Blind Guardians of Ignorance , livre ebook

The Blind Guardians of Ignorance
Covid-19, Sustainability, and Our Vulnerable Future
A Handbook for Change Leaders, Young and Old
Mats Larsson
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Published in 2020 by
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Copyright © 2020 Mats Larsson
The right of Mats Larsson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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“It is a curse to have ideas that people understand only when it is too late.”
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes



Foreword
Mikael Höök
One of the most important questions one can ask relates to current society and its sustainability over time. Literature is increasingly filled with books questioning past or present societies—and also attempts to highlight new visions for more sustainable paths—as the rapidly growing body of literature on sustainability indicates. Modern society uses a number of inputs to keep the wheels of our global economy turning as well as to satisfy the demand for increasing welfare and prosperity by a growing population. Economic growth and increased consumption are seen as politically important goals and have helped to build up the wealth of the western civilization. Emerging economies in Asia are now pursuing similar development, with increased demand for natural resources and fuels.
Hans Carl von Carlowitz studied “ sustainable management ” as an idea in 1713, and reflected upon the connections between prospering human activities and careful management of required natural resources. Others, such as Carl Linneus, also contemplated the organizing principles of nature and its surrounding administration that seemed to provide abundance for life in many forms. Since those early days, sustainability science has evolved much and branched out into several diverging schools of thought and diverging views on the best paths towards sustainability.
The realization that many societal challenges involve interconnecting sectors has been popular in the last decade. This includes everything from globalized trade and industrial supply chains to new frameworks for management of risks and the organization of transformation. The Sustainable Development Goals formulated by the UN in 2015 contain many such intersecting issues like poverty alleviation, climate action, and clean/affordable energy for production.
Industrial supply chains are essential for our modern society and they are not given as much contemplation in public discussions as they should. Inputs of raw materials flow from all over the world to manufacturing centres and are transformed into consumer goods—containing embodied energy, emissions, and materials—to be traded in the globalized economy. This direct and indirect transfer of energy and material via international trade results in material flows that span multiple economies across the globe with the need for international perspectives. This gives rise to a complex interconnectivity between sectors and also complicated power structures rarely given the attention they deserve.
Climate change is increasingly regarded as one of humanity’s greatest collective challenges, which threatens to permanently alter the foundations of life and societies across the world. In response to this threat, the international community has outlined ambitious goals for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the 2016 Paris Agreement. These goals can only be reached by simultaneously implementing a number of comprehensive measures, including the transformation of the energy sector and a decrease in energy use with significant impacts on many supply chains and societies.
A third of known global oil reserves, half of gas reserves, and over 80 per cent of coal reserves should remain unused from 2010 to 2050 in order to meet the target of limiting warming to 2°C—regardless of what is potentially available for exploitation. The need to reduce global emissions coincides with economic and population growth in the Global South and transitioning countries. Consequently, global energy demand is projected to grow by more than a quarter to 2040. Efforts to curb climate change thus face a double challenge: to rapidly and fundamentally transform the energy sector while preserving opportunities for increased well-being, economic development, and social stability as stipulated in the Sustainable Development Goals.
This challenge is hardly trivial, and how to even formulate sensible transformation pathways are far from easy. Historically, sustained and equitable economic growth, facilitated by ample access to cheap energy, has been a major source of welfare improvements and an important explanation for the remarkable decline in conflicts and wars among developed states. To the extent that climate change mitigation threatens the trajectory and distribution of future income and well-being, political turmoil and conflict are conceivable outcomes. In countries where fossil fuel production is a major source of income, a rapid global shift to low-carbon economies could have destabilizing effects. At the same time, effective shifts towards more sustainable systems will reduce loss and the damage of global warming and, in the longer term, generate benefits that extend beyond the climate system.
Transformation in societal systems is complex and can include everything from large changes in the state of the system, to substitutions of one technology to another, diffusion of completely new technologies, to new and consumer preferences or systemwide events with dramatic and unanticipated effects. For example, whale oil was—technically—an energy source in the nineteenth century, despite the fact that the overall economy was chiefly based on coal at the time. Whale oil was used only for very specific purposes (primarily illumination), and the transition to kerosene was easy and occurred very rapidly. Bardi [1] explored this in more detail and made several important remarks that pinpoint how difficult it can be to substitute energy sources. In particular, he showed that resource scarcity often dramatically increases the amplitude of price oscillations, which often slow an energy transition. Businesses and governments struggle with alternating circumstances of insufficient cash flow to handle price spikes and plummeting prices that do not cover their existing cost structures. Long-term planning in this ever-changing environment becomes extremely difficult, and investment—even highly needed investment—can drop precipitously.
Over longer timespans events occur that are simply unforeseeable or at least unpredictable with any certainty, for example the oil shocks, environmental concerns, or opposition to nuclear power. Projecting the outlook 20—let alone 40—years into the future is a far too long period for maintaining validity of many assumptions and achieving accurate predictions. Currently, the lockdowns associated with the Covid-19 pandemic are estimated to affect around 40% of global energy demand and have drastically impacted travel, politics, and society. Who would have expected such a radical shift in energy consumption trends to suddenly occur? Transformative visions need to embrace explorative and normative projections as a better way in order to illustrate possible and preferable paths for the future.
The links between transformations and sustainability remain underexplored, but are clearly gaining traction with academia, industry, and policymakers. Sustainability may easily be a key issue for the long-term survival of society. However, the important questions and answers are increasingly mixed with ideological, political, ethical, and other viewpoints. As Engelmann (2013) [2] daringly stated “we live in an age of sustainobabble”. In such a conflux of vague concepts and chaotic differences that may arise when drawn to extremes, Larsson daringly paints pictures of the future and of transformative paths that differs from many mainstream narratives.
Against this backdrop, other important trends affecting humans are the ever-present march of technological development as well as shifts in geopolitical power with the emergence of new actors and the current challenge of Covid-19. All this is fused into a thought-provoking mixture by Larsson in his attempt to inform and discuss these issues and stake out possible paths forward for change leaders.


1 Bardi, U. & Lavacchi, A. (2009) A simple interpretation of Hubbert’s model of resource exploitation, Energies , 2 (3), pp. 646–661.

2 Engelmann, R. (2013) Beyond sustainobabble, in State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible? , pp. 3–16, Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute.



Part 1: The Age of Ignorance
Chapter One
The Blind Guardians of Ignorance
Globalization on a Massive Scale
In the present global society, we have taken an idea to an extreme, without consi