My writings - and those of others.
Bad Thinking
I spent an hour on Labour Day attending a webinar presented by The Philosopher, entitled When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People. It was good enough to download Steven Nadler’s Book by the same name. It was a bit less easy to access a philosopher in Plato or Aristotle’s Day but this one came in an instant and was a quick read.
The writer is concerned about current American Thinking - or perhaps the lack of it, which he finds not only perplexing but even dangerous with epidemic proportions. Beliefs like denial of climate change as a hoax, conspiracy theories and a election fraud can’t be blamed just on lack of education - though poor education is a factor. A recent survey revealed that a third did not know that Auschwitz was a concentration camp and about the same number can’t name a single branch of the US government. Yet many who promote these ideas are highly educated from some of America’s best universities. By many criteria, they are good people. But the author believes they have a character flaw - stubbornness. They fail to tailor what they believe to evidence. They hold false beliefs and doing so has consequences/
What can be done about it? If they think badly, the solution is to learn to think well. There are in fact standards of how to think that have come down to us through - no surprise here - philosophy! It relates to knowing how to know. That comes from knowing one’s self - and knowing what one knows and doesn’t know - evaluating the truth of one’s beliefs.
Bad thinking involves refusal to change one’s beliefs in the face of evidence and instead relying on prejudice, hearsay and emotions like hope and fear. Many are averse to science and its methodologies. Some wrong beliefs - like a flat earth - might seem logical when you look at the horizon and holding such a belief is unlikely to cause harm to others. Other wrong beliefs - like thinking the election was stolen - lead to insurrection.
The lecture took me back to first year philosophy and a reminder that logic patterns have rules. It contended that more often than not, the faults in wrong thinking relate to illogical premises and these need to be questioned. The other common one in bad thinking is paying attention to small samples of evidence. Unfortunately even the best media often publish reports of studies with small samples, which bring on hope and fear rather than reasoned response. Retraction of bad studies don’t get the same press. In our own time press coverage of conspiracies enhance their reach.
We may not have time to go back to philosophy class - but the book does present some ways to counter bad thinking. Some beliefs may give us comfort whether we have any proof of them or not and this doesn’t present a danger to others. It’s when beliefs lead to behaviour that harms others where we have to pay attention. And there are plenty of those beliefs currently around us.
New energy creation
As oil and gas companies lobby in the US to do anything to delay changing our reliance on oil and gas, the world around us is full of floods, fires, and droughts - all affected by the climate crisis. Profits might just matter less if we don’t have a world that is habitable.
But in other places, there are attempts at solutions. We are familiar with the large towers with huge blades either from travel or pictures. I saw some of these in upstate New York in wilderness environments and they even had a majestic look as they moved slowly. I can understand why some might object to noise if they lived too close to them - but we are entering a world where costs and benefits are always going to compete.
Nevertheless many of these towers are offshore - and that means they have to be in places where the wind is greater and also where it is challenging to build wind farms. A typical turbine is composed of a pole and three huge blades. The design is based on windmills. It reminds us that when we create something new we tend to model it on something that we know - like the design of early automobiles that looked somewhat like horse drawn carriages. The poles have to be tethered to the seabed - and that has meant that the can’t necessarily be positioned where the wind is the strongest. What if the turbines could float instead?
Enter the Norwegian company, Wind Catching Systems. Starting in 2017, it wondered if there might be an alternative design. Could a collection of smaller turbines do the job as well. They tried out a model on a sailboat. They have now launched a prototype that is 1000 feet high and has 100 small blades. The turbine can be anchored in deeper water and can generate five times as much energy as a current pole and blade model.
It’s good to have some news like this. Let’s hope that prescient investors move away from oil and gas. This means you, governments and corporations!
Thinking about Bugs
Not something we normally do at the end of August. Black flies are long gone and mosquitoes aren’t as evident as they were earlier in the summer. Yet perhaps we should be thinking about bugs the way that writer Dave Goulson does in the Guardian in his recemt article, The Insect Apocalypse - Our world will grind to a halt without them. Here are just a few key points.
Insects have declined in abundance by as much as 75% in the last 50 years.
Three million tons of pesticides are going into the global environment each year - much stronger ones than Rachel Carson warned us against.
Insects provide us with a good deal of service: Goulson notes: “We need insects to pollinate our crops, recycle dung, leaves and corpses, keep the soil healthy, control pests, and much more – but for larger animals, such as birds, fish and frogs, which rely on insects for food. Wildflowers rely on them for pollination.”
They are the largest population on the planet and outnumber humans by a million to one.
We don’t eat them directly in the West. On the other hand, we do regularly consume them at one step removed in the food chain. Freshwater fish such as trout and salmon feed heavily on insects, as do game birds like partridge, pheasant and turkey.
87% of all plant species require animal pollination, most of it delivered by insects.
Insects are also intimately involved in the breakdown of organic matter, such as fallen leaves, timber and animal feces. This is vitally important work, for it recycles the nutrients, making them available once more for plant growth.
Insects are the undertakers of the world, disposing of all types of dead bodies
We are losing far too many of them. Like all aspects of climate change, we start noticing events at the edges - and suddenly they are totally upon us. It’s just another area where we have to consider what we are actually doing to the planet.
Jobs - pay attention to the numbers
In the middle of an election we will undoubtedly hear from the candidates about job creation - and in some cases, caution that cutting out fossil fuels will cause irreparable harm to the economy and create major job loss. Thus it is good to see the results of a new report from Clean Energy Canada which gives some current facts and projections in its modeling report, The New Reality.
Most of us would be hard pressed to guess how many are currently employed in the clean energy sector. There are already 430,500 people employed there right now. That is more than the number of people in the real estate sector for comparison. By the year 2030, the estimate is that there will be an increase to 639,200 under the proposed federal government new climate plan. The fossil fuel sector will drop by 9%. Thus new clean energy jobs will add 208,700 as opposed to 125,800 lost to fossil fuels.
Here is something else that the report says:
“The energy transition, like climate change itself, does not respect borders, and Canada has the ingredients needed to prosper in a future in which oil is no longer its largest export. As the International Energy Agency recently concluded, if the world is to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, no new oil and natural gas exploration and development will be needed going forward.”
We have a major part to play. Politician are far more interested in getting elected than in saving the planet. If you look at the above numbers it is important to see how many are still working in the sector that needs to disappear. It’s not really about jobs - it’s about our future on the planet. We need to pay attention to what the politicians say and vote accordingly.
8 Key Issues
These are the eight key issues for indigenous peoples in Canada according o Bob Joseph’s Indigenous Relations blog. He notes that they are all connected and the challenges seem to hamstring all those in governments at all levels who try to deal with them
Poorer health than that of other Canadians; causes relate to income levels and social factors. People have higher degrees of respiratory problems and infectious diseases. Heart Disease and diabetes are on the rise.
Lower levels of education. These are affected most by colonialism’s sorry legacy of the residential schools and the experience of attempted assimilation. About 36% of indigenous people have not completed high school compared to 18% of the rest of the Canadian population
Inadequate and crowded housing. Close to half those living on reserves live in dwellings that need major repairs.
An income gap. Indigenous people earn about 25% less than other Canadians
Unemployment rates remain high
Incarceration. Nearly half those incarcerated are indigenous, and women are incarcerated more than men.
Higher death rates among children and youth due to unintentional injuries such as drowning. These are three or four times higher than those of other Canadians of the same age.
Higher rates of suicide among youth. “Suicide and self-inflicted injuries are the leading causes of death for First Nations youth and adults up to 44 years of age.” (A Statistical Profile on the Health of First Nations in Canada for the Year 2000, Health Canada, 2003).
What to do? Pressure governments on areas that you know and care about from your own level of expertise or experience. Donate to those organizations working to deal with the issues. Learn historic first nations values that may save us from our own flawed ones.