Panic - Part 1

With BC in a state of emergency caused by record flooding and me sitting in the middle of it, I think it is at last time to roll up my sleeves and address the emergencies that confront all of us.

Several times in my career I have found it useful to "collapse" a problem that looks like a time series (where you need data points over time and you want to predict what happens in the future) into a picture of what is going on now. The current situation contains the past and tells us what we need to know (all we can know) about the future.

Throughout my essays on this subject, I hope you will actually consult my sources. What I tell you is built on what I learned from much smarter people who are, thanks to the miracle of the internet, available at your fingertips. This is important stuff. Far more important than all the stuff you forgot from High School. And my sources are far more entertaining than your High School teachers. 

I will start with a great book, recommended by Bill Gates, about how to think about the state of the world now and how most of us do no better than chimpanzees when asked critical questions about it. To get a taste of Hans Rosling, take a look at this video. Better yet, buy the book. Sit back, read carefully as if you are studying for an important exam. Struggle to be one rational human being in a crowd of chimpanzees You need to know 

• what's going on in the world 
• how to think about what's going on 
• why you are so actively stupid about it (worse than random)  
• what makes you so stupid and 
• how to think better - maybe.

I will also get around to telling you about a few very smart people who ought to know better. People who are actively lying to you and trying to make you stupid. But first, two smart people.

Rosling's central concept is "dollar street". To get a big picture of the human race, it helps to arrange people by income - not by "us" and "them", not by "rich and poor", religion, nationality, or any other popular simplification. The great majority of humanity exists in the "hump" in the middle of the curve - rather "poor" by our standards but not anything like as "poor" as what we imagine. To be sure, "we" are fabulously rich by world standards, but we propose "fixes" for the rest of humanity that don't take into account who these people really are.

For the analysis that comes, one of the central concepts is how different levels of income are impacted both by moving "up" by "progress and technical change" and by sliding "down" by catastrophes of any nature.

I thank Rosling for his list of the major catastrophes he worries about:

• Pandemic
• Financial Collapse
• War
• Climate Change
• Poverty in General

What is important here is to understand that we face multiple "big problems", not just one. They have a nasty way of interacting. Linking these big risks to "dollar street", we can see that catastrophe tends to push individual people down the street to lower-income and a lower standard of life. Even to the point of threatening life itself.

For example, when you hear that climate change will "disproportionally" affect the poor, this is what they are talking about. But it's the same for any catastrophe, such as the war in Afghanistan, Syria, or Yemen, where the "poor" can no longer afford to eat. They die.

Right now, through the lens of "dollar street", I am watching catastrophe hit British Columbia, whose "poor" are systematically ignored. We see people on the roofs of their RVs waiting for helicopter rescue. We do not see the homeless junkies or the Natives on reserves without potable water. Many of the flooded-out farmers will see their incomes fall (moving down dollar street). Many of the junkies will die. By the way, drug overdose, not COVID, is the biggest preventable cause of death in BC.

It's a question of resilience. If you live in the high numbers on dollar street, you have the means to bounce back. If you are in the low numbers, any "little problem" can spell death. Opportunities to move up are scarce. But that's BC - my backyard. We need to open our lens and look at the whole world.

Let me introduce you to another serious thinker on the big issues. You already know him, or think you know him: Bill Gates. You will not be surprised to learn that Gates is an uber-nerd. A nerd's nerd. He is astonishingly well-informed about just about everything (except perhaps keeping his marriage together). We have no shortage of video talks from Gates. I invite you to watch one or two. 

Gates (and his team of course) have written a great book (How To Avoid a Climate Disaster) that is packed with the kind of facts we need to have about the current state of the climate and what tools we currently have to make a difference.  He has a lot to tell us about what is currently in the pipeline. He's the one to know since he is personally financing a lot of it. Among the many takeaways in this book is the insight that the "experts" at COP26 vastly under-estimate the task at hand (whether or not you agree that the "task" is needed). The book is packed with graphs and fascinating detail behind ideas that can get us to "zero-carbon" by 2050. But you can really sum it all up by the simple fact that the human race gets over 80% of its energy from fossil fuels and the optimists are proposing we get rid of all of it in the next 30 years. So how, exactly, would that work?

The obvious conclusion is that it can't possibly work, but Gates has an engineer's optimism. We can fix it and here is how. If you don't know what it would take, you really need to shut up about the whole issue. You should see that all the brave proposals coming out of COP26 are more or less beside the point - seldom coming close to the stated goal - sometimes even claiming short-term "band-aids" that will hinder our chances in the long term.

Gates and Rosling are acknowledged giants in their own fields. They know what they are talking about.  They are both "hands-on" and "fact-based".

I'll conclude this essay for the moment. so I don't swamp my reader(s). I have a few more characters to invite to the stage. Next time.