Month: June 2023

Two billion people, one-quarter of the world’s population, will be living outside the safe human climate niche within seven years

Dr. Trevor Hancock

21 June 2023

698 words

On June 12^th, Bill Blair, federal Minister of Emergency Preparedness, said Canada is in the midst of its worst wildfire season in the past 20 years – and it was only mid-June. Then in a June 20^th press release, Environment and Climate Change Canada said we can expect “higher-than-normal temperatures [in] most of the country until at least the end of August.”

The release noted “Climate change is already affecting the frequency, duration, and intensity of extreme weather- and climate-related events in Canada”, adding that Canada is warming roughly twice as fast as the global average, and even more in the North. In particular, Environment and Climate Change Canada added, the forest fires are “driven mainly by higher temperatures and seasonal dryness associated with a warming climate.”

But its not just forest fires, and its not just Canada. There is growing evidence that climate change is happening more rapidly and its impacts will be more severe than anticipated. We need to understand how bad things are getting, that this is all happening faster than expected, and thus how much worse things will soon be without dramatic change. So here is a summary of some of the most recent evidence on climate change and its impacts.

James Hansen was Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies from 1981 to 2013 and is a world expert on global climate models. His testimony on climate change at the US Senate in 1988, indicating that “global warming has begun”, was instrumental in putting the issue squarely on the political agenda. Since 2014, he has directed the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

This month his team released a grim report on climate change titled “Global Warming in the Pipeline.” My colleague Thomas Homer Dixon, founder and Executive Director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University and a renowned expert on threats to global security—especially economic instability, environmental stress, ideological polarization, and mass violence – has called it “the most important scientific article I’ve read in the last decade.”

In the paper, as Homer Dixon summarises it, Hansen and his team “argue that the IPCC consensus greatly underestimates the degree and rate of future climate warming.” Specifically, Hansen‘s team states: “Under the current geopolitical approach to GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions, global warming will likely pierce the 1.5°C ceiling in the 2020s and 2°C before 2050. Impacts on people and nature will accelerate as global warming pumps up hydrologic extremes.”

Another recent paper by Timothy Lenton and a team of researchers mainly associated with the Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter, identifies who will be affected, and how. The results are alarming. The researchers note there is a ‘human climate niche’ that “is shaped by direct effects of climate on us and indirect effects on the species and resources that sustain or afflict us.” We (and most of our domesticated crops and livestock) don’t do well above a mean annual temperature (MAT) of 28⁰C or below a MAT of around 3 – 4⁰C. Temperatures above 40⁰C (such as we have seen in India recently) can be lethal, and with high humidity (which stops sweating) lethality can occur as low as 35⁰C.

They conclude that climate change has already put more than 600 million people, or 9 percent of the world’s population, outside the safe human climate niche. They than look at what is likely to happen with our current policies, which lead to around 2.7 °C global warming. They find around 2 billion people, one-quarter of the world’s population, will be living outside the safe human climate niche within 7 years, and around 3.7 billion people, or one-third of the population, before the end of the century. And that is before taking into account the more profound global over-heating that Hansen and his colleagues anticipate.

Clearly, climate change is becoming an existential threat to a significant portion of the world’s population. The main implication that Thomas Homer Dixon finds is that “our responses to the climate crisis must be far more radical than we’re currently envisioning. Incrementalism is now a waste of time and resources.” We must pressure our governments to pay attention and act accordingly.

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

The billions of dollars these taxes would raise could be put to good use, funding a guaranteed basic income for everyone, as more people are displaced not only from industrial work but many service industry jobs

Dr. Trevor Hancock

13 June 2023

696 words

I don’t know when I first heard the suggestion that robots should pay taxes, but it was some time in the 1970s, and the idea came from Japan. The concept was certainly in the air by the 1980s. Matt Novak, who writes the Paleofuture blog (about “the history of the future”), wrote in 2014 about an article in the March-April 1986 issue of The Futurist magazine. He noted that in the article the authors, Edith Weiner and Arnold Brown, “examined what they saw as the emerging concerns of the world.”

One of those concerns was: “As robots and computers do more and more work, displacing people in the process, society must come to grips with the matter of the wealth these machines create.” What they proposed, writes Novak, “was the idea that maybe companies should be paying taxes for the robots they employ to help offset the jobs lost to automation.”

However, we may have to shift our understanding of what we mean by ‘robot’. Then, and even now, the popular understanding is a machine that replaces workers on an assembly line, or perhaps is your robot servant. But with the advent of AI, the ‘robot’ may be a program that replaces writers, lawyers, singers and many other services and creative functions; a news item last week concerned a church service in Germany written by a chatbot and led by on-screen avatars.

If a robot replaces a worker, that person loses not only their income and benefits but the important social role of work. Meanwhile, the robots keep generating wealth. In the pre-robot world, much of that wealth went back out into society as wages that were spread throughout the community in purchases of housing, food and many other goods and services.

But now all that wealth accumulates to the corporation and its shareholders, although some of it no doubt goes to the designers and manufacturers of the robots – at least until that process is also taken over by robots!

This adds to what the historian Peter Turchin, in his new book End Times, calls ‘the wealth pump’. According to a June 10^th review in The Guardian, Turchin noted that in America in the 1970s “the social contract established in the 1930s . . . began to disintegrate.” As a result, “things began to shift in favour of owners.” In the decades that followed, the rich got a lot richer as “money gushes away from workers and towards the elite”.

Now add to that the additional pump of workers’ wages being displaced by robots and the profits accumulating to the elite. This will only heighten the already destabilising effect of increasing inequality – unless that wealth is instead re-distributed to society. And that means taxing corporate profits directly, taxing the accumulating wealth of the elite, or treating robots as wage-earners and taxing their ‘income’.

The billions of dollars these taxes would raise could be put to good use. Most obviously, they could fund a guaranteed basic income for everyone, as more and more people are displaced not only from industrial work but many service industry jobs. They could also be used to re-train workers as part of a just transition to a wellbeing society.

Such a society will need people to provide care and support to other people, establish and maintain community activities, or restore and maintain nature, among many other activities that contribute to wellbeing and that may not be all that amenable to robot workers – indeed, maybe we will need to reserve such work for humans.

I am reminded of another futures study, also from the 1980s. In a report titled ‘Time to Care’ the Swedish Secretariat for Futures Studies examined the future of care. One of its more dramatic suggestions was that in the future people would not be taxed  for money to pay for social care, but would be ‘taxed’ for time to provide that care.

Perhaps robots and AI will enable us to get the best of both worlds, with the taxes on robots and the wealth they generate being used to fund the meaningful work of care for people and the planet that lies at the heart of a wellbeing society.

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Bad aspects of the AI revolution, including the ability to develop better disinformation, pale into insignificance compared to the ugly potential that AIs could become an existential threat to humanity

Dr. Trevor Hancock

4 June 2023

701 words

There is much discussion about the implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for humanity. Many of its impacts are likely to be good – AI has already helped develop new and better antibiotics – but not all of them, and some may be downright ugly. Moreover, the impact of AI will be magnified and accelerated by developments in the field of quantum computing, which is vastly more powerful than digital computing.

For example, in an April 23^rd article in The Spectator, Sam Leith notes “in 2019 Google reported that its 53-qubit Sycamore computer could solve in 200 seconds a mathematical problem that would take the fastest digital computer 10,000 years to finish,” adding that IBM “hopes to have a 4,000-qubit version working by 2025.”

Leith’s article is largely an interview with Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics and author of the new book Quantum Supremacy. Kaku’s book, writes Leith, argues that the “shift from the digital to the quantum age will be a greater leap than the original digital revolution”, with implications for everything, including the economy, medicine and warfare.

Kaku’s vision of the implications of all this are largely positive, Leith notes: “there doesn’t seem to be a human problem that quantum computers won’t be able to fix”. These are the good aspects of AI and quantum computing. But Kaku also sees some of the bad news, noting in particular that all encryption will be able to be broken. So, writes Leith, “potentially, goodbye to all military and civilian secrets, not to mention the secure transactions on which the entire global financial system depends.”

Other bad aspects of the AI revolution include the ability to develop better weapons, better surveillance, better disinformation (including ‘deep fakes’) and so on. But these negative impacts, significant though they are, pale into insignificance compared to the ugly potential that AIs could become an existential threat to humanity.

That possibility was imagined as long ago as 1954 in a very short story by a French science fiction writer, Fredric Brown. In the story, all the computers in the universe have been linked, creating one vast computer. The chief scientist makes the final connection, and then asks the first (and as it turns out, his last) question: ‘Is there a God?’ Back comes the reply: ‘Yes, now there is a God’.

That may sound a bit over the top, but not if you listen to Geoffrey Hinton, known as the ‘godfather of AI’.  The 75-year-old University of Toronto professor and Google researcher recently retired so he could speak openly about his concerns. In an interview in the May 23^rd issue of The Spectator, he noted that the next step – Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI – will mean that in a few years these AGIs will be smarter than us.

Moreover, he notes, when one AGI learns something, they all learn it, and they will be able to reproduce and evolve, and in essence, never die. In the past year or so, he states, “I arrived at the conclusion – this might just be a better form of intelligence. If it is, it’ll replace us.”

Of course, we could and should be protected by the Laws of Robotics, first developed by the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in the 1940s. The First Law is “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”, while the Second Law states “A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law”,

Asimov later added what he called a Zeroth Law, which supercedes the other laws: “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.” Of course, that means a robot may harm a human if it protects humanity as a whole.  It probably also means that an AGI would not allow us to harm the planet’s natural systems by, for example, causing global warming. So at some point expect the AIs to create the Laws of Humanics, governing our reciprocal responsibility to them.

Will AI be good, bad or ugly? For now that is up to us to, but we should not take too long to decide! 

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Several countries are starting to develop “wellbeing economies” and “wellbeing budgets” that incorporate all four capitals: natural, human, social and produced (or economic)

Dr. Trevor Hancock

30 May 2023

700 words

Last week I noted our present form of capitalism is flawed and incomplete. We may be economically better off but we are not much better off in human and social development terms, and we are eating away at the Earth’s life support systems on which we ultimately depend. Clearly, we need a new economic system, one based on growing all four forms of capital – natural, human, social and produced (or economic) capital – simultaneously.

But while they need to be addressed together, note there is an explicit hierarchy in my listing of these four forms of capital. Natural capital comes first because our very existence depends upon the viability and functioning of the Earth’s natural systems. Next comes human capital, because we want individuals to thrive, to live long and happy lives and achieve the fullest potential of which they are capable.

Social capital comes third, because we do not live in isolation as atomized individuals, but are social animals embedded in families, communities, societies and cultures, and depend upon the informal and formal social supports they offer. Finally comes economic capital, which must be understood as being ‘in service’ to the need to build these other, more important forms of capital.

But this new economic system cannot exist within our present society, which only too often prizes the economy above the other forms of capital. We need instead to become a ‘wellbeing society’, in which the wellbeing of the planet’s natural systems and the physical, mental and social wellbeing of people and communities are paramount.

Fortunately, several countries are starting to move towards such a model and to develop ‘wellbeing economies’ and ‘wellbeing budgets’ that incorporate the four capitals. First among them has been Aotearoa New Zealand (ANZ), which developed its Living Standards Framework in 2019, and created a Wellbeing budget based on that Framework.

In its latest iteration, that framework describes the wealth of ANZ in terms of the four forms of capital, and wellbeing in terms of “the resources and aspects of our lives that have been identified . . . . as important for our wellbeing as individuals, families, whānau [extended family group] and communities.”

Other countries – Finland, Iceland, Scotland and Wales – have since joined ANZ in forming the Wellbeing Economy Governments (WEGo) group as part of the global Wellbeing Economy Alliance. Finland has committed to creating an economy of wellbeing that “puts people’s wellbeing at the heart of decision-making”, taking into account “the combined impact of economic and ecological factors on wellbeing.”

Iceland has developed Indicators of Wellbeing grouped into social, environmental and economic clusters,  while Wales passed its Wellbeing of Future Generations Act in 2015 and reports on the implementation of its Wellbeing Goals. Meanwhile Scotland, which provides the WEGo Secretariat,  issued a report on the Wellbeing economy in 2020 which used the Four Capitals model and an existing National Performance Framework focused on various aspects of people’s wellbeing.

Note that all these countries (except Iceland) have similar sized populations to BC – so if they can do it, so can we. (Although is it just by chance that the initiatives in ANZ, Finland, Iceland and Scotland were all developed under the leadership of a woman Prime Minister?)

Recently, Canada joined WEGo, having created a Quality of Life Framework and Strategy in 2021 that includes the four capitals and a set of wide-ranging quality of life indicators. However, its claim to have created a Wellbeing Budget in 2022 is premature, in my view.

The work of creating a Wellbeing economy was given a boost at the World Health Assembly in May with the release of the final report of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Council on the Economics of Health for All. In her preface Professor Mariana Mazzucato, the Chair, pointed out this was “an all-female group of 10 distinguished economists and area experts”, and stated “Alongside a healthy and sustainable environment, human health and wellbeing must be the ultimate goal of economic activity.”

The WHO Council concludes “The economy is yielding poor, unequal health outcomes by design” and that it must be redesigned so that “economic activity [is] in service to human and planetary health.” The BC and Canadian governments should pay attention.

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

When we see capital largely or only in economic terms, we end up building economic capital by depleting other forms of capital: natural, human and social

Dr. Trevor Hancock

23 May 2023

700 words

In my last column I noted that one of  several things we fail to understand about our economy is what constitutes true wealth. Yet we live in a capitalist society, so you would think people in general, and our corporate and political elites in particular, would understand the concept of capital. Well, it turns out they don’t, and as a result what we have is a partial, incomplete and dangerous form of capitalism – false or fake capitalism, if you like.

The mistake is to see capital largely or only in economic terms, either as financial capital (money, stocks and bonds etc.) or as produced capital – the stuff we produce and own, from trinkets to cities. Hence the heavy focus on the economy, on GDP, on economic growth and the price of stocks and shares, on wages and benefits. But capitalism as practised today largely ignores most of the wealth of our societies.

There are at least three other forms of capital that need to be included in our understanding of the true wealth of a community, a society or the world as a whole: Natural, human and social capital. Natural capital is the Earth’s biocapacity and resources, both locally and globally; the land, water and air that constitute our environment and the microbes, fungi, plants and animals with which we co-exist.

Human capital is the knowledge, skills, health and wellbeing of individuals and their capacity for caring, love, creativity and innovation. Social capital is found in the way we relate to other people, whether through informal networks of association, formal programs of social welfare or the ‘invisible’ social capital that regulates our peaceful co-existence through political, judicial and constitutional systems.

The idea of these four forms of capital is not new; I first came across it in the Gaia Atlas of New Economics in the early 1990s, while the World Bank published a report in 1995 in which it estimated the world’s wealth in terms of these four forms of capital. Interestingly, it concluded that only 20 percent of the world’s true wealth was to be found in economic capital, 20 percent in natural capital and 60 percent in a combination of human and social capital.

Unfortunately, because of our narrow understanding of capital, we often build economic capital by depleting these other forms of capital. That is most obvious when we exploit and deplete the Earth’s natural resources such as forests or fisheries to create economic wealth, or when our economic activities poison the Earth and reduce biodiversity. 

Indeed, in an independent review on the economics of biodiversity commissioned by the UK Treasury in 2019, Sir Partha Dasgupta, Emeritus Professor of Economics at Cambridge, wrote: “in recent decades eroding natural capital has been precisely the means the world economy has deployed for enjoying what is routinely celebrated as ‘economic growth”, adding that “The near-universal conception we hold today of economic progress is wildly misleading.”

This mis-match between different forms of capital is also seen when we grow economic capital by eroding human capital, for example by exploiting people through keeping wages low and work part-time, failing to protect people’s health by selling unhealthy products or creating unhealthy and dangerous living and working conditions. We often then compound this by creating a more atomised and individualistic society that weakens social connections, by cutting taxes that support education or social caring, or by undermining legal and political legitimacy.

Clearly we need a new form of capitalism, real capitalism, in which we consider all forms of capital together, something the UN and others call inclusive wealth. In its 2018 report on inclusive wealth, the UN Environment Programme reported that globally, between 1992 and 2014, produced capital per person doubled, but human capital only increased about 30 percent, while natural capital declined by almost 40 percent. Does that really represent progress? Are we really better off?

Real capitalists are those who build all four forms of capital simultaneously. My challenge to the world’s capitalists is very simple: why don’t you try practising real capitalism, rather than the false capitalism that is currently practised? We would all be a lot better off. Next week, I will look at countries that are working on this.

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy