The Ecolitan series deals with post apocalypse scenario where the earth has been depleted, and people ride bikes. Crucially every action has an ecological cost that must be paid by sweat equity = a rich man can not hire people to do his stuff = he must shovel his own snow etc (All transport has an eco cost - fly somewhere and you might have a month of work that can not be passed to another.
They are a good read.
Nah. The tools of persuasion applied to climate change denial are far, far too powerful. If people haven't been convinced already, no fictional depiction is going to move them.
Climate change is a tiny piece of a much larger cultural war. The battle lines of that culture war are falling almost identically with COVID, and that's a problem with much more direct and visible consequences.
I know David Attenborough credits Star Trek IV with saving the whales, but nobody was ever against saving whales. They just didn't care. In the case of climate, people actively do not want the climate problem solved -- they consider it a deliberate hoax being perpetrated on them, and even measures that improve their lives are rejected as being totalitarian.
It would be great if artists of some sort could change that. The propaganda that convinced them otherwise is, itself, a form of art. But they've got a huge thumb on their side of the scale: the law always favors inaction, and it takes only a moderate-sized minority to prevent anything to help. It doesn't matter how aware everybody else is if collective action is impossible.
On the contrary I think the reduced progress on preventing global warming is not primarily because of sceptics, but due to the fact that believer leaders often have very specific solution(s) in mind, instead of being open to any solution that works.
Many green politicians seem more interested in Europes energy independence than climate change for example. And at times those two goals don't work together.
Other times conflicts of interests favor subsidizing less than optimal solutions.
These issues also undermine public trust in climate change efforts.
I think it is time that we demand green leaders to take an impartial approach to climate change solutions and not let them get away with just blaming "deniers".
The problem is that actual change is hard. And hard becomes impossible in the presence of deniers. Different people want different approaches, and each of them has different costs for different sectors.
We can't even tell just how bad the arguments would be, because the presence of deniers shortcuts it. Nobody ever gets to make difficult compromises because "doing nothing" always wins out.
It's not just a matter of "it would all be over if we just did it my way". It probably would be... but that's not how things are done in a democracy. You have to take all the various groups into account. And when one large group is "absolutely nobody does anything", they get what they want because none of the actual discussions can be taken seriously.
This is all complicated by the fact that the worst deniers are in the US, and that they have outsized power here. Europe isn't especially thrilled about the idea of doing anything that costs anything -- whether it's money, their other environmental goals, or otherwise -- that the Americans will benefit from without paying for.
I used to think that if people could see the negative effects of climate change- if they could see it right there in front of them- then they would understand.
But, that was before covid. People will be on a ventilator, struggling to breathe, literally dying, and still claim that covid is all a big hoax. I wish I understood it, but I don’t. Some broken adaptation, some evolutionary dead end in the human psyche just primes many people to value what they want to be true above what is true.
Many people seem to have this view that the way things are right here and right now is normal and the cultural norms and customs they were born into are inevitable, and then extrapolate from there. Whereas of course there is no normal, and no guarantee that anyone will be okay, and culture is shifting sand, and whole groups of people die all the time for no good reason. Perhaps the stress of having those facts in your mind is just too much.
"But, that was before covid. People will be on a ventilator, struggling to breathe, literally dying, and still claim that covid is all a big hoax."
I don't think most people, especially those who are vaccine skeptical, think COVID is a hoax. I think you see people with different opinions on the response to COVID - especially when you see overt gaslighting for anything that goes against the blatantly obvious narrative.
Same with climate change - the more screeching about "the science is settled" the more people will dig their heals in and reject such a narrative. I have at least one copy of Newsweek from the 80's with a picture of the frozen earth on the cover and in the 90's climate alarmists were agressivly warning by the 2000's all the costal cities were going to be under water (and yet all the politicians and powerful people [such as the Obama's] are still buying property in Marthas Vineyard - barely above sea level).
Ever hear the story of Peter and the Wolf?
I dunno - may the problem isn't entirely with everyone else? Maybe the things you are so confident in aren't as black and white as you obviously assume?
Nah - it's easier to just ascribe it as the other guy being wrong. It couldn't possibly be me.
"I have at least one copy of Newsweek from the 80's.."
See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. My guess is that you're a middle class white guy, age 55-70, who learned during his formative years during the cold war that America was the greatest country ever, that we were beset from all sides by foreigners trying to destroy our way of life, and now, some 40 years later, your brain simply cannot accept anything that contradicts that fundamental narrative. I've seen it before. Your point of view on the world was essentially set in stone by the age of 20, and will never change. That's the world that to you seems normal, and anything else seems unreal and unbelievable.
I don't claim to be personally an expert on anything climate related, but the entire scientific community is unanimous on this issue- media does tend to overhype climate change, but they hype up everything. They are not who I'm talking about. I'm referring to the specific predictions as far as degrees of warming of qualified scientists, which indicate that we should probably expect about 3 degrees of warming, more or less.
Whereas you are a Random Stranger on the Internet, and I could easily give you lots of information and context disproving your vague and angry assertions ("screeching?"). But it won't make any difference, so I won't bother unless you show some signs of self awareness.
>I have at least one copy of Newsweek from the 80's with a picture of the frozen earth on the cover
I have at least one post on HN where everyone commented about how journalists don't know what they're writing about, get basic technical details wrong, and try to sensationalize everything because media is a business. You ever see that post?
on edit: to clarify not a post by me, just as the copy of Newsweek from the 80's was most probably not by you.
I believe science fiction can wake us up to our climate reality. But I don't think The Ministry For The Future is the book to do it.
You cannot "wake people up" by repeating conventional wisdom. And the beliefs represented in Ministry just seem like very traditional left-wing views to me. Big corporations are bad, we need to give diplomats and other government officials more power, once we just get really left-wing political leaders in charge the problem will be solved.
As far as KSR's eco-futurist science fiction goes, I preferred New York 2140 for its vivid portrayal of a flooded New York City. It has a bit of the same attitude, though, especially toward the end - if only our economy were organized into communes and workers' collectives instead of large corporations, surely those forms of business would appropriately prioritize the environment and lead us out of our troubles.
It is pretty cool that the author of this article went hiking through the Sierra with KSR. Shaman was a great book and this article gives you hints of how his knowledge of the wilderness enriched it.
14 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 43.0 ms ] thread"The Writing on the Wall: Sci-Fi’s Empty Techno-Optimism (bloodknife.com)"
at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30072850
https://www.lemodesittjr.com/ecolitan_matter/index.html
https://us.macmillan.com/series/ecolitanmatter
Climate change is a tiny piece of a much larger cultural war. The battle lines of that culture war are falling almost identically with COVID, and that's a problem with much more direct and visible consequences.
I know David Attenborough credits Star Trek IV with saving the whales, but nobody was ever against saving whales. They just didn't care. In the case of climate, people actively do not want the climate problem solved -- they consider it a deliberate hoax being perpetrated on them, and even measures that improve their lives are rejected as being totalitarian.
It would be great if artists of some sort could change that. The propaganda that convinced them otherwise is, itself, a form of art. But they've got a huge thumb on their side of the scale: the law always favors inaction, and it takes only a moderate-sized minority to prevent anything to help. It doesn't matter how aware everybody else is if collective action is impossible.
Many green politicians seem more interested in Europes energy independence than climate change for example. And at times those two goals don't work together.
Other times conflicts of interests favor subsidizing less than optimal solutions.
These issues also undermine public trust in climate change efforts.
I think it is time that we demand green leaders to take an impartial approach to climate change solutions and not let them get away with just blaming "deniers".
We can't even tell just how bad the arguments would be, because the presence of deniers shortcuts it. Nobody ever gets to make difficult compromises because "doing nothing" always wins out.
It's not just a matter of "it would all be over if we just did it my way". It probably would be... but that's not how things are done in a democracy. You have to take all the various groups into account. And when one large group is "absolutely nobody does anything", they get what they want because none of the actual discussions can be taken seriously.
This is all complicated by the fact that the worst deniers are in the US, and that they have outsized power here. Europe isn't especially thrilled about the idea of doing anything that costs anything -- whether it's money, their other environmental goals, or otherwise -- that the Americans will benefit from without paying for.
But, that was before covid. People will be on a ventilator, struggling to breathe, literally dying, and still claim that covid is all a big hoax. I wish I understood it, but I don’t. Some broken adaptation, some evolutionary dead end in the human psyche just primes many people to value what they want to be true above what is true.
Many people seem to have this view that the way things are right here and right now is normal and the cultural norms and customs they were born into are inevitable, and then extrapolate from there. Whereas of course there is no normal, and no guarantee that anyone will be okay, and culture is shifting sand, and whole groups of people die all the time for no good reason. Perhaps the stress of having those facts in your mind is just too much.
I don't think most people, especially those who are vaccine skeptical, think COVID is a hoax. I think you see people with different opinions on the response to COVID - especially when you see overt gaslighting for anything that goes against the blatantly obvious narrative.
Same with climate change - the more screeching about "the science is settled" the more people will dig their heals in and reject such a narrative. I have at least one copy of Newsweek from the 80's with a picture of the frozen earth on the cover and in the 90's climate alarmists were agressivly warning by the 2000's all the costal cities were going to be under water (and yet all the politicians and powerful people [such as the Obama's] are still buying property in Marthas Vineyard - barely above sea level).
Ever hear the story of Peter and the Wolf?
I dunno - may the problem isn't entirely with everyone else? Maybe the things you are so confident in aren't as black and white as you obviously assume?
Nah - it's easier to just ascribe it as the other guy being wrong. It couldn't possibly be me.
See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. My guess is that you're a middle class white guy, age 55-70, who learned during his formative years during the cold war that America was the greatest country ever, that we were beset from all sides by foreigners trying to destroy our way of life, and now, some 40 years later, your brain simply cannot accept anything that contradicts that fundamental narrative. I've seen it before. Your point of view on the world was essentially set in stone by the age of 20, and will never change. That's the world that to you seems normal, and anything else seems unreal and unbelievable.
I don't claim to be personally an expert on anything climate related, but the entire scientific community is unanimous on this issue- media does tend to overhype climate change, but they hype up everything. They are not who I'm talking about. I'm referring to the specific predictions as far as degrees of warming of qualified scientists, which indicate that we should probably expect about 3 degrees of warming, more or less.
Whereas you are a Random Stranger on the Internet, and I could easily give you lots of information and context disproving your vague and angry assertions ("screeching?"). But it won't make any difference, so I won't bother unless you show some signs of self awareness.
I have at least one post on HN where everyone commented about how journalists don't know what they're writing about, get basic technical details wrong, and try to sensationalize everything because media is a business. You ever see that post?
on edit: to clarify not a post by me, just as the copy of Newsweek from the 80's was most probably not by you.
You cannot "wake people up" by repeating conventional wisdom. And the beliefs represented in Ministry just seem like very traditional left-wing views to me. Big corporations are bad, we need to give diplomats and other government officials more power, once we just get really left-wing political leaders in charge the problem will be solved.
As far as KSR's eco-futurist science fiction goes, I preferred New York 2140 for its vivid portrayal of a flooded New York City. It has a bit of the same attitude, though, especially toward the end - if only our economy were organized into communes and workers' collectives instead of large corporations, surely those forms of business would appropriately prioritize the environment and lead us out of our troubles.
It is pretty cool that the author of this article went hiking through the Sierra with KSR. Shaman was a great book and this article gives you hints of how his knowledge of the wilderness enriched it.