly in power. Their Utopian visions generally devolved over time, into oppressive and corrupt authoritarian regimes with a small ruling elite. Often such oppressive regimes emphasise technological and economic progress, in an attempt to shift popular attention away from discontent about the present and create what C. R. Snyder calls a “pacifying hope” that progress will cause things to improve in the future, without the need for more social and intellectual freedom. ↩
Rather than seeing progress as the result of social action, they preferred to see it as a natural outcome of economic growth, human ingenuity, and technological advancement. This view of “automatic” progress gained dominance in the West, especially after World War II.
Especially theories based on “Laissez-faire economics” assume that progress is more or less guaranteed to result from competitive dynamics and commercial innovation in a free market. According to such theories, this system works best if left alone. Therefore economies should be protected against collective action, such as government intervention or the demands of labour unions. This view is often used to argue for reducing government regulations on important industries, so they have more room to innovate. In such narratives, commercial innovation is the main engine of progress. In reality, established industries often rely on established business cases and on their associated technology and infrastructure. Establishing new infrastructure is expensive, and its success may be uncertain. Dominant companies and industries tend to welcome technology that promises to increase efficiency, but they tend to oppose new technologies that may threaten their existing business models or require large investments in new infrastructure. Moreover, the banking and insurance sector base their decisions on risk models which are based on existing technologies. They are inherently risk-averse, and tend to avoid investing in new, unproven technologies. As Mariana Mazzucato has argued, true innovation is therefore mostly driven by government subsidies and policies, rather than by the private sector.
Whether and in which way technological innovation happens and leads to progress seems to depend a lot on collective choices, made at the level of governments and other institutions. Moreover, many problems can be solved just fine, in principle, with existing technology, or with technology that is relatively easy to develop. Often the problem isn’t technology, but rather coordination, profitability, priorities and conflicting interests. For instance, providing safe drinking water, reducing malnutrition and disease, improving urban air quality and reducing our dependence on fossil energy are all things we can do with existing (and often inexpensive) technology, and that arguably would contribute significantly to human progress. The limiting factor in such cases isn’t innovation, it is the low financial return on investments, combined with the high perceived risk of investing in poor regions. Yet such regions would benefit the most from investing in low-tech solutions, such as malaria nets, basic medicine and vaccination, water filters and sustainable measures to improve small-scale agriculture. ↩
Antibiotics and vaccination have arguably contributed most to our longevity and health, but both rely heavily on naturally evolved systems and substances. We didn’t so much invent these as figure out how to use them. The discovery, development, production and distribution of antibiotics and vaccines may involve innovation and technology, of course. But the effectiveness of vaccines fully relies on the human immune system, which evolved over millions of years. And the first clinically useful antibiotic, penicillin, was discovered more or less by accident in 1928. Its discovery was initially regarded as unimportant. Penicillin was mostly ignored and forgotten for a decade, before a research team decided to look into it again, which eventually led to its application as antibacterial treatment in the early 1940s. Moreover, like penicillin, most antibiotics were not “created” by humans as such, they are natural substances evolved by fungi or bacteria to keep other fungi or bacteria at bay. ↩
“Every advantage has its disadvantage.”
Cruyff actually actually said the opposite: “Elk nadeel heb z’n voordeel”, which roughly translates as “Every disadvantage got its advantage”. ↩
Progress is often portrayed as something that occurs along a single dimension, a single line on which we should always move forward.
The visual representations of progress often reflect this. We portray progress as a march forward, as an arrow or a graph going “up and to the right”, or using whatever technology is “modern” at the time. Some of the technological aspects of progress (machines!) are more visible in daily life than other, often more significant aspects, like clean drinking water or safe food. Moreover, abstract concepts such as knowledge or human rights are hard to visualise. This contributes to the dominance of technology in our common conception of progress. ↩
a development that is positive in one respect can produce negative consequences elsewhere, even if these are not immediately apparent.
Sometimes progress in one geographical area causes (or even depends on) decline in another geographical area. The clearest example of this is probably European colonialism. The initial progress of the industrial revolution wasn’t conjured out of thin air. The success of early industrial societies such as 18^th century Britain depended on the extraction of resources and labour from colonies and countryside. The progress of the middle class in the early industrialised world thus came at the cost of reducing the wellbeing of many more people elsewhere. In a way, Europe generated its progress by exporting decline. What was good for Europe was (at least initially) bad for much of the rest of the world. One could argue that a similar dynamic still operates today, as modern industrialised economies still rely on cheap labour and the cheap extraction of resources elsewhere. ↩
Antibiotics, for example, have saved countless lives over the past century, but their overuse has fostered widespread antibiotic resistance. This reduces our future options for suppressing pathogens, a problem that cannot easily be fixed by technology.
No new antibiotic mechanisms have been discovered since 1987, so resistance is evolving far faster than we can develop new treatments. The situation is exacerbated by horizontal gene transfer, whereby resistance genes can spread rapidly between different, unrelated organisms.
The story of antibiotic resistance is often presented as a decline narrative, an alarmist warning of misery to come. There are good reasons for this. Without effective antibiotics, even minor, once-treatable infections could again become fatal. What’s more, antibiotics are indispensable in modern healthcare; most medical procedures would be impossible without them. Just because a narrative is alarmist doesn’t invalidate it as a warning, especially given that we’re not talking about some distant future: in 2019 alone, an estimated 1.27 million people died as a direct result of antibiotic resistant bacterial infections. We can and should take preventive action and at least restrict the unnecessary use of antibiotics where we can.
A more optimistic view is that artificial intelligence will accelerate the discovery of new antibiotic mechanisms. Certainly, such technologies may be helpful. But the discovery of new antibiotics would only slow down the problem, not solve it. Evolutionary adaptation is an ongoing process, and this is precisely what makes life so successful. In fiction, heroes may vanquish the “bad guys” for good, because stories demand an ending and some kind of emotional reward. Reality, however, does not, and it is unwise to confuse reality with fiction. ↩
cheap fossil fuels have enabled modern life and current levels of food production. But many of the negative side effects take decades to show up, and changes in global climate will have unforeseen consequences for centuries to come.
Climate change (especially when framed as “climate crisis”) is another example of a modern alarmist decline narrative. As with antibiotic resistance, the climate crisis narrative is useful as a warning, as long as it is not presented as overly deterministic. We know enough about the climate system to know that change is already occurring, and that it is hard to reverse in the short term. And we do not yet know enough to say what the precise consequences will be. This leaves room for optimism, but also for some very worrying scenarios, such as runaway feedback loops or a disruption of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). The former could rapidly amplify global warming, the latter could lead to a sharp drop in average temperature and rainfall in Europe, even as other regions heat up more rapidly. Such events have likely occurred before, for instance around 55.8 million and 12,900 years ago. We are therefore pretty sure that they can happen, but we simply don’t know if the current climate change will cause them to happen in the near future, and if so, when. A good argument can therefore be made to follow the precautionary principle: when there is a small but non-negligible risk of significant negative changes that are practically irreversible, we should probably make a serious effort to prevent them. ↩
We collectively act as if our fictional expectations more or less represent the future. Beckert suggests that economic and technological forecasts are rarely accurate, but also that they do not need to be. They mostly need to be persuasive, inspiring the confidence required for action. Even if future-oriented decisions on, say, investment prove to be misguided in retrospect, we still need them to keep our socio-economic system going.
We all need to make decisions in a complex, uncertain economic world. These decisions should preferably be nonrandom and be more or less coordinated with other people. According to Beckert, we make such decisions based on fictional expectations, which in turn are produced by expert opinions, theoretical models and various kinds of forecasts. We collectively pretend that our fictional expectations more or less represent the actual future, which ends up coordinating our decisions to some extent. Moreover, our expectations can also end up being self-fulfilling. If we expect growth, this inspires behaviour such as investment, which may help innovation and economic growth. Social scientists refer to this phenomenon as performativity: the idea that language can shape social action, influencing norms, conventions, and expectations, and ultimately altering behaviour in ways that make the imagined future more likely.
The self-fulfilling aspect of economic expectation applies even more clearly in a financial crisis, in which a collective loss of trust in the near (economic) future may end up triggering a recession or a market crash. This effect has been known for centuries, and many examples were already documented in the 1841 book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (available e.g. through Project Gutenberg). ↩
Progress and Decline are both narrative fictions, but we do need such fictions to engage with the future.
As Fritz Breithaupt puts it in his book The Narrative Brain, we constantly see ourselves as being in the middle of a narrative, and we mentally project different versions of how this narrative may progress. Breithaupt calls this mental multiversionality. Our mental simulations determine how we feel about and prepare for the future, and they need to be fed with scenarios and possible endings. This is why we need fictions of what might happen in the future. And of course scenarios alone aren’t sufficient for effective decision making. We also need more objective information, in order to judge the likelihood of different future scenarios.
The fact that narratives simplify things isn’t necessarily a problem, as this can bring clarity and ease of communication. It becomes a problem if other stories are excluded, such as alternative scenarios or more complex or nuanced narratives, or if we take the details or ending too seriously. Future fictions are useful for motivation, for communication and for anticipating obstacles and opportunities (effective anticipatory thinking requires imagining both). But “endings” need to be taken with a grain of salt, as they are (thankfully) rare in the real world. And while simulating and discussing possible scenarios and solutions is especially important in being prepared for times of crisis, we can never know the specifics in advance: will a given crisis occur, where, when, in what way? This is why we need a diversity of scenarios, and why we should not get too hung up on their specific details. ↩
Decline narratives exploit the negativity effect: by tapping into emotions such as fear or anger, they very effectively hold our attention.
Due to their nature, fear and anger are potent emotions that are meant to trigger action in the face of potential danger. If something or someone manages to trigger these emotions in us, we find them hard to ignore. Moreover, the cognitive bias of loss aversion also plays a role in making decline narratives effective. We pay more attention to potential losses than to potential gains, and we tend to be strongly motivated to prevent losses, even if doing so makes no rational sense. This is why fear-based decline narratives are a popular (and often effective) tool in motivating people to take action, at least in the short term. ↩
But as more conservative commentators often note, collective action can also turn violent, leading to widespread destruction and loss of life, as evidenced by pogroms, wars and ethnic conflicts across history.
Conservative thinkers tend to be very weary of collective action, especially if it is driven by some impersonal, utopian ideology. Hitler’s National Socialism or Stalin’s version of Communism are often cited as examples of the misery and destruction that may result if we give in to the “tyranny of the crowd”. Indeed, such destructive ideologies are driven by overconfident, deterministic and ultimately unrealistic visions of the future, and they should certainly serve as cautionary examples. We should moreover distrust any ideology that prioritises beliefs over values, or that pushes for values that are not universal. Shared values should be ones that are actually shared by most people, not just a select group. Most people will agree for instance that the values underlying “human rights” are important, even if their actions or political viewpoints may not always reflect this (because humans are rarely consistent). We may not wish it upon those we consider our “enemies”, but my guess is that very few of us would oppose human wellbeing in principle, or even wellbeing for other living beings. ↩
Problems mostly occur when we are presented with narratives that are too deterministic, and that lack the perspective of an open future in which we have time to act and talk things over.
In his book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch explains that because democracy is inherently unstable, the function of a well-designed democratic system is to force social negotiation. James Madison understood this very well and designed the US Constitution as a “social machine” that leverages ambition and competition in order to yield compromise. No one actor can do much without the concurrence of other actors, and ultimately the public. This way, effective action becomes a series of forced compromises, requiring coalition building. This need for compromise is considered a downside by many people, but Rauch argues that this approach is actually a feature. It both leverages and contains ambition, and protects the system against tyranny by any single actor. Social negotiation does take time, but the advantage is that it also slows overly rapid change by providing checkpoints, while at the same time forcing continued change because political actors have to keep convincing each other. A well-designed democratic system thus balances the need for stability against the need for dynamism that is required for adaptability in a changing world. ↩
when we are asked to envision meaningful alternatives (or even mere structural reforms) to the current socio-economic system. The mainstream response for the past half century or so has become so entrenched that it has its own acronym, TINA: There Is No Alternative.
The TINA acronym is usually traced to a political slogan used by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, although it can be traced back further to Herbert Spencer. ↩
In the real world outside of simplified stories, our societies and lives oscillate between periods of flourishing and periods of instability.
Cycles of flourishing/growth and stagnation or decline are well documented, even (or especially) in societies that existed for long periods of time, such as ancient Sumer, ancient Egypt and China. A good overview of the good and bad times of these and other ancient civilizations is provided by Paul Cooper in his Fall of Civilizations podcast and book. For more recent examples, check out the work of Peter Turchin, notably his excellent book End Times. ↩
total social collapse is exceedingly rare. This resilience is cause for optimism. The bad news is that, historically, endless growth also does not occur.
Humans seem to be collectively fascinated by the possibility of social collapse, as evidenced by the abundance of apocalyptic fiction (e.g. as described by Dorian Lynskey in Everything Must Go), as well as the large non-fiction literature on the possibility and mechanisms of collapse. However, real-world social collapse probably has little to do with the degree of mayhem and destruction we often encounter in fiction. As Joseph Tainter pointed out in his classic work The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988), social collapse usually does not involve the extinction of a complete society. Rather, it entails the collapse of a political system, and a subsequent reduction in social complexity and economic activity, which sometimes results in the abandonment of former urban political centres. Tainter points out that, for the lives of common people, political collapse may actually be an improvement, as it may decrease tax burden and oppression in general. Similar arguments have been made in more recent work by Guy Middleton and in academic volumes such as Beyond Collapse and Questioning Collapse.
The more successful periods in which a society can flourish and grow are often self-limiting, in part due to internal social dynamics. As Peter Turchin shows, inequality causes some groups to profit more from “good times” than others, which may further increase inequality and tends to result in power struggles among the elites. These processes eventually destabilise societies after a period of growth. Also external factors such as war, disease, climate change or resource limitation can play a role in destabilising societies or at least limiting their growth. Especially aggressively expansive societies such as the Roman Empire or the European colonial powers derive their success to a large degree from their expansion and their ability to extract resources from elsewhere, while externalising some of their costs. This may result in temporary “golden ages” for the expansive societies, but these never continue indefinitely. Eventually limiting factors start mounting and expansion stops or reverses.
China is a particularly interesting example of cyclical success, because its long written history reflects clear cycles of flourishing/growth/integration and instability/decline/fragmentation, the latter of which involve both internal and external pressures. “Collapse” is relative, and in the case of China it was never total. Periods of flourishing involved central coordination, economic success and (generally oppressive) power, wielded by a strong state. Decline resulted when state coordination and power started breaking down. Such breakdown always involved one or more factors that negatively impacted internal coordination, such as the death of an emperor, corruption or internal conflict between rival elite factions. But external or secondary influences also played a role, including peasant revolts, foreign pressure, natural disaster and economic recession.
As Turchin emphasises, maintaining internal coordination within a state or empire is a requirement for stability and success. But the history of large empires contains an additional lesson: Violence, oppression and expansion can result in stability, for a while. But like growth, oppression cannot be maintained indefinitely, and its negative side-effects are many. In the end, all empires “collapsed” and nearly all of their formerly great cities were abandoned or destroyed. Oppression and expansion simply aren’t very sustainable. Often, epistemic arrogance and optimism bias also play a role in the downfall of empires: successful societies and their rulers tend to become overconfident and they expect to remain successful. It is common for empires to consider themselves “everlasting”. This in turn may lead them to neglect both the basis of their success and changes happening in the world around them. Armies generally go into battle expecting to win, but as Paul Cooper shows, the victors of decisive battles were certainly not always the biggest or even the strongest armies. The outcome of social interactions, including violent ones, remains fundamentally unpredictable. ↩
Hope […] requires not only a sense of agency, but also a form of determination, a motivational driving force to keep us going in the face of difficulty. Often, this force is fuelled by “righteous anger” at a moral injustice.
Unfortunately righteous anger is also the motor behind moral regressions, such as lynch mobs or ethnic cleansing. One issue is that different groups emphasise different moral values. This is why it is important that group values explicitly include human core values that are as universal as possible. Another issue is that anger is a very powerful motivational force, but it is not always the best response to a situation and it can easily evoke violence. This is why emotional regulation is an important skill that we should take seriously and that, ideally, every child (and adult) should learn. Like most aspects of human behaviour, both collective action and emotion are not inherently good or bad, they can lead to positive or negative outcomes. ↩
Uncertainty feels uncomfortable
I do not mean this as a metaphor: uncertainty literally feels uncomfortable and threatening. Peters et al. (2017) even hypothesize that uncertainty forms the neurological basis of our stress response. They describe how a brain region known as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) assesses the degree of uncertainty about our future wellbeing. When we are faced with ambiguous, unknown situations, the ACC activates another brain region, the amygdala, which then fires up various stress responses.
The tolerance for uncertainty differs between people, and importantly, it can change over time. If we have a low tolerance for uncertainty, we may (unconsciously) try to fabricate certainty, by resorting to wishful thinking or overly simplistic explanations (e.g. conspiracy theories), rather than face the stress associated with uncertainty. And if we develop an anxiety disorder, our uncertainty tolerance decreases. But we can also expand it, we can train ourselves to accept a certain degree of uncertainty and ignorance without feeling threatened or afraid. In fact, this is a necessary part of professional training for what Jonathan Rauch calls the “reality based community”, which includes science, journalism, law and intelligence agencies. If we seek truth through empirical methods, we must admit that there are things we do not know, and that the knowledge we have might turn out to be wrong.
There are many different methods to expand uncertainty tolerance, including gradual exposure to uncertainty, the reframing of thoughts (cognitive restructuring), mindfulness and acceptance techniques, cognitive flexibility training, probabilistic thinking, self-compassion practices and seeking diverse perspectives. Combining multiple approaches seems to be the most effective. Some potentially helpful books and other resources include the Happiness Lab podcast, The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris, Comfortable with uncertainty by Pema Chödrön, Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke, Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff and The Upward Spiral by Alex Korb. ↩
research in behavioural science suggests that hope is a far more effective motivator than fear.
Higgins (1998) finds that “promotion”-focused motivations (e.g. hope, aspiration) are associated with greater creativity, exploration, and sustained effort, while “prevention”-focused motivations (e.g. fear, avoidance) are linked to rigidity and stress, anxiety, and reduced motivation over time. Similar results are reported by Deci & Ryan (2000, PDF).
Overviews of fear appeal research by Witte & Allen (2000, PDF) and Ruiter et al. (2014) conclude that fear-based motivation can be effective in the short term, especially when paired with clear instructions on how to avoid a threat. However, appeals to fear often backfire if the threat is perceived as too overwhelming or the required action is unclear, leading to defensiveness, avoidance, or paralysis. In the longer term, fear-based motivation is associated with increased anxiety and disengagement. Positive, hope-based messages are more effective for promoting sustained behaviour change in the long term.
See also the work of Richard Snyder, e.g. the Handbook of Hope and The Psychology of Hope. ↩
to counter cynicism, we should actively seek out examples of people and groups making a positive difference. One good place to start is the Solutions Story Tracker, a resource created by the Solutions Journalism Network.
Solutions journalism is not the same as uncritical coverage of “good news” stories. As stated by the network: solutions journalism investigates and explains, in a critical and clear-eyed way, how people try to solve widely shared problems. While journalists usually define news as “what’s gone wrong,” solutions journalism tries to expand that definition: Responses to problems are also newsworthy. By adding rigorous coverage of solutions, journalists can tell the whole story. Solutions journalism complements and strengthens coverage of problems. Done well, solutions stories provide valuable insights that help communities with the difficult work of tackling problems. The rationale behind this approach is explained here and in a 2021 New York Times opinion article by David Bornstein, one of the founders of the Solutions Journalism Network. See this list of 54 news outlets with dedicated solutions journalism sections, compiled by Julia Hotz. Another popular resource is Reasons to be Cheerful, an online magazine and newsletter originally started by former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne. His NGO Arbutus “celebrates, re-presents and amplifies ideas found in surprising places, ensuring that our picture of the world contains the joy that it should, and is accessible to everyone.” ↩
The notion that we can solve systemic issues simply by buying the right products is absurd, as is the belief that technology by itself can solve such problems for us.
Technology by itself is neither intrinsically “good” nor “bad”, its effects depend on how it is applied, by whom, and with what motive. Goals and values matter, as do incentives, norms, means and opportunities, which are all socially determined. Nuclear fission can be used both to generate energy and to wipe out cities. Digital information platforms can be used to educate or to spread misinformation. And the exact same AI technology that may speed up the discovery of new pharmaceutical drugs and antibiotics can also be used to speed up the discovery of chemical and biological weapons. ↩
this is no reason to dismiss democracy entirely. It may be imperfect and can certainly be improved, but it remains the least flawed system we have for collective problem-solving in large, complex societies.
Jonathan White mentions some possible ways to strengthen and improve democratic systems. These include various forms of participatory democracy (e.g. citizens’ assemblies, participatory planning, consensus conferences, crowdsourced language for proposals) and measures to increase political accountability (e.g. recall-mechanisms, which could also enable longer terms than the usual 4 years). Other possible improvements discussed by White include making political institutions more polycentric and multilayered to enhance local decision making, strengthening of international law (to better protect universal rights), establishment of an international constitution, more transnational cooperation between political parties, measures to decrease disinformation on digital media and introducing more coherence, realism and vision in political party programmes (rather than having “shopping lists” of short-term promises).
In an essay in De Volkskrant, the Dutch philosopher, writer and performer Tim Fransen lists additional ideas for strengthening democracies, pointing to the work of people like Hélène Landemore and David Van Reybrouck on participatory democracy, Tom Malleson on democratizing economic power and Isabelle Ferreras and others on workplace democracy. ↩
Ideas on what is valuable and how to improve society need to spread before they can make an impact, and true social interaction and discussion is still the best way to do that.
This does require that we interact and discuss with people who have different viewpoints and opinions from those we hold, and not just with the intention to convince others of our viewpoint. True interaction and discussion requires that we also listen, learn and try to understand other people. Moreover, different social groups may have different “sacred values”, which are often non-negotiable, and on which we may need to “agree to disagree”. For productive discussions we need to understand what the sacred values of others are, while looking for shared values on which we can agree. ↩

Why you may find this text boring

2025-06-19T00:00:00+02:00

How stories and feelings dominate over facts

Reading time: ca. 17–25 minutes.

By Levien van Zon

When talking about sustainability, we often assume that people behave “irrationally” because they are badly informed. Or perhaps they are selfish, or incapable of thinking about long-term consequences. Some or all of these things may be true for some people, but I don’t think that this explains very well what’s going on. In this article I want to show that the way the human mind works is often misunderstood. Rational thinking isn’t our default mode, and better information doesn’t necessarily change the way we think about things. If we’re interested in positive change, we should be more aware of what really goes on in our heads, and how this interacts with what other people think and do.

The shape of thinking

How do you experience your thoughts? This may seem like a silly question. I had always assumed that the experience of thinking would be more or less the same for everyone. Recently I started asking other people about their inner experience, and I was quite surprised to discover that my own is far from universal. The problem is that I only have direct access to my own conscious mind. My “stream of thought” is both auditory and visual: I am aware of an inner voice that constantly talks about my experiences, inferences, plans and feelings. On top of this, I literally see memories and abstract concepts as static or moving images and spatial structures. It is likely that the way you experience your thoughts will be quite different. Yet if I would ask you to look back on your life, you would probably do so in a way similar to me and most others: You would experience and describe your life as an evolving story.

Rationality and its problems

Humans employ more than one mode of thought about the world and our role in it. When we talk about “thinking”, we often mean “rational thought”, a mode of thinking that involves conscious attention. It is guided by reasons, evidence and consistency. Rational thinking is important and powerful, but it does have its limits. In the previous two articles I argued that the social and natural world we live in is largely complex. This means that processes can be strongly entwined, making them hard to understand and hard to predict. Such complex systems cannot be fully controlled using rational planning. Rational thinking is still very useful, but it does have difficulty with complexity. One reason is that conscious thinking requires attention, which we can only focus on one thing at a time. This is a problem if many different things interact. Conscious thought also depends on working memory, which can hold only a few items. And crucially, for most of its tasks, our mind does not even rely on conscious processing, let alone “rational” thought.

Of course the modern world does strongly rely on rationality. Fields like philosophy, engineering, mathematics, statistics and the sciences have been extremely important in shaping the world that many of us depend on. But these same fields suffer from issues of attractiveness and accessibility. Science and similar pursuits require logical, procedural thinking, which takes effort and often requires a fair amount of prior knowledge. But perhaps more significant is that these fields are far removed from the lived experience of people who aren’t scientists or philosophers, i.e. most humans.

Most people are not very interested in abstract or technical subjects. What do we find attractive instead? Stories, especially stories that do closely match our lived experience, or that expand it in some meaningful way. Attractive stories tend to be about people and about their goals and feelings. Expository texts like the one you’re reading now, which discuss abstract concepts or detailed knowledge, are inherently much less attractive to most people. You can most likely read and understand this text without too many problems, but you may still have put off reading it. And it may take you some effort to get to the end, while this is much easier when reading a novel or watching a series. The relative unattractiveness of abstract ideas can be a problem, because we do need abstract thinking and technical knowledge to solve important human problems.

Rational, irrational, unconscious

In the context of sustainability, you often hear the argument that we all just need to be more rational, especially about our long term behaviour. There is an implicit assumption that if we just give people better information, they will make better decisions. But contrary to what much of economic theory assumes, humans are not logical, rational computers. And from the perspective of neuroscience, all forms of thinking involve processes that we could consider “irrational”.¹

Most of our thinking is unconscious and biased. All of our thoughts are influenced by our feelings, by social relations and by culture. Even our conscious, “rational” thinking is not necessarily based on empirical evidence or on strictly logical argumentation.² And there are good reasons for all of this. If you really want to make better decisions, or help other people to do so, having good information is certainly useful. But it isn’t sufficient. It also helps to be aware of how your mind actually works, so you can better use its strengths and guard against its weaknesses. And as we shall see, stories deserve special attention due to their unique role in conscious thought.

The world in our heads

First let me come back to my initial question, how do we experience our thoughts? My thoughts are accompanied by visuals and a clear inner voice. Most people seem to have an “inner narrator”, but it is not always present and can take various forms. Some people literally hear a voice, sometimes their own, sometimes a different voice, sometimes more than one. Other people see written text, and deaf people might see hands performing sign language. In a 2021 article in the Guardian, one lady reported her inner voice was actually a dialogue, involving a radio host asking her questions. Someone else reported that her inner experience included a kitchen, in which a bickering Italian couple argued over her thoughts. Some people rarely think in language at all, instead they experience images, tastes, signs, sounds, colours, feelings or other non-symbolic experiences. Some lack even that, they experience mostly inner silence. However, having no inner voice or visuals doesn’t mean that you have no thoughts. It just means that you aren’t conscious of what your thoughts are.³ In fact most thinking is unconscious, for all of us. The thoughts that we consciously experience are only a small tip of the mental iceberg.

The form in which we become aware of our thoughts can differ greatly between people. The content of our thoughts turns out to have a much more common structure. Our conscious thoughts often revolve around our goals and around feelings (those of ourselves and those of others).⁴ Even our unconscious thought is driven strongly by goals.⁵ These goals in turn reflect our needs and our values, the things that seem important to us at a given moment.

Fast and slow

One of the better known models of human thought was formulated by the late psychologist and behavioural economist Daniel Kahneman. In his best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow he distinguishes two broad mechanisms for thinking. One he calls System 1, which is fast, efficient and mostly automatic. It depends on unconscious knowledge and skill. This roughly corresponds to what most people would call intuition. The other mechanism he calls System 2, and it corresponds to deliberative “rational” thought. This mode of thinking is slow, costly and it requires sustained effort and attention. We mostly rely on the fast processing of System 1, and we only invest in the “System 2” effort of slowly working through information and arguments if we feel we really need to.

Kahneman’s model is probably a bit oversimplified, but it is useful and it does highlight an important biological reality: We humans may have big brains, but we still have limited mental resources, and these are costly to employ. Where possible, our brain takes shortcuts and simplifies “reality” for efficient processing. Mostly we are not aware of this. We usually regard our internal representation of the outside world to be complete and accurate. But when constructing a model of our environment, our brain ignores information that is deemed irrelevant, and it fills in bits that seem to be missing. Constructing a full and accurate model of our surroundings would be way too costly, so our brain aims for something that is “good enough”.⁶ This is why we don’t see our nose, why optical illusions work and why we can easily be fooled by magic tricks.

In addition to simplification, automaticity is also essential. If we would need to consciously decide on everything we do, including which muscles to move in which order and how to navigate through space on two legs, we wouldn’t get very far. We would probably never get out of bed. This is why the coordination of our muscles and our senses mostly happens automatically. Walking on two legs isn’t easy, yet we generally manage to learn it (after a somewhat awkward training period in early childhood). Once we have learnt complex coordination skills like walking, cycling, driving a car or playing an instrument, they no longer involve conscious thinking. And in the name of speed and efficiency, many other mental tasks are handled automatically and unconsciously as well. This makes sense, because conscious processing requires attention, and this cannot be applied to many things at once. We direct our attention at things we are interested in, but attention can also be directed by mechanisms outside our control.

There is a fish in the percolator

Two situations can powerfully grab our attention. One is surprise, which happens if reality does not seem to match the predictions generated by our brain. This requires that we pay more attention to details and figure out what’s going on.⁷ For instance, what’s this weird section heading doing here? Should I still drink the coffee?⁸
The other attention grabber is feeling, which is a conscious signal emitted by our unconscious mind, often indicating a need for action. The nature of the action required is indicated by the kind of feeling. For example, bodily sensations such as hunger or thirst tell us that we need to eat or drink, which in turn requires us to go search for food or water.

We also have feelings about the external environment. These are a bit more complicated (because they are coupled to emotions)⁹, but they have the same basic function: They direct our attention to possible needs, to things that may be important. By pointing out needs, our feelings strongly determine our short-term goals. Fear tells us we are in danger, and we may need to hide or run away. Anger tells us we may need to fight. And positive feelings tell us we’re safe and we can rest or play. The way feelings and emotions work seems to be similar across many animal species.¹⁰ But social animals such as ourselves seem to possess strong social feelings as well.¹¹ These address our existential need to be part of a group.

Feelings are probably the most direct driver of behaviour in all animals, including humans. They indicate acute needs, but they are fleeting experiences. They wear off once a need is met, or when it is perceived as less acute. Feelings are not permanent and can rapidly be displaced by other feelings. So how then do we determine and pursue long-term goals? This is where stories and our social environment come in.

Organising experience

In essence, a story can be thought of as a coherent ordering of selected information in time. Most people will associate story with fiction: think novels, movies, theatre, song lyrics, fairy tales and myths. But story is much broader, it also includes biographies, documentaries, personal recollections, conspiracy theories, gossip, advertisements, expressions of ideology, explanations and in general any description of the past or the future. Stories owe their familiar shapes to recognisable patterns of events that we call plots. Stories seem to be an inherent form that our mind imposes on our conscious experience.¹²

Our brain constantly works to impose order on the flow of experience. If certain events predictably seem to follow others, we automatically infer cause and effect. When we look back on our experiences, we do not access a faithful recording of everything that happened. Rather, our brain selects certain memories and it ignores others. We tend to prioritise memories that are somehow relevant to our feelings or goals, although this is not something we do consciously. Moreover, the memories that we recall are not separate, unconnected snapshots, they get ordered into familiar patterns. When we listen to music, we do not experience a song as separate, unconnected notes. Similarly, we experience our memories as a kind of coherent story, often with a plot that revolves around our intentions, or those of other people.¹³ Our memories are not recordings but mental re-creations, which are edited by our unconscious mind to make sense to us.

To remain sane, we humans need our “life stories” to be coherent and to follow a storyline that feels familiar, in which our lives have a direction. This is where long-term goals are important. In a sense, each of us creates a personal myth by which we orient our lives. This is no static narrative, it is constantly revised as our life progresses. But we do closely guard its coherence. We unconsciously select which information is included into our life story and how it is interpreted. Everyone does this, but the process of selection and interpretation is easier to see in other people than in ourselves. We all know people who seem to spin memories and facts in ways that benefit their own self-image or their optimistic outlook, or less helpfully, that perpetuate depression, addiction or questionable lifestyle choices. And again, they are not usually aware that they do this.

We contain multitudes

Talking about a “life story” or “personal myth” may give the impression that we value consistency over everything else. But humans are rarely consistent. Our behaviours, opinions and rationalisations are full of internal conflicts. They can shift all the time. We do not have a single life story. Actually we maintain many versions, which we employ in different contexts. In other words, we can be slightly different persons, employing a different “narrative identity” depending on our situation. At work we present a different version of our “self” than when we are among old friends. And the “self” talking to our mother will differ from the “self” that flirts with someone attractive. Our narrative selves can have different goals in different social situations, and we will thus highlight different aspects of our history and our character. We can even have different values: the things we consider important can change according to who we are with. Unhelpfully, our values in one social context sometimes contradict our values in another context. This doesn’t make us hypocrites, it just makes us human.¹⁴ We adapt our behaviour to the people around us because other people matter to us. In fact, it is hard to be a “self” on your own. Your conscious thinking and the elements that make up your life story all depend on the ideas and stories that are available in your environment. And we also use other people to calibrate our moral compass.

Messy morals and shared stories

Morality is complicated, messy and absolutely central to how human social groups are held together. Moral behaviour is guided by cultural customs and by the rules of ethics. Explicit moral rules are encoded in legal systems and religious texts. In practice, morality also depends strongly on intuition and feeling. We have strong feelings about fairness and what constitutes “right” or “wrong”.¹⁵ What we consider “good” is determined mostly by our social environment, by the fundamental values of the people we feel connected to. Such values outline which actions are desirable or unacceptable and what constitutes a rich, meaningful life, as opposed to an empty, meaningless one.¹⁶ Shared stories are important in this, they communicate shared values, goals and expectations. We can choose to align ourselves with these, or we can oppose them.¹⁷ But whichever choice we make, we are not isolated individuals with purely independent goals and feelings. Instead we are more like actors, engaged in various plots in a world of others.¹⁸

Shared stories are a kind of “cultural toolkit”, providing us with moral frameworks, explanations and other story elements we can use for our own lives. This also explains why we are so strongly attracted to fiction. For a story to be valuable, it doesn’t have to be true. In fact, fictional stories are often attractive precisely because they aren’t as messy and unpredictable as real life. Or because they are richer, and thus add nuance and new perspectives to our own experience. Either way, fiction tends to make more sense to us than reality, and we use it to interpret events in the real world.

Beyond heroes

Not every sequence of events qualifies as a story. Stories must somehow be relevant to us as humans, and they must have a recognisable structure. Nearly every text on storytelling goes on to explain this using the Hero’s Journey. This story structure underlies many myths, popular stories and Hollywood blockbusters.¹⁹ It is attractive in part because it represents the significant human experience of a rite of passage, an event or ceremony that marks an important transition in someone’s life. We all recognise this as being important. Also, stories that adhere to the Hero’s Journey structure emphasise group values such as compassion (for “good guys”) and risking oneself to serve the community. And the struggle inherent in such stories engages our emotions and highlights a significant human goal: often we need to face fears and overcome obstacles in order to grow.

However, the popularity of the Hero’s Journey structure makes it easy to overlook that many stories don’t actually follow it.²⁰ Also, focusing too much on structure risks overlooking other key aspects of stories, for instance that they are about goals and values, and about making sense of the world. Also, stories have a tone: they can be more positive or more negative. The importance of such aspects becomes clear when our stories fail to make sense of the world. For instance, people who express more positive life stories tend to score better on measures of wellbeing.²¹ They do experience difficulties, but see them as opportunities for growth. Conversely, anyone familiar with depression will recognise that the associated life narratives often have a negative tone. If you are depressed, you experience little control over your life. Long-term goals may be absent or feel irrelevant or unattainable. Much of what therapy does is to help re-frame such negative life stories in a more positive way. More importantly, recovery from depression often involves finding new long-term goals, or new ways to reach existing goals.

Mental versatility

We have seen that stories are central to our conscious experience, our wellbeing, our morality and to our social cohesion. We have also seen that our “thinking” takes many forms and involves many interacting processes, only some of which are conscious. All of these mental processes are highly functional, meaning that they are very good at performing certain tasks. We need automatic processes for efficiency. We require feelings and emotions to point out our needs, to distinguish “good” from “bad” and to motivate us. We need analytic thought to correct some of the errors and biases introduced by the other, more efficient processes, and to do long-term planning. And we use “story” or “narrative” to structure our experiences, our goals and values, and to share these with others. These are all aspects of “thinking”, and they are all important.²² But crucially, they all have their weak spots, and it helps to be aware of these.

The many pitfalls of thinking and feeling

In his discussion of “fast” vs. “slow” thinking, Daniel Kahneman emphasised that the unconscious processing of “System 1” is fast and efficient, but it can also be sloppy. The pioneering work of Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky spawned much research into cognitive bias, the many ways in which our thinking tends to deviate from “rationality”. Biases fall in a number of categories, which are nicely visualised in this overview (from Wikimedia):

While the notion of cognitive bias is only half a century old, people have long recognised that emotions and “gut feelings” are important, but can also be highly problematic if left unchecked. This has been pointed out by philosophers, sages and religious thinkers going back at least 2500 years. Notable examples include Buddhism, Stoicism, Taoism and Aristotelian ethics, all of which emphasise the importance of emotional awareness and emotional regulation. Contemporary research confirms this. Take for instance the huge 2022 review of psychotherapy methods by Stephen C. Hayes and collaborators. They found that when it comes to mental health, the single most important skill to develop is psychological flexibility. As Hayes explains, this entails being aware of your thoughts and feelings, and accepting them even when they are difficult or painful. It also involves using observed feelings to figure out your core values, and acting in accordance with these.²³

Rational thinking can contribute to emotional regulation, and it is essential for correcting biases. However, reason by itself does not guarantee good outcomes. I already mentioned that analytical thought requires attention to details, which makes it difficult to apply to complex systems. But a far more common problem is that rational thinking allows us to come up with reasons for just about anything. Our big brains can easily cook up reasons for why we feel the way we do, and has no problems justifying biased thinking, far-fetched conspiracy theories and all kinds of immoral and even self-damaging opinions and behaviours. Also, analytical thinking doesn’t magically lead to objectivity, science or progress.

Rational thinking didn’t suddenly appear during the European Enlightenment. What did evolve was the particular social structure of science. As I discussed in an earlier article, the main social convention that emerged was the “iron rule”. This rule says that theories are only taken seriously in science if they match empirical observations.²⁴ As anyone familiar with science knows, this doesn’t prevent the appearance of incorrect, incomplete or conflicting theories. However it does sufficiently constrain and coordinate theoretical thinking, so that incorrect explanations tend to be outcompeted or invalidated over the long term. In the short run, science is hard work, often messy and not always rewarding. Moreover, this way of thinking, working and communicating is very far removed from the lives and problems of most people. Science doesn’t come naturally to us. People generally prefer a good story to “scientific facts”, with all their nuances and complexities.

Stories work well for us because they combine and structure human feelings, problems, goals and values into a recognisable whole that can be easily copied and modified. This is a powerful ability that humans have, and that we’re naturally good at.²⁵ Because stories are packages that contain facts, emotions and values, they can motivate people much more easily than “mere” factual information can. But the ability of stories to simplify and compress a complex reality into attractive packages is also dangerous. One problem is the risk of oversimplification: simple stories with a recognisable plot and characters (e.g. heroes vs. villains) can be more attractive than the messy complexities and uncertainties of real life. A related concern is that our shared stories can easily be captured by others.

Mind pirates

Because shared stories are attractive and can influence our goals, they can be used to direct our behaviour. Attempts to do so are easy to find: simply turn on a television or open YouTube or Instagram. Advertisements are basically very short stories that are designed to generate or tap into feelings, in order to influence our short-term goals. Marketing tries to persuade us to buy goods and services. Propaganda basically uses the same tricks to influence the values and behaviour of groups in society. This is no coincidence, as the psychological techniques used in modern marketing were originally adapted from 20^th century war propaganda.²⁶ Propaganda has been around as long as human group conflict, but mass media and the internet have made its distribution a lot easier. You need look no further than contemporary politics, conflicts and culture wars to see that shared stories are potent weapons for manipulating collective thinking and behaviour.

Luckily we are not mindless automatons, we have various mental, emotional and social defence mechanisms. Marketing and propaganda depend on scale, they can have significant social or economic impact only when large groups of people are involved. But as individuals we are not so easily manipulated into beliefs or behaviours that run counter to our core values. Also, we are used to being bombarded with conflicting stories, and our social environment has a strong influence on which narratives we accept. A healthy, supportive and diverse social environment isn’t just important for wellbeing, it can also help protect against problematic narratives. And emotional regulation and awareness are important here as well, because especially propaganda tends to target powerful “negative” emotions such as fear and rage.

Most of the mental “weak points” we examined can be ameliorated by being more aware of what’s going on in our mind. You can train yourself to be more aware of unconscious bias, unhelpful thoughts, corrosive feelings and oversimplified stories. You can also train others. If we want better decisions, it isn’t enough to have better information. We shouldn’t just aim to educate ourselves and others. We also need to build essential mental and emotional skills, such as self-awareness and being aware of stories.

Future fictions

We tell many stories about what happened in the past, both to ourselves and to others. But a unique aspect of stories is that they can be about the future. Stories about the future are fiction, by definition. But they shape our priorities and our expectations, and we’ve seen that they can strongly affect our wellbeing. Shared narratives about the future have a similar role for societies. They help us identify problems and set shared priorities. Also, if we change shared narratives, we can shift group behaviour and norms in the long run, for better or for worse. Abolishing slavery, giving voting rights to workers and women and recognising human rights were all attained through slowly shifting social norms. Shared stories were important in this. Perhaps less positively, the “big stories” of religion, socialism and capitalism have had a huge influence on human history, and they still shape how we think about the future.

In my first article I discussed three common types of stories about sustainability. What I called “ecopessimist” stories have a negative tone, while “ecomodernist” and “neo-romantic” stories are more optimistic (but emphasise different values). In my next article I will examine two broad classes of stories about the future: the narratives of Progress and Decline. We will see that fictional stories about the future have very important consequences for what we as humans do in the present. And what we do in the present does eventually determine the future, just not always in the way our stories predict.

“Red thread” images by Io Cooman. Cognitive bias codex by John Manoogian III and TilmannR (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Hairballs & Loops

2024-10-03T00:00:00+02:00

Why understanding the real world is important (but not easy)

Reading time: ca. 15-25 minutes.

By Levien van Zon

Stories are important for how we see the world. In my first article, I argued that stories act as internal models of the world, supercharged by our ability to share them with others. My subsequent post was about complexity and about science. Although much of our knowledge comes from the pursuit of science, its tools have trouble with so-called complex systems. Complexity in this context means that there are many interacting parts. The parts of a complex system are hard to separate because their interactions are significant, they cannot simply be ignored or averaged away.

So far I have been a little vague about a number of things. For instance, what do I mean by “stories”, “internal models” and “knowledge”? And what is the nature of “interactions” between the parts of a complex system? In this article, I want to make some of these things more concrete. Also, I will show that complexity isn’t just there to make our lives difficult, it can actually have an important function.

Knowledge as explanatory stories

Let’s start with the concept that stories are models of the world. Stories are complicated things that are closely tied up with the workings of our mind. They are hard to define and they serve many functions. So for now I will just focus on a common experience: We generally feel that we understand an event, if we can construct a coherent story of how the event was generated.¹ Such explanatory stories are often not accurate, of course. Our explanation of an event may be quite different from how the event was actually generated.² But regardless of their accuracy, the collection of cause-and-effect stories that we believe to be true does constitute our personal knowledge, our internal model of how the world works.

Because a fair number of our causal beliefs are at best inaccurate and at worst plain nonsense, it is useful for a society to have some way to check our shared beliefs. Science can be seen as a collective human effort to figure out whether cause-and-effect stories (usually called theories or hypotheses) actually correspond to processes in the real world. And it turns out that this is not at all easy to establish.

The way to test a causal story is typically through experiment. If we change something in a proposed causal chain, we should see a change in the effect. However it is not always possible to perform direct experiments. For instance, things can be too small or too big to manipulate, like molecules or societies. Or they may be connected to too many other things, as with cells in the human brain. Luckily, people have come up with many ingenious and elaborate ways to establish which causes lead to which effects.³ Ideally we are able to figure out a detailed mechanistic process. By this I mean a description of all the steps through which certain causes lead to certain effects. Knowing the true (or at least likely) mechanism through which something happens is what we usually regard as “understanding” in the scientific sense. Having such a mechanistic description is very powerful, as it may allow us to control things and predict what may happen in the future or in other hypothetical situations.⁴

A simple complex system

As I wrote earlier, the classical scientific approach has difficulty with complex systems, because such systems have many significant interactions between their parts. For instance in the human body, in human society or in a natural ecosystem, it is hard to manipulate and study parts in isolation. This would be necessary to clearly determine cause-effect-relationships and understand how such relationships work. Yet if we isolate parts, we change the system we want to study. Moreover, cause and effect may not even be well-defined, because there may be causal loops or “feedbacks”. Let’s look at an example to make clear what I mean.

Imagine a small greenhouse containing a simple ecosystem with three kinds of organisms: plants, slugs and hedgehogs. This is a very simple complex system. It is not hard to describe the interactions here: the slugs eat the plants, and the hedgehogs eat the slugs. These interactions are significant in the sense that they are literally a matter of life or death for the parties involved. Hence this system is complex in at least two aspects: interactions are significant and the parts thus behave differently if you separate them. Whether specific interactions are positive or negative depends on our perspective. Clearly the slugs negatively affect the plants, but we can also say that the plants positively affect the slugs (and indirectly the hedgehogs). For an outside observer the two ways of seeing the interaction are more or less equivalent, for the plants and slugs they are not.

Stability and circular causes

While the interactions are easily described here, the behaviour of the system is not so easy to describe in terms of causes and effects. What happens for instance if the slugs eat all the plants? There will be a brief explosion of slugs and perhaps hedgehogs, after which all animals will die of hunger. But while such a slug-armageddon is certainly possible, the little ecosystem can also be perfectly stable. The hedgehogs can keep the slugs in check, giving the plants an opportunity to grow, and the limited number of slugs will in turn limit the hedgehogs. As you can see, there are loops of causality here: the slugs affect the hedgehogs, which in turn affect the slugs, which affects both plants and hedgehogs, and so on. This is an example of circular causality, or what are often called “feedback loops”.

Feedback loops can be tricky to describe, because there is no clear separation of cause and effect. Do the slugs limit the hedgehogs, or do the hedgehogs limit the slugs? The answer is yes. They limit each other. The relationship between slugs and hedgehogs is an example of what is called a negative (or balancing, or attenuating) feedback. A familiar example of negative feedback in human engineering is the thermostat, which turns up the heating if it becomes too cold, and turns it down if it becomes too warm. Negative feedback is in many ways positive, because it can prevent things from getting out of hand, so it tends to provide stability.

The other common type of feedback loop is called amplifying, reinforcing or simply positive feedback. As you will probably have guessed, positive feedback isn’t always positive. An example is the “rich get richer” effect: People who have more money have more opportunities to acquire further wealth than people who have less money. Therefore the rich tend to become richer and inequality in societies will tend to increase unless active measures are taken to prevent the concentration of wealth and power. Positive feedback is very powerful, it drives exponential growth and can rapidly amplify things. But in the absence of stabilising mechanisms it potentially causes instability. We depend on it for our nervous and immune systems to function (among many other things), and it drives biological evolution and economic growth. But it can also lead to explosions, economic depression, ecosystem collapse, runaway climate change and social revolutions.

Understanding complex behaviour

Back to our little greenhouse. Because “normal” human language is imprecise and has difficulty with circular causation, there is a limit to how well we can describe what goes on in this small system. This is despite the fact that our greenhouse only contains three species and our story ignores many other things that are also important (like the sunlight, water, nutrients and microbes that are required for the plants to grow). Our description doesn’t provide enough information to predict, for instance, whether a given constellation of slugs and hedgehogs will destabilise the system by eating too much. For this, we will need a more precise description of what is going on. One thing we can do is construct a mathematical model that describes the main interactions between the three species. I will not bother you here with the details, you can see what this looks like in the footnotes if you’re interested.⁵ Suffice it to say a mathematical description is much more compact than our descriptive story, and it allows us to make very specific predictions. We can use it to determine how much the animals can eat, or how fast the plants need to grow, for the system to remain stable. In this sense it is a richer description. Although to make the mathematics manageable it also leaves out a lot of details. These details may or may not be important for the questions we want the model to answer. Like our descriptive story, a mathematical model is a simplification. In many ways it is a very poor description of what actually goes on. All our models, whether stories, pictures, mathematical formulas or computer simulations, are tools for understanding the things that happen in the world. They are necessarily simplifications, and they are never as rich and subtle as the real thing.

Exploding hairballs

Now imagine trying to understand and describe an actual, natural ecosystem that isn’t an artificial greenhouse with only three species. Puget Sound is an estuary in Washington State, adjacent to the cities of Seattle and Tacoma. This is what it looks like:

And here is a picture of the main species groups and their interactions in the central basin of the Puget Sound ecosystem:

Good luck. Clearly this is a more complex complex system. Even though the diagram shown above is still much simplified, human language is no longer an effective tool to describe all the interactions shown here. The picture above actually represents a computer model. This model contains a mathematical description of relations between groups of species, such as what and how much they eat.⁶ These numbers in turn are based on observations and measurements of what actual creatures do. You can imagine how much work goes into constructing such a model. And this is not even a very complicated system, as ecosystems go. Moreover, the model mostly describes relatively big organisms. It lumps the huge diversity of micro-organisms—which constitute an ecosystem onto itself—into a few large groups such as “bacteria” and “phytoplankton”.

Now imagine trying to make a model of what goes on in the human body. The Puget Sound ecosystem model describes 65 species groups. The human body consists of roughly 30 trillion cells of more than 400 different types, plus another 38 trillion or so microbes belonging to more than a thousand different species. Our own cells interact with this personal ecosystem of resident micro-organisms in ways that are essential for our health but are poorly understood. Furthermore, the internal workings of our cells depend on more than eighty-thousand different proteins and on a lot of other types of molecules, many of which we don’t know anything about yet. Much of what goes on in our body is decentralised and self-organising, although some of it is coordinated by our nervous system, which has somewhere in the order of 100 trillion neuronal connections.⁷ The human body is so mind-bogglingly complex that there is no way a single person could understand how it all works, exactly. Luckily we don’t need to know all the details in order to operate our body. But for medical science this complexity does present a problem.

Getting lost in details

In fact, we almost always see complexity as a problem, and with good reason. If we want to control things, we need to know how they work (at least more or less). If you want a doctor to treat a serious medical condition, it helps a lot if they know what causes the condition, and what happens if you treat it with a certain pharmaceutical drug. Of course trial-and-error can be a valid approach, but it is much more useful to know causal mechanisms (and as a patient I would much prefer the latter). And luckily we do know quite a few mechanisms, the exact processes by which certain things happen in our body, often down to the level of molecules. But figuring these out has taken a gigantic, time-consuming and very costly effort by millions of researchers collecting data and doing experiments for more than a century. And given how much we still don’t know, the end of this effort is nowhere near in sight.

One of the problems is that merely collecting detailed information isn’t sufficient for understanding how things work. As science writer Philip Ball points out in his book “How Life Works”, it clearly isn’t the case that all details matter. If all details were important, life would be utterly fragile in the face of disturbance and damage. But life is remarkably resilient, so buried somewhere in the endless complex details there must be robust patterns and processes that keep things running, even under difficult conditions.

If we collect a lot of detailed observations and focus mostly on these, we easily lose sight of the big picture. We risk missing the forest for the trees, missing the patterns and processes that actually matter most. Unfortunately it isn’t always clear where we should look for these “aspects that matter”. For several decades it was believed that for living beings, genetics is what matters most. This is an understandable belief: Genes contain much of the information that we pass on between generations, and this gets acted on by evolution. So surely our genome must provide a kind of “blueprint” for how to build an organism?⁸ If we can just understand how to read and interpret this information, then all the other messy molecular and cellular details may prove less important. Or so we believed.

Complex patterns for robustness

The Human Genome Project started in 1990. It aimed to read all our DNA so that we could catalogue our genes and associate them with their function. But when the first results came in a decade later, they were quite different from what was expected. It wasn’t a neat picture of genes determining certain functions, or even mostly encoding protein molecules with clear functions. Rather, our genetic content seemed a bewildering mess of baroque complexity. Even two decades on, it is still unclear what most genetic elements “do”. In the years after the first genome datasets were published, the messy data did turn out to contain patterns: For instance, some combinations of genes were found to behave in ways similar to electronic circuits. Such biological circuits often have clear functions. They can oscillate or switch between states in various ways.⁹ These circuits are very common in single-celled organisms, but alas, much less common in humans and other multicellular organisms. The “wiring” of the molecular network encoded by our genes actually resembles the brain more than it does a set of simple circuits. An electronic circuit processes electrical signals. Similarly, our molecular networks also seem to direct and process information, encoded in chemical, electrical and mechanical signals. But the information doesn’t neatly flow in one direction or stay in one part of the system. Instead, like in the brain, the information seems to go everywhere, and it can have effects all over the organism.

How can we make sense of this? Why is our body (and that of other multicellular organisms) organised in such a strange and seemingly chaotic and inefficient way? Is this just the historical legacy of millions of years of random mutation?

Perhaps some of it is an evolutionary legacy, but certainly not all of it. Rather, it probably isn’t a coincidence that chemical interaction networks in our body show similarities to the way our brain is wired. Our neural networks are wired to integrate and process information in ways that are relatively flexible and robust. These networks need to be somewhat insensitive to noise, damage and small details. The same is probably true for the molecular networks encoded by our genome. Individual genes do have an effect on the way information is processed by these networks. But the effect is typically small and often it’s hard to predict beforehand what the effect will be. The fact that most gene mutations have only minor effects, provides the system with some degree of robustness. This also makes the process of evolution a lot easier. And the unpredictability of the effects is an advantage, given the existence of viruses and other pathogens. These parasites constantly try to co-opt our molecular machinery for their own purposes. And this would be a lot easier for them if the workings of our biology were transparent and predictable.

All living beings have to survive in a world that is full of noise, variation and elements that can inflict damage. If our biology was sensitive to all of this, it would never be able to build a well-functioning complex individual from a single cell, and make it last for 80 years.

Details can matter, but context matters more

So what does all of this tell us about how we should deal with complex systems? First, it seems that the role of details in such systems is complicated. If we ignore details, we risk coming up with “mystical” cause-and-effect stories. Such stories have no clear mechanism, no clearly defined process through which causes lead to effects. It may take away our uncertainty to attribute effects to deities, the universe, black boxes or invisible hands. This in itself can be useful. We dislike uncertainty, and even false certainties may aid us in many ways, for instance by binding social groups together.¹⁰ But often vague, mystical explanations don’t help us in solving the actual problems we face. For this, we need a mechanistic understanding of the processes through which things happen. And to understand such a process, we need to know about relevant details. If we say “everything is connected”, this may be true but it doesn’t further our understanding. To understand, we need to figure out which connections are actually important, and how they influence the behaviour of a system. But even if we do this, we should be aware that our knowledge will always be incomplete. We will usually oversimplify, and miss connections that are important in a certain context.

Moreover as written before, if we focus mostly on details, we may lose sight of the bigger picture. Especially when dealing with living systems, we need to zoom out occasionally and wonder what a system is supposed to be doing. What are its goals, which things matter for this, and what is their context?¹¹ In a living system, the way in which details relate to the whole, can be compared to the structure of human language: If you focus just on letters or on letter shapes, language seems a bewildering mess of small details. It isn’t until you zoom out to words that things start to make some sense. But to fully comprehend language, you need the words to interact with each other and with grammar in sentences. These eventually interact with our mood, knowledge and experience in paragraphs and stories. Words and letters do matter in all of this, but a sentence can remain comprehensible if we remove or substitute words, and words can remain comprehensible if we change or remove letters. Moreover, entire languages can evolve significantly and rapidly while still remaining functional. Like language, the way life works has to be both adaptable and robust. Details do matter, but it’s hard to say beforehand which details do and which don’t. One has to comprehend the larger-scale patterns to understand the role of details.¹²

The fragile, the robust and the adaptive

Finally, we need to realise that what we often see as messy, inefficient complexity can actually have a function. We tend to dislike complexity. It makes things harder to understand, manage and optimise. We prefer clear chains of cause and effect, which we can more easily communicate, understand and modify. When confronted with a complex system, we mostly seek to make it simpler. But in evolved, living systems, complexity is a feature rather than a bug.

Of course, good design doesn’t have to be complex, but it needs to be both robust and adaptive if it is to survive in the long term. The essayist and mathematician Nassim Nicholas Taleb has gone a step further and proposed the term antifragile. This describes things that do not just persist under adverse conditions (robustness) and are able to recover (resilience), but that actually require some adversity to function well and get better over time (which requires adaptation).

We humans are quite good at optimising things for a narrow set of functions and conditions. We often design structures that seem efficient and in which causes and effects are easy to understand. But these structures also tend to be fragile, especially when conditions are no longer “optimal”. If we remove or damage any part of such a fragile system, it no longer works well.
On the other hand, when we design things to be robust, we tend to do it by overdesigning. We make a best guess of worse case scenarios (say, the maximum strain a bridge has to endure). Subsequently we apply a safety factor: we design the structure so that it can withstand two or three times the worst-case strain. This approach works well, provided of course our calculations are correct, the scenarios don’t become outdated, we didn’t overlook possible causes of failure and the structure we design is well-maintained.¹³

Naturally evolved systems seem to do something quite different. They tend to have many complex causal loops that are hard to understand. But such loops do have a function in stabilising the system and in making it less sensitive to noise and damage. Such systems tend to be robust. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t last very long in a world that can often be adverse and unpredictable. They are able to recover from damage and adapt relatively quickly to new conditions.¹⁴

Having antifragility built into a system nearly always makes it harder to comprehend (in the words of the late James C. Scott, it is less legible). Still this approach is often more efficient and is certainly more adaptable than overdesigning structures with large safety margins to obtain robustness.¹⁵ And a dynamic “antifragile” approach is certainly more robust than designing systems that are so streamlined for “efficiency” that they fail at the least sign of trouble. We overdesign bridges, power plants, cars and aeroplanes, which is good. We streamline our supply chains and our food production system, which is worrisome.

If we seriously want to make our societies and our infrastructure sustainable in the long term (by which I mean: longer than a few decades), we will need to broaden our view to how life does things. We have currently organised our societies in ways that will probably not fare well under big changes of any kind, especially if such changes are sudden and unexpected. Life has survived such challenges many times, and some past societies have done so as well. It would be wise to learn from the design principles and processes through which living systems manage to persist, rather than to assume that we know better, or to ignore such mechanisms altogether. At the very least we should start to accept and appreciate complexity. We should pay more attention to patterns and processes that provide robustness, such as negative feedback loops. But we can do much better, perhaps we can learn to use some principles of adaptive, antifragile complex systems in ways that are beneficial to the long-term wellbeing of humans and non-humans alike.

“Red thread” images by Io Cooman. The Puget Sound ecosystem diagram was adapted from Harvey et al. (2010). Puget Sound pictures are by Buphoff (CC BY 3.0), Vickie J. Anderson (Harbor Seal and Caspian Tern, both CC BY-SA 4.0), Bruce Duncan (Plumose Anemone) and Robert Stearns (Geoduck).

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Entwined: Matters of Complexity

2024-06-21T00:00:00+02:00

Reading time: ca. 15-25 minutes.
Too long? Read the 8 minute summary instead!

This article has been published on https://lvzon.substack.com, and is also available as PDF or ebook (EPUB and Kindle) for offline reading. You can also listen to a narrated version:

This article and the next will be a little more technical, we will look at so-called complex systems. I will refer to complexity in future articles, and here I will explain what it is, how we can talk about it and what this all means for scientific understanding, predictability and the possibilities of control.

By Levien van Zon

We understand our world through stories. As I wrote in my previous article, how we see and how we talk about the world matters a lot for the way we understand our surroundings. This in turn determines which problems we see and how we choose to deal with them. Stories are much more than just “fiction”. They are internal models of the world that we share with others through the magical medium of language. Stories constitute knowledge, both for us as individuals and as a species.

Many of our day-to-day stories about the world are sloppy and inconsistent. Therefore much of our modern knowledge derives from science. Science aims to tell stories that are more formal and more precise, and that can be examined for their accuracy. When we’re looking for better stories, science is not a bad place to start.

Welcome to the machine

Since about the 17^th century, how we see the world has increasingly been determined by science and technology. Especially the concept of “the machine” has been very important in shaping our thinking as well as our “doing”. Many early scientists imagined the world as being similar to a giant machine or clockwork. They believed that this clockwork universe could be fully understood and predicted, once the mechanical laws that govern it had been uncovered. Enlightenment thinkers often talked about life and human society in terms of machines as well. For instance, René Descartes famously argued that animals were basically just automatons, biological machines incapable of conscious experience because they lacked a human soul.

The Industrial Revolution in the 18^th and 19^th centuries saw the development, study and optimisation of actual human-built machines for an increasing range of tasks. This yielded further insights into all kinds of mechanical laws, but also into the role of energy, including the behaviour of heat, electricity, magnetism and light. Increasingly, nature was seen as something that could and should be controlled and improved for the benefit of humans. The forests of Europe were turned into artificial monocultures, optimised for the greatest yield of wood. In the 20^th century, the efficiency of factories was maximised according to the “rational” principles of “scientific management” devised by Frederick Taylor and others.¹ Buildings and cities were reimagined as “machines for living and working” by the architects and designers of CIAM, the International Congresses of Modern Architecture. Much of agriculture was also modelled after the ideal of the factory, which was based on mechanisation, standardisation, scale and control. The aim was to replace the seeming chaos of nature by the efficiency of the factory, in order to increase the production and predictability of food, vegetable oil and fibre. This also resulted in driving down their cost.

In many ways these collective attempts to understand and improve the world through science and technology were an astounding success. We understand almost unimaginably more about the universe than we did a few centuries ago, and in many countries the quality and span of human life have greatly increased since then. But these successes did come at a cost. Some of these costs took (and still take) the form of human and non-human suffering, for instance in the former colonies and in industrial production chains, including those of agriculture. Moreover, while over the past centuries we collectively managed to reduce some problems, we’ve created many new ones, or made existing problems worse. One unintended consequence of mechanisation turned out to be climate change. Other examples of the darker sides of “progress” include biodiversity loss, soil degradation, water shortages, microbial resistance and a pandemic of chronic metabolic diseases (such as diabetes). Also some aspects of social and economic inequality have been created or made worse by technological progress.

If we want to solve and prevent such problems, it is important to figure out why they occur in the first place. Many “modern” problems are unintended and unexpected side effects of our attempts to improve human wellbeing. Proponents of technological solutions sometimes argue that these are simply a temporary price that we need to pay for progress. Further improvements in knowledge and technology will allow us to solve these problems and prevent new ones. Is this a realistic expectation, or is it just wishful thinking?

To understand both the success and the limitations of science and technology, it helps to comprehend a little better how science works, and why it is so effective in answering some questions while it has trouble with others. As we shall see, many problems actually have to do with our tendency to use human-built machines as a metaphor for how the world and everything in it works. Machines are built to be optimised and controlled. But it turns out that most of our world is very unlike a machine.

Stories, science and the iron rule

We all use stories to explain and predict what happens in our surroundings. To find out how accurate our explanations and predictions are, our brains constantly compare our expectations with our actual observations and experiences.² In principle, the way in which science works is not much different. Scientific theories are basically explanatory and predictive stories, and we constantly compare them with observations to see if they are accurate. However, there is at least one important thing that sets scientific explanations apart from other types of stories. Regular stories tend to act as a source of certainty, they provide a framework on which we build our beliefs. If we encounter observations that are inconsistent with our explanatory stories, we tend to hold on to our stories and we often ignore or explain away the inconsistent observations. This also happens in science, of course, simply because scientists are humans. But science has the underlying, collective rule that, at least in principle, observations are always more important than the story used to explain them. Philosopher Michael Strevens has called this “the iron rule of science”. And this rule is considered sufficiently valuable that (eventually) it tends to win out against human nature: If the explanation doesn’t match the observation, the story isn’t good enough and should be modified.

Observations in science often involve active and repeatable manipulations of the world, in the form of experiments. The language of scientific stories is usually a “natural” human language such as English. But when possible, the more precise “non-natural” languages of mathematics and logic are used, as these are less ambiguous and have greater predictive power. Whatever the form, the purpose is the same: to describe a part of the world, in an attempt to understand how it works in the most precise way possible. This has been especially successful for understanding the non-living physical universe.

The living world, which includes human societies, has been harder to describe and comprehend. Later we will explore some of the reasons for this. For now let’s just state that the living world is more complex than the non-living world. And this has proven somewhat of a challenge for the tools that science has traditionally used.

The “classical” way to do science is often called reductionism. The reductionist method basically works by taking complicated things apart. The parts are then manipulated and studied in isolation. In this way, a description of more complicated assemblages is built up from descriptions of its parts.

This works well, as long as the behaviour of an assemblage is mostly determined by the properties of the parts (or by statistical regularities in the interactions of parts). For instance, finding out the properties of atoms and simple molecules greatly increased our understanding of how more complicated molecules work. It also explained much about the properties of gases, fluids and solids, which are formed from large numbers of interacting atoms or molecules.

Studying parts in a controlled environment allows us to break up the study of complicated things into smaller, more manageable projects. These simpler studies can also be more easily repeated and checked by others. This method is very powerful, and has been extremely successful. However, it encounters difficulties when there are many interactions between elements. When such interactions are significant and are not easy to “aggregate” into neat statistics, it becomes hard to explain a system’s behaviour by just studying the interacting parts. This is where complexity science can help us, because it is in many respects a “science of interactions”. It is actually not so much a science in itself, but more an add-on to the various sciences. It is a toolkit for thinking and talking about complex systems.

Interacting elements

So what is a complex system? A system is a collection of elements. These elements need to be interconnected in ways that produce some collective behaviour. If a system is complex, it usually means that the system has many parts. Also, interactions between these parts are important for collective behaviour. The word “complex” comes from Latin, and basically means “entwined”.

In a complex system, the parts are hard to separate. An example is your body: if you start taking it apart into separate organs or cells, at some point it will stop working well. The same applies to most living systems, which is why they are hard to study using the reductionist method. You cannot really take them apart without changing the way they work. And performing controlled experiments on the interacting parts of a fully functional system isn’t easy. Reliably repeating such experiments is even harder.

We should point out that complexity isn’t a binary category. It’s not that something is either simple or complex. Complexity is a continuum, some things are more complex than others. More complexity can result from more parts or interactions, or because interactions are stronger or more varied.

Here it is useful to make a distinction between two kinds of complex systems: complex physical systems (CPS) and complex adaptive systems (CAS). Complex physical systems have many parts that interact, but the parts themselves don’t change much over time. A relatively simple example would be a pile of sand grains. A more complex example is the weather.

In a complex adaptive system on the other hand, the parts aren’t static, they can change over time. If parts can change, and if they don’t all change in the same way, individual elements may become different from each other in their properties. Complex adaptive systems therefore tend to have diversity in their elements. And as the name already implies, complex adaptive systems can adapt to changing conditions. All living systems are complex adaptive systems. Examples include biological cells, tissues and organs, organisms, ecosystems and human societies and economies.

More than the sum of its parts

In both types of complex systems, interactions between the parts can lead to interesting things. One of these is emergence. This basically means that an assemblage of parts has properties that its parts do not have. Think for instance of water, which (in its liquid form) can flow and is wet. Water is formed from interacting molecules, but a single water molecule cannot be said to be “wet”. And even though all water molecules are alike, the many properties of water cannot easily be predicted from knowing the properties of a water molecule.

Water molecules are the building blocks of liquid water, they can also form ice or water vapour. In general, interacting molecules give rise to gases, fluids or solids. We can think of these “states of matter” as new levels of organisation, which emerge from the interactions between molecules. A fluid or solid is a “thing” in itself, which has its own properties and follows its own peculiar rules. Water and ice are clearly very different, even though they are both made up of identical water molecules. The different emergent properties of water, ice and water vapour arise because the same molecules interact in different ways.

Emergence is sometimes presented as exotic, hard to study and almost mystical. Yet we are completely surrounded by it, and it determines our daily experience. We cannot see molecules interact, so of course we are not used to thinking of the “things” that surround us as emerging from interacting molecules. And this is precisely the point: even if we don’t know anything about molecules, we can interact with things that are made up of molecules, because such emergent levels of organisation have their own emergent properties of “thingness”. You can simply sit on a chair without being aware of the molecules of iron, nickel and nitrogen that interact to form crystal microstructures that (hopefully) keep the steel frame of the chair together.

Even if we are interested in the finer details of things, a medical specialist can study and treat heart problems without knowing all of the processes going on in the human body, or all the molecular components that make up the human heart. And an economist can say something about the global market for office chairs without having to study the detailed neural patterns in the brains of all the people that are involved in producing, selling and buying such chairs. Emergent properties allow us to know things without having to know all of the underlying details.

Strict laws, shaky laws

In the 17^th century, scientists like Isaac Newton believed that much of the universe was governed by a limited and unchanging set of “laws”. These laws were presumed to be set by the Creator, and humans could “discover” them through careful experimentation and observation. Finding the laws of nature was like unveiling the mind of God. Over the subsequent centuries, especially physicists proved to be very successful in finding such scientific laws. Notably at the subatomic level, many of the rules that govern quantum mechanics seem to be static, fundamental properties of the universe in some way.

One example is the little-known Pauli exclusion principle, a simple rule that prescribes the structure of the periodic table of elements and many of the properties of matter in our universe. A rule like this has a huge effect on the structure of reality, yet is not entirely clear where it comes from.

Following the successes in physics and chemistry, scientists in other fields also started searching for scientific laws. However, the more complex the system that they were studying, the harder it was to find regularities, let alone true “natural laws”. Rules and regularities in the more complex realms of biology, economics and the social sciences bear little resemblance to the “hard” predictive laws of physics. They are usually more trends than laws: they tend to depend on context, it is often possible to find exceptions and the rules can suddenly change.

It turns out that even in physics and chemistry, many of the “laws of nature” are not unchanging properties of the universe. Rather, they are emergent properties³ of interacting particles and forces, and they may also depend on context. As long as the interacting parts (say, molecules) and their surroundings are constant over time, their collective behaviour is often well-defined.⁴ For instance, it is a well-known fact that water freezes at 0°C and boils at 100°C. But oddly this is almost never the case in the real world. It is only true for pure water under a standard pressure of 1 atmosphere, and under fairly slow heating or cooling. Any deviation from standard pressure (for instance with altitude) or anything that is dissolved into water (for instance salt) will shift the boiling and freezing points to higher or lower temperatures. But at least water molecules are all the same, so the effects of such external influences are more or less predictable.

However as I already mentioned, discovering the behavioural rules of a system becomes much more difficult if the interacting parts aren’t constant over time. In complex adaptive systems, “natural laws” at the level of the system aren’t fixed, they can change over time as the interacting parts change. For example, the rules that seem to govern the economy depend on the structure of the economy, and on the usual, average behaviour of people. If these things change, so sometimes do the rules. Even worse, a seemingly small change in the underlying parts or interactions can occasionally lead to dramatically different system rules and behaviours. Minor interaction details can therefore matter a lot.

In any given study you can only look at a limited set of conditions and interactions. Therefore it is often very cumbersome to figure out what’s going on in a complex adaptive system. It can become almost impossible to predict what will happen if conditions change. We can still learn and know things about complex systems, even if their parts are not all identical and constant. But it requires a lot of work, and our ability to make generalised statements and predictions is rather limited.

Predictability problems

This last point is worth emphasising. The behaviour of complex systems usually cannot be predicted very far into the future, even in the unlikely case that all elements and their interactions are known. This is not just because elements and interactions may sometimes change. The problem also exists in many complex physical systems, in which the parts themselves do not change.

When there are many strong interactions, every element can end up influencing many other elements, including itself. And because interactions take time and this time may vary, it may become impossible to predict the precise order in which interactions take place. This creates an uncertainty about the outcome of interactions, which can rapidly get worse with time.⁵ This is the main reason why we cannot predict the weather with good accuracy more than a few days ahead.

And it gets worse. We saw that emergent properties allow us to know about and interact with things without having to know all of the underlying details. But the inverse isn’t true. Even if we would have full knowledge about all details of physics and chemistry (which currently isn’t the case), this wouldn’t necessarily help us to explain and predict what happens at a higher, emergent level of organisation.

Let’s take an example from a complex social system: What happens in, say, regional politics cannot really be reduced to physics and chemistry, or even to neuroscience.⁶ It depends mostly on interactions between, in this case, politicians and other groups in a society. It also depends on interactions with other systems (for instance, economies) and other levels of organisation (like national and international politics and geopolitical power relations).

In my previous article, I talked about various ways of seeing the world in relation to sustainability. The ecomodernist worldview tends to emphasise the potential for large-scale technological solutions to sustainability problems, based on existing institutions and economic growth. Ecomodernists strongly believe in the power of science and engineering. In contrast, the antimodernist or neo-romantic worldview tends to promote smaller-scale solutions with a bigger role for nature and local communities. Neo-romantics often have much less confidence in the explanatory abilities of science, and they tend to distrust large-scale application of industrial approaches.

Neo-romantics often point out the fact that we live in a world that is dominated by complex systems. This has consequences for how much we can rely on large-scale control and on stable economic growth. Especially industrial approaches require conditions that are more or less stable, uniform and predictable. As we have seen, predictability is inherently limited in a complex world.

Promises of “simplexity”

In the 1980s and 1990s, there was a hope that complexity science would allow us to eventually predict and control many complex systems. Researchers observed that complex behaviour can sometimes arise from very simple interaction rules. There are many examples of this in nature, such as the foraging of ants or the flocking of starlings.

The expectation was that we would be able to uncover simple rules to explain the behaviour of many other complex systems, including human societies. Indeed, there has been much progress in our understanding. But the more we learn, the more it seems that the potential for prediction and generalisation is limited.

The details of a specific system can matter a lot. Even if there are simple rules underlying its behaviour, we still have to find those rules for every different system. And if conditions change, the rules can change as well and our predictions may no longer work. Yet we would overstate the problem if we conclude that the world is too complex for us to understand, or that control is utterly impossible.

Much depends on what our goals and expectations are. The “industrial approach” to solving problems usually depends on maximising predictability and control. As we have seen, this doesn’t work well in systems that are more complex. The many interactions that occur in a complex system put hard limits on predictability. Often the response has been to simplify complex systems. Removing parts and interactions and reducing diversity makes a system more predictable, and easier to control and optimise. This is for instance the approach that industrial agriculture has taken.

The problem is that in complex adaptive systems, the parts have usually adapted to each other. If you remove parts and interactions, many such adaptations cease to function well, and problems begin to occur. We often see this happen if we reduce the diversity of a natural system, or of a semi-natural system such as agriculture. An example of this is the occurrence of pests in agriculture. Pests are generally made worse by removal of natural predators or competitors that help keep down their numbers. Another example is the rapid decline of pollinating insects. Both problems are partially caused by decrease of diversity through pesticide use and the “optimisation” of agricultural landscapes for maximum yield.

Health despite uncertainty

An additional problem is that complex systems are hard to study, as we’ve already seen. The scientific method relies to a large extent on reductionism. If we cannot take a system apart and study its parts under controlled conditions, it becomes hard to understand how things work and what exactly is going on. A good example of this is human health. After more than a century of intense collective research effort, we know quite a lot about the various parts of the human body. Yet we still don’t fully understand how some of its most basic control mechanisms operate.

The complexity involved in something like the immune system or the body’s energy regulation is enormous. Every part seems connected to everything else, and it is often very hard to distinguish cause from effect. We are able to replace some mechanical parts when they are broken, which in itself is very impressive.⁷ But when it comes to the major regulatory mechanisms that maintain our health, we are mostly unable to “fix” problems when they occur. We simply do not understand the body well enough, and the exact cause of many problems still remains elusive. It is at least clear that our body is very unlike a machine. We cannot simply shut it down, locate and replace the broken part and start it back up again.

However, this does not mean that we cannot improve our health or reduce the effects of disease. We may not be able to fully control or understand the human body, but we are often quite capable of nudging it towards a more healthy state. And even if we can’t, we can at least slow down damage and reduce its effects. Even better, we can reduce the risks of disease occurring in the first place.

The above does not just apply to the human body, but to many other complex systems as well. We may not be able to fully control or fix them, but we can try to understand them better while keeping in mind that we do not know all relevant details. Partial understanding may already allow us to prevent problems. And when problems do occur, we can often steer a system towards a healthier state, step by step through careful observation and management.

We certainly shouldn’t ignore complexity, but we also shouldn’t be overly afraid of it. The living world has always been complex, and in recent years we have learned a lot about the ways in which living systems don’t just deal with complexity and unpredictability, but in some ways even use it to their advantage.

Images by Io Cooman.

Beyond Optimists and Pessimists

2024-05-08T00:00:00+02:00

Looking for Better Stories on Sustainability

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This article has been be published on https://lvzon.substack.com and Medium, and is also available as PDF or ebook (EPUB and Kindle) for offline reading. You can also listen to a narrated version:

By Levien van Zon

As a lover of books, I enjoy going into bookshops and libraries. I love to check out new releases on all kinds of subjects. But when it comes to one of my main interests, sustainability, I am often disappointed by the writings on offer. There are many excellent and important books on all aspects of sustainability. Yet, something always feels wrong. It feels as if we’re a bit stuck. Half of the stories I see seem too optimistic, and the other half too pessimistic. If we are moving forward at all, it’s only very haltingly, at least when it comes to important collective insights. The dominant stories on how humanity should proceed all seem to be somewhat broken. And more crucially, they contradict each other in important ways.

Modernists, romantics and pessimists

There exists quite a large diversity in thinking and writing on sustainability. Attempts at categorisation are often somewhat arbitrary. Nonetheless, let’s look at one particular way of categorising some of the major points of view on sustainability. One important way of thinking treats sustainability as mostly a set of technical or behavioural problems. In this view, technology X or Y or certain small changes in our behaviour will fix everything. We’ll call this the “ecomodernist” point of view. Then there are ideas on how everything is connected and on how modernity has messed things up. These usually suggest that we should put more trust in nature and in small communities, and less in technology and in human institutions. We can think of this as the “antimodernist” or “neo-romantic” point of view. Finally, there are quite a few stories on how we’re all doomed because of climate change, and on how only drastic and immediate action can keep humanity from going extinct soon. We’ll call this “ecopessimism”.

Usually we choose a point of view based on our existing beliefs and our preferences. If you want to believe that technology can solve most of our problems, you will probably prefer an “ecomodernist” view. Probably you will also believe additional things, which are connected to this. For instance: “progress” is a very powerful idea, and economic growth can help stabilise societies and drive innovation, as long as the negative side effects of economic activity can be kept in check. There is probably some merit to these ideas. However, you may also be overly optimistic about the future and the things that technology can do. And you may underestimate the myriad ways in which the complexities of the real world may sabotage even the best-laid plans and the most advanced technologies.

If you deem nature to be superior to anything that we humans tend to come up with, you will probably be partial to “neo-romanticism”. You may share my opinion that nature and long-standing cultural traditions aren’t “backward”. Rather, looking at natural evolution and traditional culture can be very useful, as this may provide us with robust, time-tested solutions to some of our modern problems. However, you may also presume that everything that is natural tends to be “good”. And even if you don’t, you may assign agency and purpose to nature in ways that don’t match our current understanding of how natural processes operate.

Finally, if you believe that humankind is basically digging its own grave, you will probably tend toward “ecopessimism”. You will recognise that infinite growth is impossible given finite resources, that technology tends to have negative side effects and that both of these can eventually destabilise societies. Indeed, climate change poses a serious challenge to both human and natural systems. But focusing too much on fears of collapse is probably unhelpful. You may underestimate the resilience of both natural and social systems, and their capacity to adapt when put under pressure. Moreover you will likely experience a constant feeling of urgency, and many of your expectations for the future will be built on fear. This may lead to anxiety and depression.

People like Bill Gates, as well as many economists, engineers, politicians and CEOs tend towards the ecomodernist perspective, claiming that the combination of technology and “green” economic growth is the way forward. People who put more trust in nature, community or spirituality often lean towards neo-romanticism. They propose that a sustainable future requires a “holistic” worldview, and local, small-scale and often low-tech solutions. This view is common in various “alternative” subcultures. It is also found in the “postmodern” discourse that is currently prevalent in much of the arts and humanities. And an example of ecopessimism can be found in climate activist movements such as Extinction Rebellion, that push for drastic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions now, to prevent complete climate collapse.

Wizard, prophet or both?

I’m oversimplifying. It is true that we tend to subscribe to viewpoints that match our existing beliefs and preferences. We also listen more favourably to ideas and opinions that are common in the social groups that we belong to. But things aren’t as rigid as they seem. Humans are very good at believing multiple things at the same time, even if these are not mutually consistent. We’re able to switch between these various viewpoints and beliefs, sometimes very rapidly.

Charles C. Mann, in his excellent book The Wizard and The Prophet, writes that he tends to oscillate between seeing things from two contradictory perspectives. One he calls the wizard perspective, based on the belief that the way forward is in growth and technological fixes. The other is the prophet perspective, grounded in the conviction that we need to reduce our consumption and our population growth. One day, his views are those of the wizard, another day he feels more like a prophet, and some days he simply doesn’t know. This is probably true for many of us.

The importance of stories

There are of course many more and more nuanced views on sustainability than just the extremes of wizards and prophets, or of ecomodernist, neo-romantic or ecopessimist. I use these as examples to illustrate a point: stories are important. They are lenses through which we see the world, and they also determine how we act in it. All stories, however, simplify things, and this can end up blinding us to certain aspects of the world.

In practice, there exists a diversity of viewpoints and explanatory stories, within a society and even in our heads. This diversity is beneficial in many ways, but it can also confuse us, and it can sabotage or slow down effective action. It can even interfere with the identification of what the important problems are that need solving.

When talking about stories, we usually think of fiction, but this is not what I mean here. Stories, in a broader sense, are models of the world that are based on language (including visual and other non-linguistic languages). What we call fiction is just one example of storytelling. Fictional stories are important, they are about aspects of the world that interest or entertain us. A nonfiction story is an attempt to describe a part of the world. The attempt doesn’t necessarily yield an accurate description, though. While we see through the lenses of stories, we rarely examine the lenses themselves, to question their assumptions and their limitations.

Stories can be seen as models of the world, but they are not merely descriptive. Most stories, whether fiction or nonfiction, are also normative. They don’t just portray the world as it is, they also show how we think it should be. Our stories are intimately tied up with our values, the things that we find important. They are also tied up with our goals, the things that we strive for. Stories help determine how we look at the world and how we talk about it. Furthermore they help to determine how we act in it and how we think others should act.

Story clashes

Stories can describe different aspects of the world at different levels. For instance, some stories are mostly functional, while other ones are more emotional. Some try to explain the world as it is, while others are more about articulating or reinforcing values, or about finding meaning. These different stories can coexist in our heads and are not always consistent with each other. In fact they rarely are. And while all stories simplify, often they simplify too much.

For almost as long as I remember, I’ve been fascinated by what we now call sustainability. As a young boy in the 1980s I worried over the uncertain future facing panda bears, rhinos and elephants. I saw how organisations such as Greenpeace directed our attention to industrial pollution. I witnessed in wonder how some governments thought it a good idea to dump nuclear waste into the ocean. I was a teenager during the optimistic 1990s, when the Cold War had ended, Western economies were doing well and some people predicted “the end of history”. All humanity’s problems were to be speedily resolved by the free market. As I studied Environmental Science, “the environment” was rapidly going out of fashion. It seemed, indeed, that most environmental problems had been reduced to technical issues, to be solved by better technology and better management. At the opening of the new millennium, I became fascinated by the upcoming science of complex systems. People around me started paying more attention to climate change, with many arguing that there was, in fact, no such thing. While I was working on my Master’s degree in Theoretical Biology, worries about the future resurfaced. Increasingly people were talking about sustainability and climate. And as I write this, climate change is rapidly becoming a reality for many. Sustainability has grown from a fringe interest of activists and academics to one of the major issues discussed in politics and society at large.

Still, most books, articles and talks on sustainability talk about “the environment” as something out there. Something that needs to be fixed, protected or saved in one way or the other. Discussions about sustainability often seem either technical or superficial, or both. For example, we talk about decoupling carbon emissions from economic growth. We pretend that the “planet will be saved” by reducing plastic packaging or electricity use. We talk about sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Oddly, we often fail to define what exactly the most relevant needs of the present are, or the needs of future generations, or the needs of other, non-human life forms.

There are certainly technical aspects to sustainability but it isn’t primarily a technical problem. It’s an issue of values that touches at the core of what it is to be human. We humans are probably the only species on this planet that is able to make rational plans quite far into the future. What do we want, as individuals, as families, as communities, as societies, as a species, in the short term and in the long term? Do we wish to spend our short lives accumulating as much as possible at the expense of others? Most of us would probably answer this with no. Do we want our species, our societies to grow exponentially until resources run out and then crash, only to start growing again in some kind of “boom and bust” pattern? Probably not. If we do not want this future, why do many of our stories and our ideals not reflect our wishes? One of our most common ideals is still to get rich, so we can stop working and live comfortably. And our most common collective goal is still to sustain economic growth.

The interesting thing about sustainability issues is that they will always disappear, eventually. Unsustainable behaviour, by definition, cannot last forever. We either fix it voluntarily, or it is forced to stop at some point. The difficult question is: what will the collapse of unsustainable behaviour take with it? How much damage are we willing to incur? How do we recognise truly unsustainable behaviour before serious damage is done? And are we willing and able to reduce the perceived “needs” of the present, in order to allow for the needs of future generations, or those of non-human species?

What is sustainability anyway?

As we can see, it is not so straightforward to say what “sustainability” should be about. It is perhaps easier to state what sustainability isn’t. The point of sustainability isn’t to continue what we are doing at the moment. It simply isn’t realistically possible to keep our current resource-intensive societies running indefinitely, not even if we’d manage to drastically reduce our use of resources and our emission of waste products. And even if it were possible to continue current practices, the question is whether we should want to. The current global economic system isn’t very good at providing everyone with their necessities to lead a happy, healthy and stress-free life.

Sustainability also isn’t about preventing human extinction. Even if our most dire predictions will come true, we’d most likely still survive as a species. While it is certainly possible that some calamity will drastically reduce the human population, humans have so far proven to be quite a resilient bunch. Moreover, “not going extinct” is setting the bar a little low, in my opinion. One would hope that we can do better than that.

Maintaining and improving wellbeing

So if our long-term goal isn’t the continuation of current economies and the preservation of our species, what could we be aiming for instead? My proposal is to aim for continuing and improving the wellbeing of both humans and other life-forms. Wellbeing may seem like a vague concept, not much better than “needs”. But as I will try to show in this article series, the concept of wellbeing is a lot more concrete than “needs” or even “happiness”. Wellbeing is connected to physical and mental health. It is, to some extent, the absence of prolonged physical and mental stress. In a highly social species such as humans, it is also connected to a healthy social environment, as well as to our possibilities for self-realisation. Unfortunately we tend to confuse wellbeing with things like comfort, freedom of choice and “welfare” or individual wealth.

We should probably also aim to stabilise our societies. We might not need to “save” the planet, but for our own sake we should stop destroying or degrading our own life-support systems and the things in the world that give us pleasure (which includes much of nature). Probably few people would disagree with this goal. However, social dynamics are rarely guided by rational thinking or common sense. Large and complex societies have their own peculiar dynamics, which are difficult to steer and may not always favour long-term stability. Still, there is much room for improvement. And as we shall see, telling better stories can play a role in this.

Stories as simplifying models

As noted before, stories shape the way we see and understand the world. They are about cause and effect and about what is important. Essentially, stories are simple toy-models of the world, or rather of parts of the world. We build these models in our heads, and we can share them with others, which is a kind of human superpower. Stories help us to simplify the world, which is useful because our brains can only handle so much complexity. Stories give us a sense of identity and purpose and they can help us set priorities.

We tend to prefer simple stories over complicated stories, because simple stories make our lives easier. They can specify which categories of things are “good” or “bad”. This then helps us seek or avoid such good and bad things. Examples of “good vs. bad” stories are not hard to find. They clearly stand out in wartime propaganda, and in most organised religions. But they are also common in other areas of daily life, for instance in political views (e.g. “wokes” vs. moral conservatives), dietary trends (ketogenic diets, veganism, paleo diets) or economics (free markets vs. strong governments). Also the ways in which we think about sustainability are full of “the bad” (flying, eating meat) and “the good” (solar energy, buying local, organic produce, travelling by train). Thinking in terms of good and bad is attractive, it provides a shorthand for moral assessments. Good vs. bad stories also provide a strong sense of shared values that link us to our social groups.

Simple stories provide a feeling of certainty, and we much prefer certainty over uncertainty and doubt. In fact, simplifying stories are so important to us that we will defend them when they are challenged. When we are confronted with evidence that contradicts our main explanatory stories, we often choose to ignore it. Rather than question our internal story, we actively go in search of evidence that will support it, and we try to convince others that our stories are somehow more “true” than theirs.

Stories can be big or small, they can construct utopian ideals for a whole society or describe individuals recycling some of their waste. Still, many stories share similarities in structure. One well-known story arc is the Hero’s Journey. One or more heroes must face and overcome difficulties in order to help their people or loved ones. The majority of Hollywood movies follow this story arc. All of us also construct these types of stories in our heads, all the time. Most of us want our lives to matter. We generally strive to be the hero of our own life stories, working toward some future goal. We want to be remembered when we are gone. If our internal story lines and goals become so separated from reality that we can no longer ignore the growing gap, we can become depressed, until we manage to define new goals or develop a new story line to give our lives renewed direction and meaning.

Shared stories

As a group we construct collective stories to give direction to our societies. One extreme example is the utopian story of Communism, which promised to end inequality by getting rid of private property altogether. A somewhat less extreme example can be found in the SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals. These broadly aim to increase well-being for all humans and protect the lives of non-human species. In fact, the concept of “development” or “progress” is in itself a shared story, and a fairly useful one, although it is not without problems. We will examine these problems later, in a separate article.

As I said before, all stories are simplifications. This in itself isn’t a problem. It can become a problem, however, when we forget or ignore the fact that our stories are simplifications. The story of Communism was a simplification. Communist utopia never became a reality and would probably never come. In fact, many communist leaders were perfectly aware of this. Yet they stuck to the story, because it was useful. It provided a common goal, at least in theory. It also provided a shared identity which, for a while at least, kept communist and socialist societies together. The story of Capitalism is a similar kind of simplification. In his well-known book Sapiens, the author and historian Yuval Noah Harari calls such stories “shared fictions”. In his view, ideologies such as Communism and Capitalism are shared fictions, as are all religions, and even things such as “money”, “the government”, “the law” or “the economy”. Shared fictions are concepts and stories that we collectively believe in and that therefore, through our collective actions, have real power in the world. Shared fictions can also lose their power if we stop believing in them, as when currencies collapse again and again throughout history. However, as long as they persist, shared fictions are very powerful tools to coordinate collective action within human societies. Humans are storytelling animals, it is our superpower. It is also the cause of much suffering and many problems.

Shared stories are very hard to change, because they are distributed over a great many minds. Moreover, our shared stories are tied up with our shared identities. This is important for binding people together within a society. But it can also cause us to drift apart, because we contrast our identities with “others” outside the social groups we identify with. This can result in polarisation between groups in a society, which in the best case can sabotage collective coordinated action required to solve large-scale problems. In the worst case it can lead to extreme violence between “tribes” of people who base their identity on different stories, different ways of viewing the world and their place in it.

Blind spots

Even if our collective stories don’t lead to polarisation or violence, they can be problematic. They help us to understand and navigate the world, but they also blind us to the parts of the world that do not fit the story line. Our stories lead us to collectively focus on certain problems and connected kinds of solutions. Sometimes this is counterproductive, especially if we try to apply simple stories to situations that are complex, and even more so if we do this on a large scale. An example is the relentless focus on “efficiency”, which has come to dominate much of our global thinking, especially in the 20^th century. Thinking in terms of efficiency can be useful, and has proven very powerful in shaping the modern world. But making a system more efficient tends to reduce its diversity and its resilience, which almost always causes problems in the long run. An obvious case in point is the production of food through large-scale monocultures. This is very efficient, at least in terms of product yield per hectare or acre. But obtaining such high yields generally requires large-scale application of fuel, fertiliser, irrigation water and pesticides. Moreover, many of the techniques of modern agriculture have negative effects on the quality of agricultural soils. Consequently, yields have become increasingly sensitive to shortages of water and fertiliser, and to high fuel prices, bad weather and the appearance of new pests. Continuing this trend is unlikely to achieve long-term sustainability. Yet there is a tendency in “ecomodernist” stories to emphasise the need for further increase in agricultural efficiency in order to “feed the world” without expanding agricultural land. At first glance this seems like a sensible idea, but like all stories it’s a simplification that ignores some important complexities of the real world. While it can help solve some problems, it can make other problems worse.

Better stories

The question is, is this really the best we can do? Do we really have to choose between technological optimism or environmental pessimism? I think that we can do better, and I’m not the only one. However, when thinking and talking about sustainability, we do need better stories. If we are to truly address the difficult problems of long-term well-being, wishful thinking will be insufficient. We cannot simply believe that technology or more education or “going back to nature” will fix everything. Equally it won’t help us to believe that our problems are too big to be solved, or that the best solution is the extinction of all humans.

It’s important to realise that our stories aren’t just explanations and problem solving-tools, they are also meaning-making tools and self protection devices, used by people to feel good about themselves. They help determine what we want, how we want it and what we’re willing to give up. Most people want sustainability, but they also want growth (as a perceived part of “progress”), so we prefer “magic bullet” solutions to ones that actually require effort or sacrifice. These magic bullet solutions have shifted through time: from machines to “science” to rational planning to computers to “the market” to cryptocurrencies and the blockchain to artificial intelligence. Besides this, many people want to feel that they’re the hero that is “saving the world” in some way. This in itself is not bad, but unfortunately most of the real problems we face do not require an individual to “save the world”. Instead they require hard work done collectively by many, many groups of people, who need to coordinate locally, regionally and globally to analyse and solve many small problems, preferably without causing a lot of new problems in the process. Much of this work is already being done by people somewhere and we can learn from their experiences and scale up our collective effort on solutions that really work.

In this series of articles I will look for better stories. Over the years, many people have come up with different and occasionally non-conventional ways of looking at and talking about sustainability, about the nature of our main problems and the direction of possible solutions. I believe that some of these ideas are useful, and may inform more constructive ways of thinking and talking. They may help us build better stories. They may help bridge the gaps between ecomodernist, neo-romantic and ecopessimist ways of seeing the world.

Science as starting point

Science of course is one tool that may help us. The neat thing about science is that it provides a toolbox for testing if our explanatory stories are useful, based on observations and experiments. The stories of science are often the best explanations we have for how the world works. Still, these stories of science are necessarily simplifications, that may be inaccurate and may miss important aspects of the world. And scientific stories describing complex realities rarely offer single or simple explanations. Rather they offer sets of likely alternatives. As with all stories, when offered a choice between alternatives, we tend to pick the explanations that suit us best. Still, at least the explanatory stories of science constantly evolve as new observations are made and some explanations are shown to be incomplete or incorrect. Therefore, it is to science that we shall turn first. Specifically in the next articles we will look at the fairly young science of complex systems. We will also examine some reasons why biological life is so robust that it has managed not just to survive but to flourish, despite several truly cataclysmic events that occurred over the long history of our planet.

Image credit: Bigoudis

On Energy, part 1: How much do we use?

2017-02-12T00:00:00+01:00

By Levien van Zon
Reading time: 5-10 minutes

We live in interesting times. Humanity has never had as much energy at its disposal as we have had over the last half century or so. Given this abundance, our complex societies have flourished, yet they have also become increasingly dependent on the availability of cheap energy sources. The last few decades however, things seem to be changing. Fossil energy is becoming increasingly expensive², and the negative side-effects of burning large amounts of fossil fuels are becoming apparent.

The past years have been the warmest years on record¹, and the first effects of global warming on regional climates are starting to become apparent and are already causing problems for people all over the world. In an international effort to slow climate change, many countries signed the Paris climate treaty in 2016. Under the treaty, countries committed themselves to basically phasing out atmospheric emissions from fossil fuels by 2050.

While most industrialised countries are still very much dependent on fossil fuels, an increasing number of countries and companies are starting to see the transition away from fossil fuels as an economic opportunity. Especially China, although currently the largest greenhouse gas emitter, is positioning itself as the leading provider of alternative energy infrastructure.³ Technological development and increasing investment in alternative energy have led to a sharp drop in the prices of wind and solar power. Meanwhile, anticipating the shift away from oil, most major car brands have announced plans to move away from combustion engines and focus exclusively on electric vehicles in the near future.

Yet, we’re only at the start of a transition away from fossil energy, and serious challenges remain on our way. The United States, globally the second-biggest emitter of greenhouse gasses, currently has a national government bent on stretching and even increasing fossil fuel use for as long as possible. Perhaps more seriously, few people realise how much fossil energy we actually use. While scaling up alternative energy sources to this level is theoretically possible, it is certainly not going to be easy, especially not in the short term and not in all countries.

This is the first of two articles on energy use.⁴ In this article, I shall look at how much energy we use and where it comes from.

A brief history of energy

As I already suggested in the introduction, we live in a rather unique period in history. Not only do we have more energy at our disposal than ever before, energy has also never been as cheap as it has been over the last century or so. Granted, especially oil prices have fluctuated quite a bit during this period, as you can see in the chart below. As recently as 2011, the price of crude oil was at an almost historic high. At $0.74 per litre, the oil price in 2011 was more than ten times that in 1970! But we easily forget that oil actually contains a lot of energy. A convenient measure of energy is the kilowatt-hour (kWh), which I will explain in a bit, but which you may recognise from your electricity bills. A litre of oil contains roughly 10 kWh of energy, so even the extremely high 2011 oil price translates to a mere 7 dollar-cents per kWh, which, in the grand scheme of things, is really not that much.⁵

The global price of a litre of crude oil from 1860 to 2015. Historical prices are inflation-corrected and are expressed in 2015 US dollars, for fair comparison. Click on the image for more information. Data source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy, June 2016

Fact is that we all have become rather dependent on energy being so cheap, because we use an incredible amount of it, especially in industrialised countries. In many ways, this abundance of cheap energy is a good thing. Energy quite literally powers everything we do. Things like food production, transport, heating and cooling become a lot easier and cheaper with abundant energy, and modern communication wouldn’t even be possible without it. So what exactly is the problem?

Take a look at the following graph, which shows how much energy we humans use per day, and where it comes from, from 1800 until the present day. (These are fairly rough estimates, expressed in terawatt-hours, a unit which I shall explain in a moment.)

Until the nineteenth century, people almost exclusively used biomass (stuff directly derived from plants or animals) as an energy source. Things like cooking, heating and lighting were done using wood, charcoal, peat, dung and whale-oil. Transport and agriculture were mostly powered by humans and animals such as horses, mules and cattle. Wind and water played an important role as well, in industry (windmills and watermills) and in long-distance transport (think sailing ships).

By 1850 the Industrial Revolution was well on its way. The Industrial Revolution was as much about technical innovation as it was about social change and energy transition: Technological developments were intimately tied to the availability of cheap labour and the large-scale mining of fossil coal. But the use of coal was still mostly limited to cities, to industry and to steam locomotives and ships. In 1850, firewood was still and by far the most important energy source for humanity.

By 1900, the use of coal had caught up to be more or less equal to the use of biomass. The half-century that followed saw a further increase in the use of coal for industry, heating and transport. It also saw the slow expansion of car use and the development of aeroplanes, both of which required oil as an energy source. The two world wars were an important driver for technological development and the expansion of fossil fuel mining.

By the end of World War II, the energy provided by coal had doubled again, it now provided almost twice as much energy as biomass. Also, the large-scale use of natural gas and oil really started take off. A mere two decades later, by the 1970s, oil had become the most important energy source, closely followed by coal and gas. This just goes to show how quickly the energy landscape can change.

Since 1800, human energy use has increased roughly 28-fold, and 82% of our energy is now provided by fossil fuels. Of course this enormous increase in global energy use is in part due to the more than seven-fold increase in world population over the last two centuries. If we factor this out and look at the daily energy use per human, the increase since 1800 has been somewhat more modest:

What you can see here is that the energy consumption per person has gone up too: it almost doubled between 1800 and 1950, and has doubled again since then. However, we can see that most of this second doubling actually occurred during the 1960s and 70s. This period saw the rise of energy-intensive consumer culture, personal car ownership and comfortable housing for small families, at least in the Western world. In the 1980s and 90s, recession and increases in energy efficiency temporarily halted the growth of personal energy consumption. Energy efficiency is still increasing today, but unfortunately so is our absolute energy consumption in this age of digital gadgets, data centres, cheap air travel and increasingly heavy cars. This has led to a renewed increase in personal energy use over the last 15 years.

The kWh and other animals

Two centuries ago, in 1800, an average human was estimated to use just over 16 kWh per day. A century ago this had increased to just over 24 kWh per day. Today, the average person uses around 60 kWh per day. Before we continue, what is this kWh-thing exactly? The kiloWatt-hour (kW·h or kWh) is a measure of energy. But how much energy exactly? Let’s look at a few examples (click on the image for more details).

In short, a kilowatt-hour (kWh) is sufficient energy to boil a bucket of water, to drive a bit over 1 kilometre by car, to power a laptop for a few days or to power a smartphone for a few months. As for the terawatt-hour (TWh) I mentioned earlier, 1 TWh is 1 billion kWh. So we humans currently use over 430 billion kWh of energy per day. That’s a very large number, and a very large amount of energy. Then again, there are over 7 billion of us on this planet, so we are a lot of people. This is why I will mostly talk about average energy use per person, in kWh.

I mentioned this figure of 60 kWh per person per day, but actually that’s a bit misleading. This is the average energy use of a human being, but very few people are average human beings. In fact, most humans worldwide use less energy than average. But if you’re reading this, chances are that you’re not one of them, and that you in fact use quite a bit more energy than average. This is what I shall discuss in the next article.

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Footnotes:

The past years have been the warmest years on record
Based on the NOAA dataset of annually-averaged global combined land and ocean temperatures, the top-4 warmest years since 1880 are: 1. 2017, 2. 2016, 3. 2015, 4. 2014. While this can be partially explained by a strong El Niño, to date, all 17 years of the 21^st century rank among the eighteen warmest on record (the other one is 1998, which is currently the ninth warmest). The six warmest years in a 138-year temperature record have all occurred since 2010. Even if you account for some uncertainty, methodological problems and natural variation, this is still a rather worrying trend. ↩
Fossil energy is becoming increasingly expensive
Some may object to this statement and point out the current low cost of fossil energy sources, and the decreasing costs of bringing the fairly abundant supplies of US shale gas and oil to market. However, if we take a longer-term view, it is very unlikely that fossil fuel costs will ever return to anywhere near the low level we saw in the 1960s. Increasing public pressure for higher carbon taxes and decreasing willingness to invest in long-term fossil fuel development will probably also drive up fossil energy prices in coming decades. For more information on past energy prices, see this page. ↩
China, although currently the largest greenhouse gas emitter, is positioning itself as the leading provider of alternative energy infrastructure.
China is planning to invest billions in industries that can produce solar panels, windmills and long-distance energy transportation networks. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-solar-idUSKBN15J0G7 China’s installed photovoltaic (PV) capacity more than doubled last year, turning the country into the world’s biggest producer of solar energy by capacity, the National Energy Administration (NEA) said on Saturday. Installed PV capacity rose to 77.42 gigawatts at the end of 2016, with the addition of 34.54 gigawatts over the course of the year, data from the energy agency showed. Solar plants generated 66.2 billion kilowatt-hours of power last year, accounting for 1 percent of China’s total power generation, the NEA said. The country aims to boost the mix of non-fossil fuel generated power to 20 percent by 2030 from 11 percent today. China plans to plough 2.5 trillion yuan ($364 billion) into renewable power generation by 2020. ↩
This gradually evolved into an article series, in which I try to shed some light on our current use of energy, and on the possible shape of the energy transition ahead.
My examination will necessarily be somewhat technical at times, as energy is a complex and technical subject. However, you can safely skip technical sections, as I will try to recap important points every now and then. There will also be numbers. I will try to explain without numbers where I can, but the numbers are actually crucial. The energy problem, as we shall see, is mainly a problem of scale, and scale is determined by numbers. Specifically, big numbers. ↩
A litre of oil contains roughly 10 kWh of energy, so even the extremely high 2011 oil price translates to a mere 7 dollar-cents per kWh, which, in the grand scheme of things, is really not that much.
The effective price per kWh of usable energy will of course be higher, as converting one form of energy to another always implies losses. The 10 kWh of energy that is in a litre of oil can only be fully extracted in the form of heat. If you take the energy in oil or coal or natural gas and convert it into electricity, you’ll lose at least a quarter to a third of the energy in the conversion process, often even more. Still, in many countries electricity is also relatively cheap. In the US the average electricity price is only slightly over 10 dollar cents per kWh (a bit more for residential use). While oil was expensive in 2011, this comparison of 2011 electricity prices shows that the relative cost of electricity (adjusted for purchasing power) was below 12 dollar cents per kWh in Canada, China and the US. Electricity is generally generated from coal and natural gas, the price of which is linked to oil prices but only loosely. Electricity prices are therefore typically not a very good reflection of oil prices, or even of fossil fuel prices. Moreover, readers who have followed recent developments in solar energy costs will have noticed that the expected cost for solar-generated electricity has recently dropped below 3 dollar cents per kWh for some projects in the Middle East. While such low costs will certainly not be realistic for projects in less optimal locations, it certainly is a promising development that solar energy now can be cheaper than electricity from coal, at least in certain cases and areas. ↩

On Energy, part 2: We are not average

2017-02-12T00:00:00+01:00

By Levien van Zon
Reading time: 10 minutes

This is the second of two articles in which I try to shed some light on our current use of energy. In the previous article I introduce the kilowatt-hour (kWh), and looked at how much energy we use on average. We observed that, globally, around 82% of our energy is derived from fossil fuels. In this article I shall look at the large differences between regions and countries, and at the dismal state of renewable energy in industrialised nations so far.

In the previous article I showed that we use around 60 kWh of energy per person per day, but actually this figure is a bit misleading. This is the average energy use of a human being, but very few people are average human beings. In fact, most humans use less energy than average. But if you’re reading this, chances are that you don’t belong to this group. In fact, you probably use quite a bit more energy than average.

On this satellite image compilation you can see that some parts of the planet use much more electricity than other parts, at least for lighting roads and buildings at night. Source: NASA, 1995.

You are not average

As you can see in this figure, countries and regions vary quite a lot in how much energy they use per person:

The red bar in this figure is the average worldwide energy use. Most countries above it are either relatively wealthy, or they have a lot of industry or oil reserves. Most countries below it are lower-income countries. And most people live in low-income countries. In fact, three quarters of humanity lives in Asia (around 51.7%), Africa (15.5%) and Latin America (8.6%). Asians use 40 kWh/person/day, but if you leave out China this average drops to 22, and in a country like Bangladesh it’s only 7 kWh. Africans use 21 kWh/person/day, but someone in Central Africa uses only 8.5, and in some countries it’s even below 5 kWh/person/day. And most of the energy used in Africa is actually firewood for cooking. It seems that there is a strong relationship between “development” and energy use¹. A minority of humans use most of the world’s energy supply, while most people still use as much energy (or less) as humans did a century ago.

To be fair, the level of “human development” certainly isn’t the only factor in energy use. Climate and geography play an important role in our need for energy. The countries where energy use per person is highest all have cold winters and/or warm summers and tend to have a relatively low population density. Such countries may need more energy for heating in winter or cooling in summer, and for transportation year-round. And then there’s industry, which also tends to require a lot of energy. This is especially important for a country such as China, which not only houses a fifth of the world’s population but also most of its manufacturing industry.² Many manufacturing processes require high temperatures, which in turn require a lot of energy. The industrial products are generally meant for export, which means that the average Chinese person actually uses a lot less energy than shown in the figure above, while the average consumer in a Western country may use quite a bit more.

Even if we don’t count the “indirect” energy use from consumption, the differences in energy use between countries are sometimes enormous. For instance, the United States are home to a mere 4.4% of the world’s population, less than Bangladesh and Pakistan combined. But the US uses over 16% of the world energy supply, while Bangladesh and Pakistan together use only 0.9%. The average North American uses over thirty times as much energy as the average Bangladeshi. It’s obvious that energy consumption will be higher in countries with lots of public infrastructure, where most people have their own car and house, and where most building have heating or air-conditioning, compared to countries where people are struggling to get by. And if living conditions are to improve in a country like Bangladesh, energy consumption needs to increase there, rather than decrease. It would obviously be rather unfair to state that such countries should not be allowed to increase their standard of living. But it would also be unrealistic to expect richer countries to voluntarily decrease their standard of living. As we shall see in later articles, the richer countries can actually decrease their energy use quite a lot without sacrificing living standards. But the energy problem is not only about how much we use, it is also about where the energy comes from. And in this respect there are significant differences between countries as well:

Let’s start with some similarities: Most countries shown here need quite a bit of oil, up to 9 litres per person per day, which comes down to between 10 and 86 kWh of oil-derived energy per day for each person. This oil is used mostly for transport. On top of oil, most countries use a fair amount of coal, natural gas or nuclear energy, or a combination of these, to generate heat and electricity. Only very few countries use significant amounts of renewable energy. Iceland clearly stands out, being a volcanic island with a cold climate, a tiny population and abundant supplies of geothermal energy. A few other countries in this figure also stand out when it comes to renewable energy. Norway gets around a third of its energy from hydro power, and Canada, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden and New Zealand manage a little over 10%. New Zealand also gets around 20% of its energy from geothermal sources. But actually most renewable energy isn’t geothermal or hydro-power, and it certainly doesn’t come from solar or wind power. Even in most advanced industrial countries, it turns out that the biggest “green” energy source is still firewood! This is followed in second place by waste material (including household waste and agricultural waste). In other words, most “renewable energy” comes from burning biomass and waste, much as it did 200 years ago. A country such as Finland has little hydro power and almost no windmills or solar panels, but it does have trees, lots of trees. As for some other countries:

While it can certainly be sensible to generate some energy from waste and plant material, there’s no way we can run our current high-energy societies entirely on firewood. There simply aren’t enough trees in the world to do that. We need sustainable energy sources that are more scalable. Let’s therefore ignore the energy generated from biomass and waste for a moment. If we do that, things actually look pretty dismal when it comes to renewable energy. Worldwide, a little over 1% of energy comes from “other” renewable sources, including wind, solar and geothermal power. PV solar panels currently provide a little over 0.1% of global energy, which comes down to about around 0.04 kWh per person per day. A teaspoon of gasoline actually contains more energy than that.

My home country of The Netherlands does only slightly better than the world average, it derives 0.7% of its energy from renewable sources outside of biomass and waste. In the UK this is 1.5%. Even Germany, generally considered to be a front-runner, only gets 3% of its energy from wind, solar and hydro power, which incidentally is the same percentage as France.⁴ Spain and Portugal on the other hand, currently the poorest nations in Western Europe, do relatively well. Profiting from its relatively sunny climate, Spain is actually the European leader in solar energy at almost 2 kWh per person per day (2.4% of the country’s energy consumption). That’s still a small percentage, but when we consider other renewable sources, Spain currently gets 9% of its energy from wind, hydro power, thermal solar power and PV solar power. Portugal even manages a little over 10%. Granted, European countries with higher mountains and more water still tend to do a little better (Norway, Sweden and the Alpine countries)³, mainly because they have more hydro-power. Still, it’s interesting and hopeful to see that Portugal, Spain and even Greece (with 5.8%) are outperforming countries like Germany and Denmark, at least in generating their energy from sustainable sources outside of biomass and waste.

We can clearly see that we have a long way to go if we want to switch all countries to a renewable energy supply. Even if we do count biomass and waste, the percentages of renewable energy are very small compared to the amount of fossil fuels we use. Let’s take The Netherlands as an example. The Netherlands is a tiny country with some 17 million people. But it actually uses more oil than nearly all of the of the 40+ countries in sub-Saharan Africa taken together (if we exclude South Africa and Nigeria). And in fact, the wealth and the economy of The Netherlands depend very much on this. We currently need large amounts of oil to power the millions of cars, vans, trucks, tractors and boats that transport our people and goods and work our land. And then there’s all the coal and gas we use to heat our homes, offices and greenhouses, and to generate our electricity. Even a relatively small and wealthy country like The Netherlands would be hard-pressed to find sufficient alternative power sources to generate the more than 140 kWh per person per day it currently gets from fossil fuels.⁵ And these figures don’t even include the energy use of international air traffic and shipping. This large-scale use of fossil fuels is the biggest reason why an average Dutch person emits over 46 kg CO₂-eq. of greenhouse gasses per day.

So why is energy a problem?

Fossil energy is a problem for at least two important reasons. First of all the supply of fossil fuels is not infinite. In fact, we haven’t discovered any major new conventional oil fields since the 1960s, and oil and gas are increasingly mined from old reservoirs and non-traditional sources such as oil shale and tar sands. We’re basically getting better at pulling fuel out of the ground, as a result of technical improvement. We can keep on doing this for at least a few decades, but it does come at a cost: The energy needed to get fossil fuels out of the ground is increasing, in some cases quite rapidly. For oil and gas it has more than doubled in the last 15-20 years. This is reflected in a measure called the energy return on energy investment (EROI or EROEI). The EROI tells us how much energy we get back for the energy we invest. It was as high as 33:1 for conventional oil and gas back in 1999, which means that for each kWh that we invested in looking for oil, pumping it out of the ground, and refining and transporting it, we ended up with a useful energy surplus of 33 kWh.

In order to sustain a complex society we actually need a fairly high return on energy investment. The reason for this is that you need a significant energy surplus to transport things, to feed everyone who doesn’t farm, to produce equipment, to do research, to build and maintain houses, offices, hospitals, schools, factories, stores, roads, power lines, gas pipes, computer networks and all the other infrastructure we’ve come to depend on in modern society. It has been estimated that the minimum EROI needed for the basic functioning of an industrial society is around 5:1. And that’s really a minimum, if you want to sustain more complex public infrastructure such as education and healthcare, you probably need at least 10:1 or 11:1.

Fossil fuels contain a lot of energy, so as long as you can get them out of the ground with ease, they yield a high return on energy investment. The problem is however that the average global EROI for oil and gas is going down. While it was around 33:1 in 1999, it had dropped to around 18:1 in 2005, and it is still declining. For US shale gas the EROI was estimated at 12:1 a few years ago. It probably went up a little in recent years, as low oil and gas prices forced efficiency improvements, but sooner or later it will decrease again as initial “sweet spots” are depleted. An EROI of 12:1 is already close to the minimum, and things get significantly worse when we make electricity from fossil fuels. The problem is again efficiency: we generally lose more than half our energy in conversion and transport. Electricity generated from conventional gas actually has an EROI around 7:1, and electricity from shale gas is probably around 5:1.⁶

The falling global EROI for fossil fuels means that if we stick with current energy sources and if we do not decrease the current level of energy use, it may become a real challenge to keep our industrial societies running within a few decades. The effects of falling EROI will probably be noticeable well before that, as economic growth is coupled to energy surplus.

So our high energy needs are a problem, especially in combination with decreasing energy returns and a growing world population. But there’s perhaps a more pressing problem with our current energy situation: Every year, human activities release around 40 billion tonnes of greenhouse gasses (CO₂-equivalent) into the atmosphere. An estimated 69% of these emissions are the result of burning fossil fuels. We know with certainty that these emissions have a warming effect on the Earth’s climate. Apart from sea-level rise, we’re not entirely sure what the exact effects of climate change will be in the longer term, as I discussed in an earlier article. This in itself is a problem. Models suggest some fairly nasty possible scenarios, including significant disruption of agriculture and biodiversity in large regions. In fact, it seems that this is already happening to some extent. Prolonged drought is causing structural water shortages in some regions (e.g. South Africa), while heavy rainfall is causing problems with flooding and erosion in other parts of the globe. To avoid serious climate disruption, we probably need to keep the warming of the global climate below 2 degrees Celsius. And to do this, we’d probably need to keep the total amount of human greenhouse gasses emitted after 2011 below 1 billion tonnes. At current rates of emission, this “carbon budget” will be used up in 2036.⁷

Of course, if we manage to reduce our emissions, we may be able to stretch this budget a little longer. On the other hand, recent observations suggest that climate warming is actually proceeding faster than predicted by the IPCC models (which were used to estimate the carbon budgets). If this is indeed the case, we may have only a decade or two left to basically reduce human greenhouse gas emissions to zero. Given our enormous dependence on fossil energy, this is going to be an extremely difficult undertaking. It would probably require a dramatic increase in the energy efficiency of just about every human activity, as well as large-scale carbon capture, reversing deforestation, decreasing consumption, scaling up wind and especially solar energy more than a hundred-fold over existing levels, and building a completely new infrastructure for global energy transport and storage. And this all has to happen in a very short period of time, a few decades at most.

Following the Paris climate treaty, most governments have announced more or less ambitious goals to reduce fossil fuel use and scale up alternative energy sources. But it’s going require hard work and significant investment to meet those goals. Given the extremely high energy requirements of industrialised societies, just putting a few solar panels on a roof somewhere isn’t going to be enough to solve our energy and climate problems (by far, as I will discuss in a later article).

In its World Energy Outlook 2017, the International Energy Agency (IEA) describes three possible scenarios for what the world energy system will look like in 2025 and 2040. Their most conservative “Current Policies” scenario takes into account only existing legislation for energy transition. This would lead to nearly a three-fold increase in solar and wind energy by 2040. This may sound impressive, until you realise that it would also lead to a significant growth in fossil fuel consumption.⁸ The use of fossil energy would grow by 36% and would still provide 79% of all energy in 2040 under current policies. Wind and solar would only provide a little over 4%. Unsurprisingly, greenhouse gas emissions would increase by 33% relative to today. The more optimistic “Sustainable Development” scenario analyses what policies would be needed to hit the targets of the Kyoto agreement. It would require a significant reduction in the use of coal by 2040, as well as a reduction in oil use, a slight increase in the use of natural gas and almost a doubling in nuclear energy and hydro-power. Wind and solar would have to grow almost ten-fold, although they would still “only” provide around 14% of total energy in 2040, compared to 61% for fossil fuels. Greenhouse gas emissions would be around 43% lower than they are today, although this would require significant effort.

It is actually rather risky to pretend that we can easily switch to renewable energy by just installing a few windmills and solar panels. It allows governments and corporations to get away with superficial and cosmetic measures, rather than making difficult, structural changes. Energy transition is not easy. New inexpensive large-scale energy sources will not magically materialise from research and innovation, at least not within the coming one or two decades. Energy transition will require blood, sweat, tears and a lot of investment, from everybody, from governments to companies and public institutions, and from researchers to house-owners. It’s time we started taking this more seriously, it’s time we really got to work and it’s time we all knew our numbers so we can actually be critical citizens.

Recap: What have we learned so far?

We use a lot of energy, especially in industrialised countries that are located far from the equator. Currently, over 80% of this energy is derived from fossil fuels. The rest is largely derived from burning firewood and waste materials. The widespread use of fossil fuels is actually a fairly recent development, it was established mostly in the 1960s and 1970s. Energy use in Western, industrialised countries is much higher than elsewhere in the world. With a few exceptions (mostly countries with a lot of hydro-power), renewable energy sources outside waste and biomass provide only a very small fraction of the energy used in industrialised countries, sometimes a few percent but more generally less than one percent. Especially with regard to wind and solar energy there is certainly a lot of room for improvement.

While we’re not out of fossil fuels yet, the effective energy we get from especially oil and gas is declining, because most of the “easy” fossil fuels have already been mined and burnt. More importantly, if we want to avoid serious climate change, we may not be able to burn much of the fossil fuel reserves that we do have left. We would have to find other large-scale energy sources, and fast.

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Footnotes:

It seems that there is a strong relationship between “development” and energy use.
There seems to be a reasonable correlation between a country’s energy use and its Human Development Index. The countries with the lowest energy use all score “low human development” (e.g. Niger, Eritrea, Senegal, South Sudan, Nepal) or at most “medium” development (e.g. Bangladesh). South Sudan is only a state since 2011, has been in civil war since 2013, and has ranked in the top-2 of the Fragile States Index for the last three years. The countries with above-average energy use nearly all rank as “very high human development” (e.g. Canada, the United States, Saudi Arabia, most European countries, South Korea, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, Japan, Israel) or “high” development (e.g. Russia, Iran, Bulgaria, Ukraine, China, Venezuela, Thailand), with only few exceptions (e.g. South Africa). ↩
This is especially important for a country such as China, which not only houses a fifth of the world’s population but also most of its manufacturing industry.
As people in the West often point out, China is the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, as well as the world’s biggest consumer of coal. This is true, but in fact most of this energy is used for making export products. And even if we would count everything as domestic energy use, the population of China is so big that it comes down to only around 72 kWh per person per day, just above world average but well below the energy use of European countries. ↩
Granted, European countries with higher mountains and more water still tend to do a little better (Norway, Sweden and the Alpine countries)
And in fact, some Eastern European countries do better as well. For instance, 34.35% of the supply of Albania comes from renewable sources, including 25.32% from hydro power and 0.5% from solar. Of course it helps that Albania is relatively small and has high mountains. But it’s a sobering thought that even a country like Romania still outperforms The Netherlands when it comes to the precentage of energy it gets from wind (1.2%) and solar power (0.11%). ↩
My home country of The Netherlands does only slightly better than the world average, it derives 0.7% of its energy from renewable sources outside of biomass and waste. In the UK this is 1.5%. Even Germany, generally considered to be a front-runner, only gets 3% of its energy from wind, solar and hydro power, which incidentally is the same percentage as France.
Many information sources mix up energy use and electricity use, and fail to mention the dominant role of biomass and waste. This is the source of a lot of misleading statistics on renewable energy use. For instance, the contribution of renewable energy to total primary energy use in Germany is around 15%, of which around 12% is provided by biomass and waste. However, on average around 32% of German electricity use is provided by renewable sources, and on particularly windy and sunny days this is can actually be over 100%. This leads to misleading news headlines such as “Germany Just Got Almost All of Its Power From Renewable Energy” (Bloomberg, 2016). In fact, even when there is a renewable energy surplus, which only happens a few days per year, Germany still derives at least a third of its energy from oil on such days, as well as a significant portion from coal and gas for heating and industrial processes. Moreover, peak energy consumption occurs mostly in winter, while a surplus of renewable electricity only occurs in spring and summer. Most news articles on the “sustainable energy revolution” in Germany also fail to mention that, on average, Germany uses a lot more fossil fuels than countries such as France, Spain and Portugal, and even a bit more than “dirty” countries such as the United Kingdom, Italy or most of Eastern Europe. Now don’t get me wrong, the expansion of solar and wind energy in Germany is certainly an impressive feat and a good thing, but it shouldn’t be used to obscure the plain fact that Germany still runs mostly on fossil fuels. ↩
Even a relatively small and wealthy country like The Netherlands would be hard-pressed to find sufficient alternative power sources to generate the more than 140 kWh per person per day it currently gets from fossil fuels.
Note that this figure is the so-called primary energy use, which means the total energy used, including the losses associated with mining, conversion and transportation of energy. The amount of energy that we effectively use if we don’t count all these losses is called the final energy use, and this tends to be quite a bit lower. For The Netherlands, the final energy use is around 90 kWh per person per day. Renewable energy sources like wind and solar power generally have fewer losses associated with mining, conversion and transport, so we would actually require less primary energy to do the same activities with renewable energy than with fossil energy. However, the figures for primary and final energy use do not include the energy required for the manufacturing of imports, and also do not include the energy requirements of international traffic. Both are probably substantial, so that the full “final” energy use of a person in The Netherlands is probably several times higher than 90 kWh/person/day. ↩
An EROI of 12:1 is already close to the minimum […] Electricity generated from conventional gas actually has an EROI around 7:1, and electricity from shale gas is probably around 5:1.
The 7:1 EROI for electricity from natural gas is based on figures from Mason Inman (2013). The 33:1 (1999) and 18:1 (2005) for oil and gas were based on Gagnon et al. (2009). The 12:1 estimate for US shale gas is based on Yaritani & Matsushima (2014). The minimum EROI-numbers are based on an interview with Charles Hall, in which he states: “If you’ve got an EROI of 1.1:1, you can pump the oil out of the ground and look at it. At 1.2:1 you can refine it and look at it. At 1.3:1 you can move it to where you want and look at it. […] You need at least 3:1 to drive a truck. If you want to put grain in the truck, you need 5:1. To include the truck-driver, oil-worker, farmer and their families, you need 7:1. If you want education, you need 8:1 or 9:1. If you want healthcare, you need 10:1 or 11:1.”
Some sustainable energy sources have a high energy return on investment, such as hydro-energy (more than 40:1) and wind energy (over 20:1 and rising). Modern PV solar energy generators still have a fairly low EROI of around 6:1 (this can be higher or lower, depending on location). Also this figure is increasing, but unfortunately batteries and other forms of storage are expected to significantly degrade this EROI again in the near future. Electricity from coal has a fairly stable EROI around 18:1, but carbon capture and storage may decrease this by around a third. Nuclear electricity has a rather variable EROI, which on average is fairly low (around 5:1) due to the extremely high energy costs of mining uranium, building and maintaining nuclear power plants and storing nuclear waste. ↩
At current rates of emission, this “carbon budget” will be used up in 2036.
The 2013 IPCC AR5 WG1 Summary for Policy Makers states that limiting the warming caused by anthropogenic CO₂-emissions alone with a probability of >66% to less than 2°C since the period 1861–1880, will require cumulative CO₂-emissions from all anthropogenic sources to stay between 0 and about 1000 Gt carbon since that period. […] An amount of 531 Gt carbon, was already emitted by 2011. One Gigatonne carbon (GtC) is equal to around 3.67 million tonnes CO₂-equivalent. For more explanation on carbon budgets, see: https://gofossilfree.org/understanding-the-carbon-budget/. The 2036-figure is based on: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-only-five-years-left-before-one-point-five-c-budget-is-blown. ↩
This would lead to nearly a three-fold increase in solar and wind energy by 2040. This may sound impressive, until you realise that it would also lead to a significant growth in fossil fuel consumption.
These figures are based on table 2.2 of the WEO-2017 report. It doesn’t explictly list wind and solar, but “other renewables” make up around 1.6% of global energy use in 2016, and would grow to around 4.4% in 2040 under the Current Policies scenario. ↩

CO2 and (the average) you

2016-04-22T00:00:00+02:00

By Levien van Zon

This article is also available in Dutch, and as PDF or ebook (EPUB and Kindle) for offline reading.

Today, on Earth day, countries will start signing the Paris climate treaty that was reached last December by the representatives of 195 countries. A lot has already been said and written about this Paris Agreement, which in 2020 should succeed the venerable 1997 Kyoto protocol.¹ While the agreement is a great step forward, we’re certainly not there yet. There’s a lot of work ahead for governments, civil society and the private sector. The key to controlling global warming basically lies in keeping government-owned fossil fuel reserves in the ground, and halting the exploration of new reserves by private companies. This is possible, but not exactly trivial given the huge economic interests involved and the significant challenges inherent in transitioning to a new energy system.

In an earlier article I described why it is important to reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses such as CO₂, even if you’re sceptical about the warnings of an impending climate apocalypse.² Recognising that something should probably be done to reduce emissions is an important step, one that our governments finally seem to have taken. But the more difficult problem is really: how do we do that? Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is much easier said than done. For the most part, they are caused by the burning of fossil fuels to meet our energy requirements. If we want to reduce these emissions, we will need two things: alternative energy sources and more efficient use of energy.³ Governments will no doubt play an important role in reducing emissions, but the role of citizens and companies will probably be at least as important, if not more so.

An average person exhales roughly a kilogram (2.2 lbs) of CO₂ per day.⁴ On top of that however, our activities are responsible for the emission of a lot more CO₂ and other greenhouse gasses. For instance, my home country of The Netherlands is a relatively wealthy Western European country, with a high standard of living, and therefore a high energy requirement. In fact, the activities of an average Dutch person cause the equivalent of around 46 kilograms (100 lbs) of CO₂ to be emitted every day! This is more than our average body weight every two days. In some cases we emit this CO₂ directly, for instance when burning gasoline, diesel or natural gas in our car or heating system. Sometimes someone else emits it for us, some distance away, for instance if we use electricity or take a plane. Very often however, our emissions are indirect, and often even occur outside of our own country. This happens when we buy things that cost energy to produce. Sometimes a lot of energy, as we shall see.

The figure below shows the daily greenhouse gas emission for an average consumer in the Netherlands (click on the figure for more details):

First, I’d like to say two things about these numbers. These are estimates, based on two different studies, done using data from 2000 and 2001. These numbers are not exact measurements, and results from various studies rarely match exactly. And yes, the data is 15 years old, unfortunately I could not find more recent numbers at this level of detail. Undoubtedly some things will have changed since the start of the millennium, which would cause some minor shifts in these figures. But I don’t expect drastic changes in consumption or emission over this period. More importantly, it doesn’t really matter if the numbers are a bit off, as I aim to look at large-scale trends here.

Another thing to note is that these are numbers for an “average Dutch person”. This average person, however, does not exist. It is a theoretical construct of indeterminate age and sex, with no clear place of residence. Or to put it another way, the actual emissions will be different for everyone, and the numbers quoted here will apply to nobody exactly. If you’re vegan and do not own a car, your average daily CO₂-emission will easily be 10 kg below average. But if you eat meat three times a day and drive around in a big SUV or fly to a different continent four times a year, your emissions can easily be several times the average.

So within a country, the differences in emission between people can be quite large. But between different countries the differences can sometimes be enormous. The average American emits one and a half times as much as the average Dutch person. The average Chinese on the other hand causes around five times less greenhouse-emissions than the average Dutch consumer, even though China, with its enormous population and industry, is often named as the biggest polluter. The reason for this apparent contradiction is simple: Chinese consumers (on average) buy less, travel less and use less energy than those in the West. However, the Chinese industry produces a lot of the stuff we buy. Therefore much of the emission in China as a country is for making our consumption goods. The CO₂ from Chinese factories and power plants is mostly part of our indirect emissions in the West. The more well-off a country’s inhabitants, the more greenhouse gasses are emitted directly and indirectly to support their lifestyle. One average Dutch person emits as much greenhouse gas as 4 Brazilians, 10 people in India or 23 people in Malawi.

As we can see in the figure above, The Netherlands is fairly representative of rich Western European countries when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. So, if we assume that being poor is not the preferred way to mitigate climate change, what would be the most effective way to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions? To determine this, it is useful to look at the numbers in a bit more detail. Which things contribute most to our emissions?

In the above figures, I have divided consumption-related emissions into five main categories. Generally the smallest of these represents the emissions from constructing houses and other buildings. This is a bit misleading, as constructing a building (and producing all its components) actually requires an enormous amount of energy. But most people have only one house, which lasts at least a few decades and is usually shared with other people. This is why the emissions associated with construction per person per day are fairly small: 3 kg for someone in The Netherlands, even though this is still more that the total daily greenhouse gas emissions of someone in Malawi!

When people talk about saving energy or installing solar panels, a lot of attention is given to the direct usage of electricity in buildings. But actually our home electricity use tends to make only fairly small contribution to our total greenhouse gas emissions (for an average Dutchman less than 3 kg per day). Heating actually has a bigger impact. In The Netherlands, buildings predominantly use natural gas for heating rather than electricity, and this provides for an emission of almost 4 kg CO₂-eq. per person per day. Taken together, the direct energy use of Dutch households (gas + electricity) generates almost a sixth of Dutch greenhouse gas emissions, or ±6.5 kg per person per day.

Mobility, especially road and air traffic, contribute around the same order of magnitude as our housing. In The Netherlands, mobility is responsible for 9 kg CO₂-eq. per person per day, around a fifth of the total emissions. The figure below shows the source of some of these in more detail for 2010/2012 (click on the figure for more details):

We should note that the contributions of especially air traffic and transport of goods are underestimated here, because only traffic within the country counts in this figure. Nonetheless, you can clearly see that air travel contributes significantly (probably more than 2 kg), but that cars contribute even more to emissions (almost 3.5 kg). Emissions from public transport on the other hand are almost negligible. Commuting and private car-use emit about as much as electricity use at home does. And this is despite the fact that only around half of land-based travel in the Netherlands is by car.⁵ Compared to other European countries, a relatively high percentage of Dutch people travel mainly with public transport or on bicycle. The average emission figures actually include a lot of people that either have no car or hardly use their car, so the daily emission per car driver will certainly be higher than 3.5 kg!

Construction, direct energy use and mobility together are responsible for just under half of the Dutch greenhouse gas footprint. The other half is due to the remaining two categories. One bears the somewhat mysterious title “services & trade”, and includes things like infrastructure and the things we do and use outside our homes, in as far they do not fit in the other categories. For most of us, these are mainly the things we do at work, and our use of public services such as hospitals, schools, government services, universities, roads and public lighting. All in all these things cause about a quarter of our greenhouse gas emissions. And unfortunately we have little control over this category, with the possible exception of the things you do at work.

However, the remaining category covers many things we can control: Roughly a quarter of the CO₂-emission of European consumers comes from making the stuff we consume. The largest part of this is for food and drink, around 9 kg CO₂-eq. per person per day in The Netherlands. More than a third of this is for producing animal protein: things like meat, fish, eggs and milk products. Of course the reason why food contributes so much to our daily emissions is that everyone needs food on a daily basis. Other consumption goods like clothes and electronics often require more energy to produce, but we simply buy such things less often. So it follows that an obvious way to reduce your CO₂-emissions is by simply buying less stuff, especially buying less new stuff.

Because it’s not so easy to think in averages, it’s good to see how much greenhouse gas is emitted by individual products and activities (click on the figure for more details):

Here the same caveats apply: these are not exact figures, and estimates for emission will vary between studies, between products and between countries. But again, it’s the large-scale patterns that are important.

For most of us, this figure will contain a few surprises. The emissions from public transport, taking a shower or using electricity are perhaps surprisingly small. On the other hand, things like paper, cheese and food or flowers grown under glass have an unexpectedly large emission footprint. Most people will not be very surprised by the fact that meat, shrimp and driving a car all have a relatively large carbon-footprint. The contribution of driving however depends very much on the size of the car (and its speed, but that is not shown here). And many people probably wouldn’t guess that, as a passenger, we emit roughly the same amount per kilometre when we fly as when driving an average car. But because we generally travel much longer distances when we fly, one trip by plane will have a large impact on our emission figures. However, the impact of an intercontinental trip is dwarfed by the amount of CO₂ released when making a new car. Buying a car has a huge impact, even if no-one ever drives in it, especially if the car in question is big and luxurious. Finally, because our first two figures use data from 2000/2001, they may somewhat underestimate the current contribution of electronics devices. As an example, producing one computer emits roughly as much CO₂ as 1-3 months’ worth of food, or driving an average car for 12-40 hours.

And in case you were wondering why roses have such a large climate footprint (relative to many other producs), this is a matter of energy and climate. A single-stem rose takes roughly two months to grow, and it requires additional lighting and heating in winter, when most roses are bought (think Valentines Day!). Although heat pumps and modern LED-lights can significantly reduce energy use in modern greenhouses, a single greenhouse complex easily requires several megawatts of electrical power just to keep the lights on.

If we want to keep climate warming below 2°C, we will basically have to reduce our direct and indirect emissions to zero within a few decades. This is going to be a real challenge for governments and companies. They will have to figure out where to get sufficient, affordable energy to keep their infrastructure, their transportation, their services and their factories running, and to keep growing their food. This is going to take time. But of course we don’t have to sit around waiting, there are plenty of ways in which we can help as individuals. Which lessons can we learn from the above figures, how can we start reducing our carbon footprint as individual consumers and employees? The main categories we can influence directly are consumption goods, mobility and our direct energy use at home and at work. There are several things you should consider, if you want to significantly reduce your greenhouse gas emissions:

In many countries, saving energy at home is a high-profile issue. But energy savings at work often receive a lot less attention. In many offices the heating or climate control is turned on night and day, computers are never switched off, and perfectly functional equipment is replaced every few years, even when this is not strictly needed. As we spend a lot of our time at work, our energy use and CO₂-emission at work is often higher than at home. Maybe now is a good time to start discussing this in your organisation.
If you own or regularly use a car, only use it when really necessary. If you live in a country with decent public transport, consider taking the train or the bus to work. Work from home on a regular basis, if your job allows it. For some odd reason it is generally considered normal that employees come to work by car, even in companies that consider themselves “sustainable”. Likewise, it is generally considered acceptable that we drive several hours just to visit a client or attend a meeting. Such trips easily amount to several hundred kilometres, and the average car emits 20 kg CO₂-eq. per 100 km. In other words, driving for 2-3 hours can easily double your greenhouse gas emissions on a given day. The same trip by a combination of train and bus (or folding bicycle), easily emits a factor 5 less carbon and is very doable in countries such as The Netherlands. This has the added advantage that you can work on the train. Of course, using public transport isn’t always a viable option for attending meetings. As an alternative, you may want to research the possibilities of conference calls or video conferencing. Current-day technology makes this almost trivial on any laptop, smart phone or tablet.⁶
For holidays, the distance you travel has a much greater impact than the form of transport you choose. If you do want to travel to far-away places, consider making one longer trip (e.g. a few weeks), rather than several separate short trips. Even better, consider destinations that aren’t so far away. And for distances up to a few hundred kilometres, the impact of travelling by train or bus is much less than that of travel by car or plane.
If your climate has cold winters and especially if you live or work in an old building, consider investing in insulation and an upgrade of the heating system. Even small modifications can have a large effect on energy use. In some cases you can already save around a third on heating energy by simply closing cracks and gaps, tweaking your central heating and lowering the thermostat by a few degrees when you’re in bed or away from home. Such measures can save you a lot of money, with just a few hours of work and almost no material. But if you’re able to invest a bit more, insulating your outer walls and ceiling/roof can have a huge impact on your energy bills. If you’re putting up a new building, or are planning a renovation, consider insulation as well as floor- or wall-heating. A large heating surface is more efficient and comfortable than using a radiator, and the lower water temperature will make it easier to install a heat pump at some point. A heat pump is basically a fridge in reverse: it extracts heat from the ground, water or air outside, and uses this to heat your house or workplace. In theory, a heat pump can be up to 3-4 times more efficient than using natural gas or an electrical radiator for heating⁷, especially when combined with a thermal solar-collector and a heat-buffer. Moreover, a heat-pump can also function as a cooling-system in summer.
For older buildings where floor-heating and heat pumps are not an option, local heating with thermal infra-red panels or similar systems can be an efficient and comfortable alternative.
If you own your roof, consider placing solar panels. A solar photo-voltaic (PV) installation usually pays back its investment costs within 5-12 years or so (the payback time varies greatly between countries), while it will produce power for 20-30 years. Even better, consider placing a thermal solar collector as well, or a install a hybrid system that can produce both electricity and heat. If you do not have the funds to invest in a PV-installation, you could consider leasing one (through companies such as Sungevity). If you do not own your roof, you could consider joining an energy cooperation.
Don’t buy things you don’t need. This may sound obvious, but check with yourself how many of the things you bought recently (for yourself, your family or for work) were things that you really needed. If you do need (or would like to have) something, try checking first if you can get it second-hand. And if you do buy something new, you may want to consider product quality and expected life span. Sometimes you end up spending a lot less in the long run if you buy something that is a bit more expensive, but of higher quality. Cheap things tend to be cheap for a reason, and quite often something is cheap because the quality of the materials and the construction isn’t very good. Low-quality products won’t last very long and need replacing more frequently. This applies to items such as shoes and bags, but also to electronics equipment and mechanical devices such as washing machines and bicycles. If you cannot assess the product quality yourself, try asking someone who can, or check out some reviews. If you buy devices that use energy, their energy efficiency is as important as their life span. More efficient devices tend to be a bit more expensive as well, but may save you a lot of money in the long run. This applies to things such as refrigerators, freezers, heaters, washing machines, dryers, lamps and especially cars. When selecting a car, remember that a small, light vehicle will require significantly less energy (to build and run) than big and heavy vehicles. Moreover, electrical vehicles tend to be more energy-efficient than comparable vehicles with a combustion engine.
Eat less meat. You don’t immediately have to become a vegetarian or vegan⁸, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to eat a meal without meat every once in a while. If you don’t know how to cook a nice vegetarian meal, try looking up some good recipes, or talk to a vegetarian who cooks well. Another option is to simply reduce the portions of meat you use, or replace part of it with alternative products. In fact, most people will hardly notice if you replace half a portion of minced meat or factory-farmed chicken by a decent, vegetable-based product. My own experience with eating less meat is that after a while, you really start to enjoy both cooking a good vegetarian meal and occasionally eating a meal with good-quality meat. It’s a win-win situation, although of course your mileage may vary. Just give it a serious try!
Buy fewer products out-of-season. Especially in cold climates, a lot of food is imported, and a lot of energy is wasted on growing vegetables in greenhouses during the winter months. Greenhouses are great at capturing light and providing a controlled environment, but they tend to be very badly insulated and in winter they require artificial heating and lighting. If certain fruits and vegetables can’t be grown outside in season, then it may actually be better to buy frozen or canned products, or to look for alternatives. This applies especially to soft fruit and leafy vegetables that do not keep well and are hard to transport.
Produce less waste. Instead of throwing something away, try selling it, give it away, eat it⁹, bring it to a second-hand store, recycle it where possible, but don’t throw it in the general trash unless you have no good alternative. In most countries, municipal waste is either burned or used as landfill. Both disposal methods tend to produce a lot of greenhouse-gas emissions, while (at least in principle) a modern society should hardly have to produce any rest-waste. Most of what we consider “waste” is actually a mix of high-grade resources, which can be used in producing all kinds of new products. Metals are a well-known example, but also plastics can be seen as a concentrated source of carbohydrates, glass is basically silicon, paper provides cellulose and organic waste contains all kinds of valuable nutrients, not to mention energy. Reusing these “waste”-materials can sometimes save a considerable amount of energy in producing new products. Moreover, everything you give away or sell second-hand, won’t have to be bought new by someone else.
Last but not least, do you feel that your work does not make a positive contribution to society? Consider looking for a different job.¹⁰. The government, the service-sector and the private companies are responsible for much of our emissions, and we want them to start changing the world for the better. But in the end, governments, companies and other institutions are all run by us. There is such a thing as “the system”, but you should never forget that you’re a part of it, and therefore you can help change it.

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Footnotes:

A lot has already been said and written about this Paris Agreement, which in 2020 should succeed the venerable 1997 Kyoto protocol.
The Guardian has provided excellent coverage of and commentary on the Paris talks and the resulting agreement. Read their 5 reasons to be glad, 5 to be gloomy for a short summary. While James Hansen and George Monbiot see the Paris agreement as grossly insufficient, others have pointed out that it represents a flame of hope, that its goals can be reached if governments and the private sector increase energy efficiency] [and scale up renewable energy to 36% by 2030, and that the agreement at least provides a reason to run harder. ↩
In an earlier article I described why it is important to reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses such as CO₂.
The effects of having more CO₂ in the atmosphere are hard to predict, and the effects of more CO₂ in surface waters are almost certainly negative. It is fairly certain that more heat is being retained by the climate system, but the effect of this will vary by region, and is partially still unknown, which in itself is a problem. It is certain however that this extra heat is a big problem for life in the oceans. And as example of possible nasty surprises, the climate in Europe may actually cool down due to global warming, as the melting ice of Greenland may slow down the gulf stream in the Atlantic Ocean. ↩
If we want to reduce these emissions, we will need two things: alternative energy sources and more efficient use of energy.
There are alternative sources of energy, but their contribution is currently very small. Globally, solar, wind and geothermal energy contribute around 1% to the global human energy supply. Fossil fuels, by comparison, contribute around 80% globally, and over 90% in countries such as the Netherlands. The role of renewable energy sources is increasing fast, but a lot of technical and social problems still need to be overcome if solar and wind power are to contribute significantly to the global human energy supply. A realistic expectation is that fossil fuels will continue to play an important role for at least the coming decades, although this role will probably decrease over time. Because we cannot simply cease being dependent on fossil fuels to some extent, it is important to use the available energy more efficiently. Luckily there is enormous scope for improvements in energy-efficiency. Even with existing technologies and methods, the way we heat and cool our buildings, the way we power our transport and the way we produce food can be made much more efficient, provided that we start using better technologies and methods on a large scale. ↩
An average person exhales roughly a kilogram (2.2 lbs) of CO₂ per day.
This is roughly 1.6% of our average body weight. Apart from CO₂, we humans also emit small amounts methane directly, as a result of flatulence. While methane is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO₂, the amount we emit in our daily farts is almost negligible: roughly 6% of a litre, which comes down to a fraction of a gram per person per day. ↩
only around half of land-based travel in the Netherlands is by car.
Statistics on car ownership and use in The Netherlands in 2010 can be found in the CBS-publication Sociaaleconomische trends, 1e kwartaal 2012, chapter Personenautobezit van huishoudens en personen. The StatLine database shows that in 2007, 84% of Dutch people owned a bicycle, 63% had a drivers’ license and 45% owned a car. ↩
you may want to research the possibilities of conference calls or video conferencing. Current-day technology makes this almost trivial on any laptop, smart phone or tablet.
Google Hangouts is probably the easiest option for video conferencing, as it’s free, it handles video, audio, text-based chat and screen-sharing, works for two or more people, and works on almost any device. The only drawback is that it does require a Google-account. Unsurprisingly, many free services are coupled to social networks: Peer uses LinkedIn and ooVoo requires Facebook. Cisco WebEx and Skype for Business are targeted specifically toward hosting business meetings. Other options for group-meetings are Fring, Jitsi and Viber. For one-to-one meetings, the free version of Skype works just fine, as does Facetime on Apple-devices, or basically any other video chat service. And for meetings where you don’t need video, you can just use Skype, or even a plain old phone, smart or otherwise. ↩
A heat pump is basically a fridge in reverse: it extracts heat from the ground, water or air outside, and uses this to heat your house or workplace. In theory, a heat pump can be up to 3-4 times more efficient than using natural gas or an electrical radiator for heating
Specifically, the theoretical coefficient of performance (COP) of a heat pump can easily be 3-4 times higher than that of other heating devices. A COP of 1 would mean that all the energy you put into a heating device is actually used for heating living spaces. Modern high-performance gas heaters tend to have a COP above 0.85, which means that less than 15% of the heat escapes up the chimney. Modern heat pumps can have a COP above 3, which means that they can actually pump at least three times as much thermal energy as the electrical energy you put in. In practise however, this does not lead to a factor 3 decrease in energy use or CO₂-emission. Part of this is due to the fact that electricity is often generated using gas or coal, with 40-70% efficiency. Furthermore, the efficiency of a heat pump goes down if the outside temperature is low and the heat requirement is high. Still, a heat pump tends to be a good long-term investment, as it makes the heating-system of a building less dependent on gas supply and prices, and it allows a heat buffer to be installed. A heat buffer is basically a large mass of water or rock that can be used to store heat in times of abundance (i.e. summer), and extract it when needed (i.e. winter). ↩
Eat less meat. You don’t immediately have to become a vegetarian or vegan
Of course, with respect to greenhouse gas emissions, general pollution and soil degradation, biodiversity and animal welfare, being vegetarian or vegan is a lot better than eating meat! But what to eat and not to eat is a choice that everyone must make for him- or herself. In The Netherlands, the percentage of vegetarians and vegans combined is around 4.5%. But the percentage of people that choose to skip eating meat on a regular basis is much higher, around 35% (source: fact sheet and report, LEI 2012). ↩
Produce less waste. Instead of throwing something away, try selling it, give it away, eat it
My grandmother, who had to feed several children during the “hunger winter” of 1944-1945 in Amsterdam, is one of the people who raised me never to throw away food unless it has really gone off. Therefore I am always shocked when I see people, especially friends, dump large quantities of perfectly edible food into the trash after dinner without giving it a second thought. To me, this is a completely unnecessary waste of good ingredients. Try using leftovers in your next meal, make them into soup, put them in the freezer (this works especially well with rice) or eat them as lunch or even breakfast. ↩
Last but not least, do you feel that your work does not make a positive contribution to society? Consider looking for a different job.
One could argue that this measure is actually the one that can make the most difference. But changing your job or even your career will not be easy for most people, which is why I mention it last. This does not mean that you shouldn’t give it some serious thought. ↩

Why CO2 Should Worry You (Yes, Sceptics Too!)

2014-10-30T00:00:00+01:00

By Levien van Zon

This article is also available in Dutch, and as PDF or ebook (EPUB and Kindle) for offline reading. The footnotes provide additional background information, and can safely be skipped or read separately.

I had originally planned to write my first article on a different subject, the ecological footprint. But World Climate Action Day and the UN Climate Summit last month persuaded me to write about CO₂ instead. I must admit, I think that maybe too much emphasis has been put on climate change over the last few years. It is but one aspect of an underlying problem, that of energy sources and energy use. Moreover, it distracts from other important problems, such as land use, biodiversity decrease and ethical issues. Sometimes one gets the impression that sustainability is equal to reducing CO₂-emissions, which is obviously not the case. Many people are tired of the discussion surrounding climate change. The arguments of climate sceptics and “climate deniers” have been quite effective in generating doubt among the general public. More than half of people worldwide do not believe climate change to be a serious problem.¹ Yet, despite all this, it is still important to talk about CO₂. Even if you doubt that climate change occurs, there are still good reasons to seriously reduce CO₂ emissions as soon as possible.

Six degrees and four kilos

So what’s up with carbon dioxide? Relatively speaking, there’s only a tiny amount of CO₂ in the air, less than one part in a thousand. In the natural situation² this is around 0.03% by volume, or ±300 ppm (parts per million). The rest of the air consists mostly of nitrogen gas (78%), oxygen (21%) and the noble gas argon (0.9%). So there’s really not a lot of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, but still this little bit is actually rather important. For plants and algae, this smidgeon of CO₂ is the source of nearly all carbon, the main building block of organic molecules. And together with water vapour and a couple of other gases, CO₂ is responsible for what we call the greenhouse effect.³ And this is a good thing. Without this effect, things would be rather chilly on Earth, on average around -18°C. Thankfully this is not the case, average temperatures are a comfortable 14°C. The natural greenhouse effect therefore contributes roughly 33°C to our climate, which is important to keep it habitable.

There is, however, one problem: The magnitude of the greenhouse effect depends on how much of the various “greenhouse gases* we have in our atmosphere. And these amounts are not exactly constant. Before the industrial revolution, the air probably contained around 280 ppm CO₂ (on average). But since then, this concentration has been rapidly increasing. Currently it’s over 400 ppm, with an annual increase of 2 ppm (and rising). CO₂ contributes roughly 6°C to the (natural) greenhouse effect, but this contribution is increasing…

Of course our atmosphere is not merely a reservoir that is slowly filled by various gases. Living organisms and other natural processes constantly exchange substances with the atmosphere. Plants and algae need carbon to grow, and as already mentioned, they get this from the air in the form of CO₂. However, breaking this CO₂ down into carbon and oxygen requires energy, and plants get this energy from sunlight. Animals do the opposite: they eat plants, and use a small fraction of the carbon from plant molecules as building material. What happens to the rest of the carbon, you may wonder? It is used as an energy source, to stay alive! The carbon reacts with oxygen from the air, which results in CO₂. This releases energy, in fact the same energy that plants needed to break the CO₂ apart in the first place. The reaction of (in this case) carbon-based molecules with oxygen is also known as oxidation, or more commonly, combustion or burning. An average human combusts quite a lot of food every day, and from it produces around 1 kg of CO₂. This means that on an average day, the carbon dioxide you exhale roughly has the weight of a pack of sugar!

To put it differently, together we humans exhale around 7 billion kilos of CO₂. That may sound like a lot (and it is), but it’s only around 1% of the roughly 575 billion kg CO₂ that all living beings pump into the atmosphere on a given day. And us living beings have been doing this for quite a while, yet the CO₂-concentration in the air remains remarkably constant. The reason for this is that plants, algae and oceans also remove roughly 589 billion kg CO₂ from the atmosphere per day. Natural emission and absorption of atmospheric CO₂ are therefore almost in balance.⁴ However, a significant source of extra CO₂ was added quite recently. Below ground are all sorts of fossil remains of plants and animals, buried in the course of millions of years. In some spots, these remains have formed a reservoir of concentrated carbon compounds. We know this as oil, natural gas or coal. From the 18^th century onward, people have begun digging up these remains. Not that we particularly enjoy digging up dead things, but burning these carbon compounds does yield a lot of energy. And we need this energy to power our modern society: Over 80% of the energy produced by humans, is produced from such fossil fuels. In most western countries this percentage is higher, in my home country of The Netherlands for instance it is 92%.⁵

Obviously, burning all this dug up carbon does not just yield energy, it also yields CO₂. This relatively recent source emits around 23 billion kg extra CO₂ into the atmosphere on a daily basis. This comes down to an average of 3.3 kg per person per day, three times what we breathe out ourselves. And there is no extra sink for this extra source. Worse, the Earth’s capacity to remove CO₂ from the air has decreased in recent centuries, in part due to the large scale removal of forests. The result is that the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere has increased, with almost 50% in two centuries. Moreover, this increase is accelerating.

So far, this is all not very controversial. The recent increase in CO₂ can be measured, and its causes are quite well known. Less clear however, is what effect this extra CO₂ will have. One of the consequences is an enhanced greenhouse effect. This is simply because the extra CO₂ will cause extra heat to be trapped by the atmosphere. The problem is, we’re not sure how much extra heat, precisely, and we also don’t know how this effect will develop in the coming century. There is no doubt that the average temperature is currently rising.⁶ We can also say with a high certainty that this is, at least in part, due to an enhanced greenhouse effect. But the climate is a complex system with many feedbacks, so what will happen in the long term? Many predictions and projections have been made, but fact is that no-one really knows what will happen.⁷ Basically, two centuries ago we started the largest experiment in human history. And this experiment is virtually uncontrollable, the outcome is unknown and there is no panic button, should things go wrong.⁸ Maybe, this should worry us.

Acid is the new base

Of course, it might just turn out fine. Maybe the extra CO₂ will hardly have an effect, and all will be tickety-boo. On the other hand, maybe it will lead to runaway climate warming, rendering large parts of the planet unsuitable for agriculture. We don’t know. Personally, I think that’s a pretty big risk to take.⁹ But even if you really don’t believe that CO₂ contributes to climate change, or if you believe that this will not really be a problem, there are other reasons why an increase in atmospheric CO₂ should worry you.

Part of the extra CO₂ that ends up in the atmosphere, will eventually dissolve in surface water. For the global temperature this is a good thing, as it reduces the warming effect. But if carbon dioxide dissolves in water, it becomes an acid, known as carbonic acid. Dissolved CO₂ is what provides the “sparkle” in carbonated water (and in most soft drinks), and carbonic acid is what gives it a slightly sour taste. Carbonated water has a pH value between 3 and 4. Luckily, surface water contains rather less carbon dioxide than carbonated water does. Most of the surface water consists of oceans, and sea water tends to have an average pH just above 8. Those of you that have paid attention in chemistry class may know that this is not acidic. Rather, it’s the opposite: slightly basic.¹⁰ As far as we know, the average pH of sea water has remained fairly constant over the last 24 million years or so, between 8.1 and 8.3.¹¹ However, over the last decades, the average pH of the ocean water has been declining rapidly, from around 8.2 to just under 8.1. The oceans are becoming less basic, or to put it another way, they are becoming more acidic. A 0.1 unit decrease in pH may seem minuscule. In fact, in a glass of tap water it would be. But the oceans are not a glass of tap water, we’re talking about a well-buffered system with a LOT of water. In this situation, structural decrease in pH isn’t just a tiny natural variation. And for life in the oceans, a small decrease can be a big problem, especially given how fast it’s happening. Many of the smaller sea animals have an external skeleton that consists of calcium carbonate. Think sea shells, but also coral, and even some types of plankton. If water becomes more acidic, calcium dissolves more easily, and it becomes harder to build and maintain an exoskeleton. The current, rapid acidification of ocean water can lead (and probably already does lead) to large-scale extinction of corals, plankton and molluscs. And as these creatures are at the base of the ocean food chain, this could endanger the stability of the entire oceanic ecosystem.

As with the climate, no-one really knows what’s going to happen to the oceans. Even scientists cannot see the future, they can only extrapolate from current knowledge and trends. It could be that the effects of increased CO₂ levels are not so bad as we expected, and we’ll wonder what all the fuss was about. In fifty years we’ll probably know. On the other hand, the effects could also turn out as bad as we expected, or worse. In that case, we’ll probably wonder why the hell we didn’t act earlier. In any case, if we just sit around and do nothing, we’re taking a pretty big risk. It would be like playing Russian roulette with the stability of both the climate and the ocean ecosystem. And that’s, probably, not a good idea.

War, crises and resources

Risk management isn’t the only reason to curb the human emissions of CO₂. The underlying cause of these emissions, burning fossil carbon for energy, is actually a problem in itself. The largest reserves of fossil fuels are controlled by a relatively small number of regimes. And let’s just say that not all of these regimes are particularly known for their reliability and good will. Attempts to control and mine fossil fuel reserves have directly or indirectly led to many violent conflicts over the last century, and have caused much human suffering. Control over large fuel reserves gives some countries a lot more influence than might be desirable, and funnels a lot of money into corrupt regimes in Africa and Latin America.¹²

Apart from geopolitical considerations, if you value economic stability and poverty reduction, it is unwise to make the world’s energy supply dependent on a small number of centralised energy sources.¹³ If the supply is (temporarily) reduced, or is in danger of being reduced, the price of energy tends to sky-rocket worldwide. And with increased energy prices, the price of almost every product and service goes up fast. This is what happened for instance during the oil crises of 1973 and 1979, and to a lesser extent during the food crisis of 2007-2008.

Finally, apart from practical considerations, there are also ethical considerations. We could argue that every generation should leave the world as they found it, or preferably in a better state. Currently, this is not what is happening. Granted, socio-economic factors like wealth, technology and health do tend to improve considerably across generations. But playing roulette with the climate system and the oceans, and draining fossil fuels and other natural resources, clearly isn’t part of “leaving the world in a better state”. We still have sufficient fossil fuel reserves to last us at least a few decades. But fossil carbon shouldn’t just be considered a fuel, it’s a valuable non-renewable resource. One could argue that this resource is too valuable to simply be converted into heat by burning, within a timespan of less than three centuries…

A LOT of energy

There is no shortage of arguments for why we should reduce CO₂ emissions. Unfortunately this is easier said than done! If we add all direct and indirect emissions through consumption and services, then the average Dutchman or -women emits between 38 and 46 kg CO₂-equivalent per day. This is over forty times as much as we exhale ourselves! For other western countries the figures are similar: in the UK it’s around 42 kg, in Germany 41 kg, in France 36 kg, and in the US it’s a bit higher, around 78 kg. Of these emissions, around 88% is CO₂, the rest is mostly methane and N₂O.¹⁴ And the difficulty is, almost everything we do causes CO₂ emission, because everything we do requires energy. Switching to alternative energy sources is basically the only way to significantly reduce emissions. But this is not so simple, because we currently use a lot of energy! An inhabitant of The Netherlands directly and indirectly uses something between 100 and 250 kWh per day, on average.¹⁵ Again, for other westerns countries these figures are similar. In many countries, the electricity use is only a small part of the total energy use. Most of the energy is used to heat houses and offices, to drive vehicles and to produce all the stuff we buy. And that energy is almost entirely derived from fossil fuels.

Actually our energy use can already be reduced by a fair amount, simply by using the energy we have in a more efficient manner. I will write about this in more detail, in a separate article. But most energy is currently being wasted in transport and in heating. Internal combustion engines use only around a quarter of the energy from their fuel for actually moving a vehicle. The other three quarters are discarded into the air as heat, a “waste” product. An electromagnetic engine is much more efficient, with up to around 90% of input power getting converted into movement. Even if you would generate the electricity using coal (which also isn’t very efficient), the indirect emissions of an electrical car would still be slightly less than the direct emissions from a conventional one. So switching to electrical transport is already a good idea, even though storage of electricity is still a problem. While batteries these days are much more advanced than those two decades ago, they are still impractical and inefficient. Batteries cost a lot of energy, material and money to produce, they’re heavy, charging them is slow, their capacity is rather limited and they generally last only a few years.¹⁷ Therefore, we badly need more investment in developing alternative energy storage!

In cold and moderate climates, houses and offices are probably the biggest causes of wasted energy. In many countries, buildings are heated by burning gas. The conversion of natural gas into heat is actually extremely efficient.¹⁶ Unfortunately though, most of this heat tends to escape from buildings pretty rapidly. It is radiated by walls and windows, and it is carried away by moving air, that escapes through cracks, holes and ventilation systems. A lot of energy can be saved by simply keeping the heat inside the building a little longer! Think double glazing, insulating walls and ceilings, closing cracks, using heat exchangers, and in general better design of new houses and offices. Technology may help, but significant energy savings can already be obtained with merely low-tech solutions like insulation. Moreover, we don’t really need to obtain all our heat from burning gas, or coal, or wood. Nearly everything we do produces heat as by-product. Heat is our main “waste-product”, heat everywhere in our environment, and heat is relatively easy to store and move around. By better use of heat pumps and storage buffers, we can heat our buildings with a lot less fossil fuels. Currently there is a lot of interest in placing (photovoltaic) solar panels on houses. But if you live in a moderate to cold climate and want to cut down on fossil fuel use, it makes a lot more sense to start with placing a solar heater on your roof, installing a heat buffer below your house and modifying your heating system!

Alternatives wanted

By saving energy and increasing efficiency, we can certainly decrease CO₂ emissions by a sizeable fraction. But it will not be sufficient. To drastically reduce emissions we will need to solve the underlying issue of energy sources. This will however require some technological development. Many people believe that solar and wind power can provide all the energy we need, but currently this is not the case. Perhaps they could, one day, but the windmills and solar panels that are currently on the market produce relatively little energy, do cost a lot of energy and resources to produce, take up a lot of space and are relatively expensive. Moreover, our current energy infrastructure is not suited to such intermittent energy sources. We simply have no efficient way of storing lots of energy for later use. Better alternatives for batteries will no doubt appear at some point. Better solar cell technology is being developed, for instance at institutes like AMOLF in Amsterdam. But it will still take ten to twenty years for such technologies to reach the market. And the problem is, we can’t really afford to stand around for twenty years and wait for the technology to get better. If we want to reduce our use of fossil fuels any time soon, we’d better start placing as many conventional solar panels and windmills as is practical. They might not yet contribute much to the total energy picture, but they will contribute to an energy transition. The recent increase in demand for solar panels is already driving all kinds of developments in technology and infrastructure. Yet while technological development can be fast, infrastructure will take decades to adapt. We therefore need to invest more in modifying our energy infrastructure, and looking for ways to efficiently store surplus electricity. Especially the latter, energy storage, will be one of the great technological challenges for this generation.

Apart from renewable energy sources, other technologies are being developed that may contribute to significantly reducing CO₂-emissions. A thorium molten salt reactor may be able to produce nuclear energy without many of the dangers and drawbacks associated with traditional nuclear reactors. However, this technology will still require a few decades of research and development, before it is ready for large-scale application. This applies even more strongly to nuclear fusion, which will probably require another half a century or so of research and development. Until good, large-scale alternatives are available, CO₂ capture and storage could allow us to continue using fossil energy for a few more decades, without many of the associated greenhouse gas emissions. However, capture and storage of CO₂ isn’t free. It requires 20-40% of the energy that is produced, and currently it is not financially viable.

Whatever ways we will use to produce energy in the future, it’s important that we start acting now, and it’s important that don’t put all our eggs in one basket. If we want to decrease CO₂-emissions within a reasonable time frame, then we should start investing now in research and development of new energy technologies, rather than stalling and protecting existing interests. In this respect, most politicians and policy makers seem to show little vision and daring. Let’s hope that this will change the coming years.

And what can normal people do?

Important transitions in societies are seldom to never driven by politicians and policy makers. Important transitions happen because sufficient people want them to happen, because they can happen, or because we don’t have a choice. As a citizen and as a voter you influence politics, and you influence others around you. And as consumer, employee, researcher, entrepreneur, policy maker, teacher or whatever role you may fulfil, you don’t have to wait for politics, science or business sectors to start making large-scale changes. In your work and in your private life you can make choices, and in this way influence society. Granted, probably only a small part of society, but a part nonetheless. So make choices. Try to reduce your energy use, and thereby your emissions. Set an example.

I will end with a rather superficial list of things you can do to reduce your CO₂-emissions. In one of my next articles I will break down our greenhouse gas emissions from consumption in more detail, to see where the largest gains can be made. But for now, it will suffice to state that by far the largest fraction of our CO₂-footprint is formed by our buying consumption goods, by road and air traffic and by energy use at home. This footprint can be significantly reduced with a few relatively simple measures:

Don’t buy things you don’t need. This may sound obvious, but take some time to check with yourself how many of the things you buy are actually required. Collectively we buy enormous amounts of food we don’t eat, clothes we hardly wear, trinkets and gadgets that sit unused in a cupboard, cheap devices that are outdated or break within a few months or years, and all kinds of other stuff that we think we need, but in the end doesn’t really contribute to our happiness. But all this stuff does cost a lot of energy and other resources to produce.
If you do really need something, first see if you borrow, rent or lease it, or try to buy it second-hand.
If you stop using stuff, don’t simply throw it in the garbage. Municipal waste tends to be either burned or sent to landfill. Either way, it ends up as CO₂, methane and/or as other forms of pollution. This is a shame, because many of the products and materials that are thrown away can easily be reused or recycled in some way. If things are still remotely usable, try selling them, giving them away or bring them to a second-hand store. Outdated or broken electronics equipment should be handed in at a recycling point, as it contains precious (and often toxic) materials that can easily be reused. It will cost you a little extra effort and time, but indirectly it can save a lot of energy and other resources.
Make sure that the walls and attic (or roof, or ceiling) of your house, apartment or room are well insulated. Close cracks and holes through which warm air can escape. Consider adapting your warm water installation by fitting a heat pump, a solar heater and heat storage. Also consider installing photovoltaic solar panels, especially if you have a heat pump. If you rent your house, check with the house owner for possibilities regarding insulation and sustainable energy.
If you don’t live in a particularly hilly area and road safety allows it, consider using a bicycle for short-distance travels. You can also consider getting an electric bicycle for longer distances, or for hilly roads. When cycling is not an option but public transport is present and bearable, travelling by train or bus is preferable to car or aeroplane. If you know your way around the train systems (especially discount tickets) and book a few weeks in advance, international travel by train can be cheaper than flying, or can be just as cheap. This is the case in many European countries, e.g. between cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Brussels and Paris. Over such distances, the amount of time you can save by flying is quite limited anyway, due to the overhead of getting to and from the airport and standing in line.
Moreover, one or two long holidays are preferable to a lot of short trips, especially for intercontinental travel. And if you do travel by car, try to take as many people as you can. Using car-sharing networks such as Blablacar may allow you to reduce both cost and fossil fuel use. And who knows, you may even meet some interesting people along the way…

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Notes:

More than half of people worldwide do not believe climate change to be a serious problem.
The exact figures will vary between polls and countries, of course. A 2010 Gallup survey in 111 countries indicated that on average 42% of adults worldwide considered global warming to be a threat. Countries that scored below 50% included China, Russia and many countries from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. However, it also included The Netherlands, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. The US, often considered a nation of climate sceptics, actually scores above 50% when it comes to climate worries. This year’s Gallup environmental poll indicates that around 56-60% of Americans are worried about climate change, while 25% do not believe global warming to be a serious problem. A study by the European Commission in 2013 found that 69% of Europeans ranks climate-change as a serious problem, 21% ranks it as a moderate problem and 9% ranks it as being relatively unimportant. Interestingly, only 25% of Europeans seem to think they have a personal responsibility in tackling climate change. A 2011 report by Nielsen states that 19% of the Dutch respondents were not worried by climate change. Moreover, 33% did not have an opinion, and 48% were worried. This places The Netherlands far below the European average. However, according to a poll by TNS Nipo in 2007 90% of the Dutch public does believe that the climate is changing, and 80% believe that humans contribute to this. But 27% of respondents was not really interested in the issue, almost half was tired of the subject and more than half was not really sure what to believe anymore. ↩
Relatively speaking, there’s only a tiny amount of CO₂ in the air, less than one part in a thousand. In the natural situation this is around 0.03% by volume, or ±300 ppm.
Obviously, there is no such thing as a “natural” CO₂-concentration. As far as we know, the atmospheric CO₂-concentration has varied a lot over the last several hundreds of millions of years. During recent ice ages it was around 180 ppm, in the tropical climates of the Mesozoic era (the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods) it was around 2000 ppm, and during the Cambrian era it is possible that concentrations were as high as 7000 ppm. However, the world was, quite literally, a different place back then. During the last two interglacials (the periods between ice ages), atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ seem to have been rather consistently between 260 and 300 ppm. Some studies do estimate slightly higher values, above 300 ppm, but this is still significantly lower than the current-day concentration, which is over 400 ppm. Moreover, measurements from ice cores suggest that the concentration has been remarkably stable during the last few millennia, around 280 ppm. Measurements that are based on plant stomata (the openings that plants use to breathe) suggest a somewhat higher variation over the last few centuries, between 260 and 320 ppm, and concentrations up to 400 ppm during previous interglacials. This still seems to be below current-day values, and because human societies mostly developed during the last few millennia, I will consider 300 ppm to be the “natural” pre-industrial average, with a “normal” variation of 20-40 ppm around this level. ↩
… together with water vapour and a couple of other gases, CO₂ is responsible for what we call the greenhouse effect.
Actually this name is somewhat misleading, because the mechanism behind the greenhouse effect is different than the mechanism in an actual greenhouse. However, the effect is the same: in both cases heat gets trapped. The Earth receives a lot of energy from the Sun on a daily basis, but around half of this is immediately reflected, and the other half is fairly rapidly radiated back into space. Water vapour, CO₂ and several other gases absorb a large part of this outgoing radiation, and re-radiate part of it back in the direction the Earth’s surface. This video by the TED-Ed project nicely explains how the greenhouse effect works. ↩
Natural emission and absorption of atmospheric CO₂ are therefore almost in balance.
Seen over longer time scales, this isn’t the case of course. During the Holocene (the last 4000 centuries or so) the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ varied between 180 and 300 (possibly 400) ppm. But during the current interglacial, the CO₂-concentration seems to have been fairly stable, which suggests that emission to and absorption from the atmosphere were roughly balanced. More importantly, the historical variations that did occur, seem to have occurred relatively slowly, especially if you compare it to the rate at which the CO₂-concentration is currently increasing. ↩
Over 80% of the energy produced by humans, is produced from such fossil fuels. In most western countries this percentage is higher.
According to the 2013 Key World Energy Statistics of the International Energy Agency (IEA), in 2011 the world used around 13113 Mtoe (million tonnes oil equivalent) of energy from primary sources. This is roughly 152504 TWh (terawatt-hour) of energy (1 TWh is a billion kWh, or 3600 terajoules, and 1 Mtoe is 11.63 TWh). This comes down to 21786 kWh per world citizen in 2011, or an average of 60 kWh per person per day. Of this energy, 31.5% comes from oil, 28.8% from coal and peat, and 21.3% from natural gas. All together, 81.6% of the energy we used in 2011 (124443 TWh) was derived from fossil fuels. The rest was mostly derived from biomass and waste material (10%), nuclear fission (5.1%), hydroelectric power (2.3%) and “other sources” (1%). This last category includes renewable energy sources, such as solar energy, wind power and geothermal energy. It’s clear that, at a global scale, sustainable energy sources do not contribute significantly to our energy supply. The main renewable energy sources are firewood and hydropower, and both of these sources are often exploited at the expense of natural ecosystems and small communities.
A part of the energy from fossil fuels is converted into electricity, whereby a sizeable fraction (around 60%) of the energy is lost as heat. Due to such losses, around 8918 Mtoe (103716 TWh, or 68% of the primary energy) was available to end users, in the form of oil (40.8%), electricity (17.7%), natural gas (15.5%), biomass and waste (12.5%), coal and peat (10.1%) and other sources (3.4%). Oil is mainly (62.3%) used for transport, and gas, biomass, coal and peat are primarily used to produce heat for industry, offices and households.
In total, burning non-renewable energy sources in 2011 caused 31342 Mt (megatonnes) of CO₂ to be emitted, around 92% of total human CO₂-emissions, and 64% of total human greenhouse gas emissions. Of these emissions, 44% comes from burning coal and peat, 35.3% from oil, 20.2% from natural gas en 0.5% from waste and other sources.
Around 40% of our global energy supply (5239 Mtoe in 2012) is used by the 34 relatively wealthy OECD-contries (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). These countries represent roughly 18% of the world population (1.26 billion people in 2013). The average energy use per OECD-citizen is therefore more than two times the world average, around 48356 kWh per person in 2012, or 132 kWh per person per day.
In the Netherlands, the gross energy use in 2012 was 951 TWh (according to Eurostat). Of this, around 92% is derived from fossil fuels: 41.4% from oil, 40.4% from natural gas, 10% from coal, 4.3% from renewable sources (including biomass), 1.2% from nuclear energy and 0.9% from waste. ↩
There is no doubt that the average temperature is currently rising.
Even if you would doubt that such temperature measurements are accurate and representative, there is sufficient evidence for a structural increase in average global surface temperature. The extent of polar ice, glaciers and plant- and animal-populations are good natural indicators of long-term temperature trends. The size of nearly all of the world’s glaciers has decreased significantly over the last few decades, and the same applies to land and sea ice at the poles. Many plant and animal species in moderate climates have shifted their range in the direction of the poles, and the tree line has shifted upward in many mountain regions. ↩
But the climate is a complex system with many feedbacks, so what will happen in the long term? Many predictions and projections have been made, but fact is that no-one really knows what will happen.
In my opinion, denying uncertainty does not contribute to the climate discussion. Granted, many climate deniers use the existence of uncertainty to generate doubt. The response is often to point to broad scientific consensus. Unfortunately this can be counterproductive, as to some this may suggest absolute certainty. And this is misleading, as there’s no such thing as absolute certainty. In a recent interview with de Volkskrant (27 September 2014), logician Johan van Benthem said the following: “Many scientists choose that approach: we’ll shout them into silence. We’ll keep loudly insisting that we’re right. And as long as we keep stamping out every spark, reason will prevail. Unfortunately, history has shown that it simply doesn’t work that way. Often, scientists will present their knowledge as something fixed, something on which there is consensus. They’re basically saying: we thought about the ins and outs with a number of very smart people, and now there’s consensus, which you can use to convince others. Personally, I have a different idea about science. I see science as a form of organised discussion, and the power of science is in the quality of that discussion. The fact that we keep differences in opinion open for discussion, that is where we obtain progress. The image that science should emit is one of discussion and debate. I believe that this will make us stronger, because this way you indicate: we’re familiar with differences in opinion. And if you open these for discussion, in our way and following our norms, you will gain progress.”
It is true that there is broad consensus among scientists regarding the existence of an enhanced greenhouse effect. However, this consensus does not cover the scale of the problem, or the effects in the long term, and I think that it’s important to be open about this. ↩
Basically, two centuries ago we started the largest experiment in human history. And this experiment is virtually uncontrollable, the outcome is unknown and there is no panic button, should things go wrong.
A cynic might state that this applies to the development of humanity in general. This does not make it less worrying. ↩
Maybe the extra CO₂ will hardly have an effect, and all will be tickety-boo. Personally, I think that’s a pretty big risk to take.
A nice 15 minute explanation of global warming and why we should be worried, is given in this TEDx talk by David Roberts. ↩
sea water tends to have an average pH just above 8. Those of you that have paid attention in chemistry class may know that this is not acidic. Rather, it’s the opposite: slightly basic.
pH is a measure of acidity. Pure water has a pH-value of 7, which is considered neutral. A pH below 7 is acidic, and higher pH is called basic. Strong acids can be damaging to life, as can strong bases. Think sulfuric acid, and potassium-hydroxide (a strong base, often used as chemical agent to unclog sinks). However, even small variations in pH can already have large effects on biological processes, especially where single celled organisms and small water-organisms are involved. ↩
As far as we know, the average pH of sea water has remained fairly constant over the last 24 million years or so, between 8.1 and 8.3.
This seems odd at first sight, as the atmospheric CO₂-concentration has been rather variable over the same period. You might expect that the pH of the oceans would follow the atmospheric concentration of CO₂, but this does not seem to be the case. Probably, the oceans are good at regulating the concentration of dissolved CO₂ and buffering the pH of the water, provided that the concentration changes aren’t too rapid. Currently however, the rise in oceanic CO₂-concentration seems to outrun the ocean’s buffering capacity. ↩
Attempts to control and mine fossil fuel reserves have directly or indirectly led to many violent conflicts over the last century, and have caused much human suffering. Control over large fuel reserves gives some countries a lot more influence than might be desirable
I do not mean to suggest that you should consider countries such as the US or Russia as “evil states”. However, Russia does use its oil and gas reserves for geopolitical gain (for which you can’t really blame them I guess). And since the Carter doctrine, it has been the policy of the US to secure their oil supply, using military force if needed. It is unlikely that this doctrine has done the stability of the Middle East much good. Moreover, the US army itself is probably the organisation that uses the most oil world-wide. In 2001 alone, the US army probably used more than 85 million barrels (an estimate from the book Crude: The Story of Oil). And in 2010 the author Mike Berners-Lee estimated the emissions from the military operation in Iraq at 250-600 billion tonnes CO₂-equivalent. This is roughly what all the inhabitants of The Netherlands emit in two years.
Obviously, mining fossil fuels can have some beneficial effects, mostly in the short term. Until around 1994, the Netherlands built their welfare state on the state income from selling natural gas. In the long term however, this isn’t necessarily a good thing. In fact, the example of the Netherlands is known as the Dutch disease. Currently, the Dutch treasury receives over 10 billion euros per year from selling gas. But as the gas reserves in the north of the country are shrinking, this source of income is expected to decrease in coming years. And it is certainly not unthinkable that the reduced state income from fossil reserves will have to be compensated at some point by further spending cuts regarding the welfare society. ↩
…if you value economic stability and poverty reduction, it is also unwise to make the world’s energy supply dependent on a small number of centralised energy sources. Note that this applies both to fossil fuels and sustainable energy sources. An important concept that is often promoted for sustainable energy production, is building large-scale solar power plants in the desert. But becoming largely dependent on desert solar power would provide single points of failure, and interruptions in the supply would be disastrous. On the other hand, it is unlikely that we would ever be as dependent on large solar power plants as we currently are on oil… ↩
Of these emissions, around 88% is CO₂, the rest is mostly methane and N₂O.
Methane (CH₄) as a greenhouse gas has around a 25-fold bigger effect than CO₂. And the greenhouse effect of nitrous oxide (N₂O, also known as laughing gas) is almost 300 bigger than that of CO₂. In both cases we’re talking about estimated potential warming (global warming potential) over a period of 100 years (GWP₁₀₀). Both gases are present at very low concentrations in the atmosphere (less than 1 ppm), but both do have a significant warming effect. Methane is a relatively light gas, and therefore ends up relatively high in the atmosphere. Here it stays on average about 10 years, after which it degrades into water and CO₂. These are both again greenhouse gases, which moreover have a bigger effect at higher altitudes. Nitrous oxide has a much longer lifespan than other greenhouse gases, it remains in the atmosphere for over a century (on average). Moreover, it isn’t just a greenhouse gas, but also contributes to degrading the ozone layer. ↩
An inhabitant of The Netherlands directly and indirectly uses something between 100 and 250 kWh per day, on average.
The kilowatt-hour (kWh, or technically kW·h) is a unit mostly used to express electricity-use. A kilowatt-hour is the amount of energy consumed in an hour, by a device that uses 1000 Watt. In SI-units this is 3.6 MJ (megajoule). However, following author David MacKay, I will use kWh as general unit for energy use, because many people are already familiar with it (e.g. from their electricity bill). ↩
In many countries, buildings are heated by burning gas. The conversion of natural gas into heat is actually extremely efficient.
In fact, all the energy released in burning gas (or anything else) is eventually turned into heat, so in principle one could say the conversion efficiency is 100%. However, in a gas-powered heating system, not all of the heat is released into the building. Some of it escapes through the exhaust, so the efficiency of most gas-heaters is somewhere from 70% to 95%. ↩
Batteries cost a lot of energy, material and money to produce, they’re heavy, charging them is slow, their capacity is rather limited and they generally last only a few years.
At the moment, the dominant type of electricity storage is the lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery. These are the batteries that are used in most phones, laptops and electric vehicles, mainly because they have a high energy-density (energy stored per unit weight or volume of battery). However, the drawback is that after about three years, the performance of most Li-ion batteries tends to start decreasing rapidly. Under optimal temperature- and charge-conditions, some types can be made to last at most 10-15 years or so. Higher temperatures will make a battery degrade faster, as will fully discharging it. A trick therefore used to extend battery life in electrical cars is to only partially discharge the batteries during normal use. This saves you having to replace the batteries every few years. The drawback is of course that you cannot use the batteries to their full capacity, while you do still have to haul their weight around (which requires energy). Additionally, the Tesla electric sports car and several other electric vehicles utilise a cooling system for their battery packs, which increases life span and safety, but again also increases weight. To compensate for the weight of the batteries, the Tesla’s aluminium frame is designed to minimise weight and drag.
There are many Li-ion battery variants. Laptops and phones mostly use lithium cobalt oxide batteries, which have a high capacity but do not last very long. Lithium iron phosphate (Li-phosphate) batteries have a much longer life span, and are safe. However, they are less frequently used due to their somewhat lower (initial) capacity. The Tesla model S uses lithium nickel cobalt aluminum oxide (NCA) batteries, which have the advantage of high capacity and a relatively long life span, but are also more expensive and prone to overheating.
Apart from the most common types of batteries, such as lead acid (“car batteries”), Li-ion and NiMH, there are alternate battery technologies that may hold some promise. The venerable Nickel-iron battery, developed by Edison in 1901, is currently seeing a bit of a revival in solar-power storage, due to its low cost and extremely long life span. Modern lead-acid derivatives such as the CSIRO UltraBattery also hold promise, although the much-hyped EEStor ultracapacitor has spectacularly failed to materialise. Hydrogen fuel-cells, another big hype (in the 1990s), are also unlikely to be a viable solution for energy storage any time soon. ↩

The Substance of Sustainability

The Future is Fiction

On Progress, Decline and the need for active hope

Black Swans and future blindness

Simulating the future

Futures better or worse

Optimism and negativity

Bright futures

Problems of Progress

Motivational expectations

Capturing the future

A tale of TINA

Agency over prophecy

Rediscovering possibility

Hope and humility in practice

Cooperative change

Further reading

Footnotes

Why you may find this text boring

How stories and feelings dominate over facts

The shape of thinking

Rationality and its problems

Rational, irrational, unconscious

The world in our heads

Fast and slow

There is a fish in the percolator

Organising experience

We contain multitudes

Messy morals and shared stories

Beyond heroes

Mental versatility

The many pitfalls of thinking and feeling

Mind pirates

Future fictions

Further reading

Footnotes

Hairballs & Loops

Why understanding the real world is important (but not easy)

Knowledge as explanatory stories

A simple complex system

Stability and circular causes

Understanding complex behaviour

Exploding hairballs

Getting lost in details

Complex patterns for robustness

Details can matter, but context matters more

The fragile, the robust and the adaptive

Further reading

Footnotes

Entwined: Matters of Complexity

Welcome to the machine

Stories, science and the iron rule

Interacting elements

More than the sum of its parts

Strict laws, shaky laws

Predictability problems

Promises of “simplexity”

Health despite uncertainty

Further reading

Footnotes

Beyond Optimists and Pessimists

Looking for Better Stories on Sustainability

Modernists, romantics and pessimists

Wizard, prophet or both?

The importance of stories

Story clashes

What is sustainability anyway?

Maintaining and improving wellbeing

Stories as simplifying models

Shared stories

Blind spots

Better stories

Science as starting point

Further reading

On Energy, part 1: How much do we use?

A brief history of energy

The kWh and other animals

On Energy, part 2: We are not average

You are not average

So why is energy a problem?