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The agenda for such a transformation has been known for at least half a century, but in spite of the evidence, we have not done so

Dr. Trevor Hancock

1 August 2023

700 words

In my last two columns I suggested we urgently need a rapid transformation of the major systems that make up society and underpin today’s dominant culture. Not only will this transformation protect the Earth systems we depend upon for our wellbeing, indeed our very survival, it will actually lead to improved wellbeing and quality of life.

Those systems include not only the obvious issues of energy use, consumption of materials, production of wastes and pollutants, food production, housing and urban development, protection and restoration of nature and so on, but the economic, legal and political systems and the social norms and cultural values that underpin society.

It is both encouraging and disturbing that the agenda for such a transformation has been known for at least half a century. Encouraging because we know what we need to do; disturbing because in spite of the evidence, we have not done so.

More than half a century ago, the Club of Rome warned of the limits to growth in its report of that name. Following up on these ideas, the Science Council of Canada’s Committee on the Implications of a Conserver Society produced ‘Canada as a Conserver Society’ in 1977. Their report mapped out “the transition from a consumer society preoccupied with resource exploitation to a conserver society engaged in more constructive endeavours.”

While the report focused on resource uncertainties and the need for new technologies and made recommendations in the areas of transportation, shelter and community, renewable energy sources and materials conservation, the authors recognised the needed changes were more profound.

As the Chairperson noted in her letter of transmittal to the Chair of the Science Council, while science and technology are important, “finally, however, the choice comes down to a matter of social preferences, and its implementation often waits on political will.”

That Chairperson was Professor Ursula Franklin, a distinguished physicist and humanitarian at the University of Toronto. It is worth repeating at length here some of what she had to say in her letter, beginning with this: “The need to come to terms with resource scarcity, environmental pollution and the associated social questions is . . . recognized throughout the world, often much more keenly than in our country.”

She went on to write: “It is now understood that in many fields the continuing expansion of current practices will not be possible in the future”, adding that “to suggest that moving toward a Conserver Society means regression, or moving ‘back to the woods’, is totally misguided.”

But unfortunately, she noted, “the awareness and the willingness which I sense at the grassroots seem to find at best a reluctant political expression. It may be that this apparent inertia is due to the lingering of the old illusion that Canadians, as a small population possessing immense natural resources, have only to sit back and let the world take its course, to enjoy perpetual prosperity.” Sadly, that view is still around 50 years later, as the recent article by Gwyn Morgan so clearly illustrated.

Dr. Franklin concluded: “I can only hope that this study will help to destroy that mirage and free Canadians for action. Not only are we not as rich as we have grown to think, but our complacency and indecision could cause us to miss participating in the most stimulating and rewarding global tasks of the next decade. Not to respond now could mean losing control over the design of our future. As I hand over this Report, I can only pray that its insights will be used and that it may become, in the hands of many Canadians, a tool for the good of all.”

Well, it didn’t happen. Dr. Franklin and the Committee were right, but the political will was missing, as the political and corporate elite were still wedded to growth and economic expansion. Within a few years, the environmentally destructive and inhumane ideology of neo-liberalism, ushered in by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, had become mainstream orthodoxy, bringing us to the current polycrisis.

50 years ago we missed the opportunity then to begin the transition from a consumer to a conserver society. Now the need for a major transformation is urgent; we cannot miss it again.

© 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

(Published as “A polycrisis is greater than the sum of its parts”)

It’s not just a set of isolated crises happening at the same time, but a set of interacting crises that are “producing far greater harm together than the sum of harms they’d produce in isolation”

Dr. Trevor Hancock

25 July 2023

700 words

Last week I suggested that we need to listen to the so-called ‘doomsayers’ – those who study global change and have been raising concerns for decades about the unsustainable path on which we are embarked. Regrettably, and perhaps disastrously, they – we – have been largely ignored, in favour of a ‘business as usual’ approach.

So we now find ourselves in what some – including the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University – are calling a polycrisis. (In the interest of transparency, I am a member of the Institute’s Scientific Advisory Board). Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, drew attention to this emerging phenomenon in his speech to the UN General Assembly in February, outlining the UN’s priorities for 2023.

“We have started 2023 staring down the barrel of a confluence of challenges unlike any other in our lifetimes”, he said, and went on to list the challenges: “Wars grind on. The climate crisis burns on. Extreme wealth and extreme poverty rage on. The gulf between the haves and have nots is cleaving societies, countries and our wider world. Epic geopolitical divisions are undermining global solidarity and trust.” 

His list does not even include the Covid-19 pandemic, from which the world was slowly emerging, nor does it list biodiversity loss and pollution, the other two components  – along with climate change – of what the UN Environment Programme calls “a triple crisis”.

The Cascade Institute has an even longer list that make up the polycrisis which it is studying. In addition to those listed by Guterres, they include financial system instability, ideological extremism, pernicious social impacts of digitalization, cyber attacks, mounting social and political unrest, large-scale forced migrations and an escalating danger of nuclear war.

The Institute is one of a number of centres around the world that are studying the polycrisis; others include the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany and the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. In a February article in the Globe and Mail, Institute Director Thomas Homer-Dixon and two of his colleagues discussed the concept of a polycrisis.

While some dismiss the idea as simply meaning “there’s lots of bad stuff happening simultaneously and one thing can affect another”, as one critic of the idea put it, a polycrisis is more than that. Its not just a set of isolated crises happening at the same time,  wrote Homer-Dixon and his colleagues, but a set of interacting crises that are “producing far greater harm together than the sum of harms they’d produce in isolation”; in short, a polycrisis is greater than the sum of its parts.

Today’s crises they wrote, “simultaneously span natural, political, economic and technological systems, because they’re driven by a multiplicity of underlying ‘systemic risks’.” Moreover, those crises “are not only worse than they were one or two decades ago, they’re also getting worse faster”, and often happening at the same time. So what should we do in the face of a global polycrisis? If, as Naomi Klein wrote in 2014, climate change“changes everything”, surely that is even more true of a polycrisis?.

A simple yet profound way to think about systems is provided by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in its slogan: “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets .“ Our system seems to be perfectly designed to disrupt the Earth systems that are our life support systems, while at the same time creating massive inequality and poverty and all the other elements of the polycrisis.

So if we want to change the results, we have to change the systems that underlie the polycrisis and lead to those results. And that is the second main focus of the Cascade Institute’s work; given the possibilities of rapid transformation inherent in complex systems, can we identify ways to trigger what the Institute calls ‘virtuous cascades’ of positive change? Just as we can hit tipping points that take us into deep trouble, we should be able to find tipping points that take us in the right direction.

Almost 50 years ago we missed that opportunity, as I will discuss next week. We can’t afford to fail again as we work to change everything.

© 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

(Published as “We need to start listening to the ‘doomsayers’”)

The real doomsayers are those who, if we follow what they say, will lead us to our doom, not those issuing prudent warnings of real danger

Dr. Trevor Hancock

17 July 2023

699 words

I ended last week’s column with the admonition from Johan Rockstrom and his colleagues that “Nothing less than a just global transformation . . . is required to ensure human well-being” and Thomas Homer Dixon’s observation, with reference just to climate change, that “our responses . . . must be far more radical than we’re currently envisioning. Incrementalism is now a waste of time and resources.”

Both Rockstrom – Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research – and Homer Dixon – founder of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University – have been studying the issue of global change for many years and are respected leaders in this field. They and many other leading researchers are growing increasingly concerned that we are approaching, if not already at, multiple tipping points for the climate, biodiversity loss and other key Earth systems. I take their warnings very seriously, as should we all.

People like  Rockstrom and Homer Dixon – and me for that matter – are often labelled ‘doomsayers’, as if that were some sort of negative characteristic. But stop and think for a moment. If someone can see the possibility that speeding through the North Atlantic in the dark means there is a risk the Titanic will hit an iceberg, and recommends a more southerly route and  slower speed, are they a doomsayer, or a prudent and prescient foreteller?

In fact, the real doomsayers are those who, if we follow what they say, will lead us to our doom. We had a splendid example of this just a couple of weeks ago, when Gwyn Morgan popped up on these pages yet again to condemn action to restrict fossil fuels, and to urge that Canada do nothing. Of course, his judgement is suspect – biased and self-interested as it is – because he spent his career building up the fossil fuel industry in Canada and now seems keen to protect his legacy.

But if we follow his advice, and the mix of half-truths, distortions and mis-direction of much of the fossil fuel industry, Canada and the rest of the world will continue to blow through its carbon budget. This will take us further down the path towards a planet with 2 – 2.7 ⁰C of global heating. As it is, we are seeing what a mere 1.2 ⁰C of global heating can do, with climatologists expressing astonishment and concern at the rapidity and scale of temperature changes and their impacts.

Indeed, just a couple of weeks ago UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres stated “climate change is out of control.” And as I noted last week, Rockstrom and his colleagues reported that we have already passed the safe and just boundary for seven of the eight Earth systems that they were looking at.

So we cannot continue to follow the advice of those who want us to bury our heads in the sand, ignoring our challenges and hoping they will go away, or that somehow technology will save us and allow ‘business as usual’ to carry on. It seems to me that the prudent thing governments need to do is to take seriously the work of these and other Earth system researchers and begin to take the radical steps towards a just global transformation that is needed.

That is particularly the case because, far from being doom-laden, the radical transformation that is called for will not only protect the Earth systems we depend upon for our wellbeing, indeed our very survival, but will actually lead to improved wellbeing and quality of life. It is not a path of sacrifice, but one of enhancement.

That transformation begins by recognising that we only have one planet, that it is the only home of 8 billion people, a myriad of other species and – as far as we currently know – the only life in the galaxy, perhaps in the universe. So we have to learn to live within the physical and ecological constraints of our one planet, and do say in a way that is socially just for the present global population, for future generations and for other species. 

So in the coming weeks, I will explore what such a just transformation looks like and what it will mean.

© 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

Dr. Trevor Hancock

10 July 2023

701 words

Last week I noted  the concept of planetary boundaries has been around for over a decade. A 2009 publication by Johan Rockstrom and his colleagues at the Stockholm Resilience Centre identified a number of key Earth systems fundamental to natural processes and human wellbeing, and “thresholds which, if crossed, could generate unacceptable environmental change” were identified.

Now Rockstrom – currently at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research – has led another team in re-working the planetary boundaries by adding a justice component. In doing so, they are identifying not just a safe operating space for humanity, but a safe and just operating space, one that will minimize “exposure to significant harm to humans from Earth system change.”

To do so, they looked at eight different earth system domains that are important for human wellbeing: Climate; two measures of the biosphere (the area of largely intact natural ecosystems and the functional integrity of all ecosystems); two measures of water (surface flows and ground water levels); flows of two key nutrients – nitrogen and phosphorus; and atmospheric aerosols (air pollution).

Each of these systems, they noted, “have impacts on policy-relevant timescales; are threatened by human activities; and could affect Earth system stability and future development globally.” For each, they then assessed whether “adhering to the safe ESBs [Earth system boundaries] could protect people from significant harm”, knowing that any such harm “will lead to greater impacts when vulnerable populations are exposed.”

They assessed the ESBs using three justice criteria: Intragenerational justice, which is about justice in today’s world “between countries, communities and individuals”; Intergenerational justice, which is concerned with the “relationships and obligations between generations”; and Interspecies justice, “which aims to protect humans, other species and ecosystems. The latter in particular “could be achieved by maintaining Earth system stability within safe ESBs.”

Their conclusions are sobering: “Seven of the eight globally quantified ESBs have been crossed and at least two local ESBs in much of the world have been crossed, putting human livelihoods for current and future generations at risk” – the one that was not exceeded globally was atmospheric aerosols, which is a regional rather than a global measure. (An accompanying map shows the greatest levels of exceedance are found in a band from Indonesia and Indo-China across India and the Middle East and up into central and eastern Europe.)

The climate ESB is worth further consideration, especially considering that climate, along with biosphere integrity, is considered a core planetary boundary, according to a 2015 updated article on planetary boundaries by the Stockholm Resilience Centre team. This is because “large changes in the climate or in biosphere integrity would likely, on their own, push the Earth system out of the Holocene state” – the relatively stable state experienced by humans in the past 12,000 years.

Referring to what Timothy Lenton’s team found (see last week’s column on the unjust impact of climate change), Rockstrom and his colleagues pointed out that at 1.5 °C warming – the optimistic target established in the Paris Accord – “more than 200 million people, disproportionately those already vulnerable, poor and marginalized . . . could be exposed to unprecedented mean annual temperatures”. In addition, they noted, “more than 500 million could be exposed to long-term sea-level rise.”

This they consider to be unjust, so they recommend the safe and just boundary for climate change be set at or below 1 °C. However, they acknowledge, since we are already at 1.2 °C of warming, and on track for further warming, “this boundary may not be achievable in the foreseeable future”, adding that “adaptations and compensations to reduce sensitivity to harm and vulnerability will be necessary.”

So where does this leave us? Rockstrom and his colleagues are clear: “Nothing less than a just global transformation . . . is required to ensure human well-being. Such transformations must be systemic across energy, food, urban and other sectors, addressing the economic, technological, political and other drivers of Earth system change, and ensure access for the poor through reductions and reallocation of resource use.”

As Thomas Homer Dixon wrote with reference just to climate change, “our responses . . . must be far more radical than we’re currently envisioning. Incrementalism is now a waste of time and resources.”

© 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

We need economic activity that actually regenerates rather than depletes natural systems, while distributing the economic benefits more fairly

Dr. Trevor Hancock

4 July 2023

699 words

More than a decade ago, a group of earth system scientists developed the concept of planetary boundaries. They identified a set of a dozen or so earth systems and proposed thresholds for each system beyond which it was likely that the system’s stability and resilience would be compromised. “These boundaries”, they wrote, “define the safe operating space for humanity with respect to the Earth system.”

One of those earth systems, of course, is climate change. Two weeks ago, I referred to the work of a team of researchers led by Timothy Lenton at the University of Exeter in the UK, examining the ‘human climate niche’ – in effect, the ‘safe operating space’ for humans when it comes to temperature. Neither we nor our domestic animals or crops do well beyond a mean annual temperature of 29 ⁰C, known as ‘hot exposure’.

Lenton and his colleagues looked at our current pathway, which sees average global temperatures increased by 2.7 °C by the turn of the century. When combined with expected population growth, they found, the number of people outside the niche rises to about 2 billion people in 2030 and 3.7 billion people – 40 percent of the entire population – by 2090.

But importantly, they also looked at which countries and people would be most affected. With global warming of 2.7 °C by the turn of the century, India would have more than 600 million people experiencing ‘hot exposure’, while Nigeria would be second with more than 300 million exposed. Then come Indonesia (100 million exposed), the Philippines and Pakistan (both with more than 80 million exposed).

Some smaller countries – Burkina Faso, Mali, Aruba, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Benin are the top six – will experience ‘hot exposure’ conditions across almost their entire land areas. Importantly, Lenton’s team note that for the most part those most affected come from poorer nations that have less than average greenhouse gas emissions; the UAE and Bahrain are obvious exceptions.

In other words, the victims of climate change are both less responsible for the problem and less likely to have the resources to cope with it. “Overall”, the researchers write, “our results illustrate the huge potential human cost and the great inequity of climate change.”

However, climate change is but one of a number of Earth systems – the natural systems that provide our life support – that humanity is stressing. And as with climate change, transgression of any planetary boundary can be expected to have inequitable impacts, as the benefits and costs of ecosystem disruption are not evenly distributed.

Wealthy countries and people have ecological footprints far higher than those of middle and low-income countries and people. That has been the case for decades, indeed centuries, meaning that these countries and people are responsible for most of the cumulative damage to the Earth. So both historically and in present times, we bear a collective responsibility to act first and go furthest in reducing our impact on the Earth’s life support systems.

This current and historic inequity is the basis for thinking about not just a safe operating space for humanity, but one that is also just. This is a step presaged by Kate Raworth in her ‘Doughnut Economy’ model, where she referred to a ‘safe and just operating space’ for humanity. This led her to propose that a doughnut economy – one that meets the social needs of everyone on Earth while not transgressing planetary boundaries – would need to be both regenerative and distributive.

That is to say, we would need economic activity that actually regenerates rather than depletes natural systems, while distributing the economic benefits more fairly. In other words, we cannot separate what, more than 40 years ago, I called the two fundamental principles of public health: ecological sanity and social justice.

This of course raises the question – what is a safe and just space, and how does the introduction of a justice perspective shift the planetary boundaries?

Now, in an article published in Nature in late May, a team led by Johan Rockstrom, one of the leading researchers on earth systems and planetary boundaries, has looked at and sought to answer that question. Next week I will review and discuss their work.  

© 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

Was the loss of the Titan really a disaster, or a foreseeable incident brought about by exaggerated pride and self-confidence?

Dr. Trevor Hancock

26 June 2023

702 words

We just witnessed the destruction of the Titan submersible on a dive to view the wreck of the Titanic. It was quickly dubbed a disaster, and rapt media attention was paid to the hunt for the Titan, perhaps in expectation of another ‘edge-of-the-seat’ rescue attempt. But the whole episode raises a number of thorny questions.

The first is: Was the destruction of the Titan with the loss of five lives a disaster? Is there a number that turns an unfortunate incident into a disaster? If so, the recent bus crash in Manitoba that killed 16 seniors was surely a greater disaster than the loss of the Titan. Both of these pale in comparison to another disaster at sea that occurred at the same time as the Titan’s destruction; the loss of hundreds of lives when an over-crowded refugee boat sank off the Greek coast. But much more attention – and certainly way more resources – were devoted to the Titan rescue effort.

My colleague Dr. Charuka Maheswaran alerted me to Barack Obama’s comments on exactly this point. As it happened, the former US President was in Greece last week, speaking at a conference. The Huffington Post reported that he drew attention to the loss of the Titan, but added, tellingly “the fact that that’s got so much more attention than 700 people who sank, that’s an untenable situation.”

In a later interview with CNN, The Huffington Post reported, Obama suggested this differential coverage “reflects a larger problem with inequality”, adding that “it’s indicative of the degree to which people’s life chances have grown so disparate.” And of course, behind the tragedy of the refugee deaths lies an even greater disaster; the combination of poverty, violence and climate change that is forcing millions of people to flee their homes and seek security elsewhere.

The second question is: Was this an unforeseeable and surprising disaster, or merely an accident waiting to happen? Well, it has since been revealed that Stockton Rush, the creator of the Titan, took a pretty cavalier attitude to safety. Standards and regulations, he implied, are for wimps. They get in the way of clever people such as himself who are innovative and entrepreneurial.

Reports since the Titan was lost have revealed that there was a great deal of concern among the professionals in the submersibles business about the approach taken by Mr. Rush – but nobody actually acted on these concerns. I am reminded of a comment from the 1980s by James Tye, the founder of the British Safety Council, reported in a recent Spectator book review: “It is no use putting these accidents down to acts of God. Why does God always pick on badly managed places with sloppy practices?”

The Ancient Greeks called attitudes such as those of Mr. Rush ‘hubris’ – exaggerated pride or self-confidence. As the Merriam-Webster Dictionary notes, the Greeks “considered hubris a dangerous character flaw capable of provoking the wrath of the gods. In classical Greek tragedy, hubris was often a fatal shortcoming that brought about the fall of the tragic hero.”

From that perspective, the loss of the Titan – appropriately, the Greek name for a family of giants that used to rule the Earth until the Olympian gods overthrew them – was poetic justice, and at least the captain went down with his ship. So it would have been ironic, rather than tragic, if it hadn’t also killed four other people.

Which takes us to the unfortunate passengers and my third question: What on Earth were they doing down there?  They have been branded as explorers and scientists, but this is specious, as the site is well documented. They were hardly discovering new places or adding to scientific knowledge – except, ironically, knowledge about the dangers of the innovations that Mr. Rush was creating, dangers that, sadly, they had not been made aware of.

Instead,  Paul Johnston, curator of maritime history at the Smithsonian, in Washington, D.C., nailed it in comments reported in this newspaper on June 23^rd, labelling them ‘risk tourists’:  “people who are going down to look at an underwater graveyard”, adding “it’s a plaything for wealthy people — a checkbox on a bucket list.”  Some bucket, some list, to paraphrase Sir Winston Churchill.

© 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

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