for - comparison - doughnut economics - vs - safe and just earth system boundaries

• for: recommendation - replace SDG with downscaled earth system boundaries / doughnut economics

• recommendation

  • recommend syncing local actions to global impacts via downscaled earth system boundaries instead of just SDGs due to the urgent nature of the climate crisis

• for: good match - SONEC - TPF, good match - SONEC - downscaled earth system boundaries, good match - SONEC - doughnut economics

• for: doughnut economics, climate change - societal impacts, whole system change - motivation
• question: why transform?
  • answer
    • The word transformation is carefully chosen by John and here he explains why.
    • We face an extreme and growing polycrisis that threatens to overpower our capacity to cope with it unless we act now for whole system transformation.
    • Voices across all of society are becoming more vocal of the need to transform the existing system.
    • This transformation program does not need everyone to participate, just a sufficient but small percentage of the population who are aligned to these ideas.
    • Not everyone believes such transformation is necessary but the R+D project only needs to onboard a small percentage of the population who does believe to change the entire system for the benefit of even the non-believers.
• comment
  • John is implying social tipping points as well as social engineering

• for: earth system boundaries, safe and just boundaries, planetary boundaries, doughnut economics, bend the curve
• title Earth System Boundaries for a Just World on a Safe Planet
• source
  • Future Earth, Earth Commission
• date
  • June 2023

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=complexity+exonomics+textbook&crid=2SZP0E6DIIR6J&sprefix=complexity+exonomics+text%2Caps%2C630&ref=nb_sb_noss

While I'm reading Doughnut Economics, it's interesting to contemplate the images on common economics textbooks as an indicator of how the authors/publishers think about the models of the information inside them.

Some broad ideas represented here: - bustling people (consumers) walking over curvy 3D graph grids - greenish abstract cover (representing the green idea of money) - a compass rose (indicating finding one's direction; on a book about managerial economics and business strategy) - a globe of the world with a colorful infographic heat map - a bunch of blue and silver metal balls connected in a network-like configuration - a montage of images of numbers (credit card numbers, numbers on money, a ticker with stock prices, etc.) - a solar panel with blue sky and clouds in the background - blue sky with white fluffy clouds (indicating what, exactly?) - an ipad with an image of a busy street in the 1800s held up as if taking a photo of the same street today - puzzle pieces being put together with an image of people exchanging money at a farmer's market - abstract grid of a map outline of the Americas

Raworth, Kate. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist. White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017.

If the "whole is greater than the sum of its parts" who benefits from the excess value and how is that economically broken up in a fair manner?

Where are the tools for graphing inter-dependencies of areas of study? When entering a new area it would be interesting to have visual mappings of ideas and thoughts.

If ideas in an area were chunked into atomic ideas, then perhaps either a Markov monkey or a similar actor could find the shortest learning path from a basic idea to more complex ideas.

Example: what is the shortest distance from an understanding of linear algebra to learn and master Lie algebras?

Link to Garden of Forking Paths

Link to tools like Research Rabbit, Open Knowledge Maps and Connected Papers, but for ideas instead of papers, authors, and subject headings.

It has long been useful for us to simplify our thought models for topics like economics to get rid of extraneous ideas to come to basic understandings within such a space. But over time, we need to branch out into related and even distant subjects like mathematics, psychology, engineering, sociology, anthropology, politics, physics, computer science, etc. to be able to delve deeper and come up with more complex and realistic models of thought.Our early ideas like the rational actor within economics are fine and lovely, but we now know from the overlap of psychology and sociology which have given birth to behavioral economics that those mythical rational actors are quaint and never truly existed. To some extent, to move forward as a culture and a society we need to rid ourselves of these quaint ideas to move on to more complex and sophisticated ones.

Kate Raworth's Donut Economics thesis is a step in the direction of reframing economics towards cooperation and creating a self-sustaining world.

• Title: Consumption Corridors: Living a Good Life within Sustainable Limits
• This book explores how to enhance peoples’ chances to live a good life in a world of ecological and social limits.

• 21:52 Carbon credits, carbon markets
  • it's a scam designed to perpetuate fossil fuel use, in a phoney war against the climate crisis
  • Offsets were designed to allow polluters to pay others to create schemes that would compensate or "offset" that pollution. The classic example WAS afforestation, the planting of trees that can sequester that carbon.
  • Carbon neutrality comes from this idea that you can keep polluting if you offset it and become "carbon neutral"
  • A company may decarbonize a lot of their supply chain but may struggle to get rid of airflights around the world. In that case, they use offsets. When companies analyze the very difficult choices, they take the easy way out and use carbon offsets
  • However, there is so much offsets for afforestation now that there isn't enough land on earth
  • Carbon markets are a recipe for grifting and fraud or zero impacts
    • https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe
  • This is the current state of offsets

31:00 Shell oil carbon offset greenwashing scam - the sky zero proposal - Shell claims they can offset all the O+G emissions out of the ground - it is preposterous - there's not enough land on earth when you tally up all the carbon offset afforestation schemes

• 32:30 Neo-colonialism

  • rich white man can offset his emissions by buying land from a developing nation. Now the indigenous people cannot use that land for any reason.
  • also, will require huge amount of water to grow those trees
  • we don't have enough land and we don't have 100 years, only 5 years.
  • nature-based solutions are an industrial, myopic approach

• 37:00 Deferred Emission Reduction

  • a lot of carbon credits are called deferred emission reduction credits.
  • this is avoided emissions - ie. trees in a forest with 100 ton of sequestering potential
  • this is promise to not destroy the biosphere any further so it's not removing any existing carbon
  • maybe multiple people might own the same forest, or someone might come along and burn it down
  • Trees are vulnerable to climate impacts - ie. Microsoft bought a large forest in California that later burned down in a climate change intensified wildfire

• 40:00 can we do anything within the extractive capitalist system?

  • some people claim that as long as extractivist capitalism still persists, we cannot have system change
  • also a neocolonialist element - global north exploited the global south to create most of the emissions in the atmospheric commons
  • a number of people are beginning to see that an extractivist capitalist system is not in line with effectively addressing the climate crisis
  • wind, solar, etc has displaced electricity generation in a number of countries like in the UK. However, these are only a few countries.Renewables are helping increase overall energy production

• 44:22: Stop burning fossil fuels

  • t doesn't matter if investments in renewables triple. It won't make a difference if we don't significantly stop burning fossil fuels at the same time.

• 47:00 economic growth prevents real change

  • Insisting on 1, 2 or 3% growth, will limit the response to the climate threat to render it irrelevant
  • Climate change is still mostly an optimization problem. They are more concerned with economic damage.
  • Economists believe that anything that threatens economic growth cannot be accepted

• 51:00 Degrowth making headway

  • Degrowth scholars are getting more attention on the need to decouple economic grwoth from climate policies

• 52:10 Is there a positive future scenario - The role of solidarity

  • Solidarity is the greatest strength we can harness.
  • The success of Doughnut Economics gives me hope
  • The richest 1% must reign in their impacts and redistribute to allow the impoverished to live humane lives
  • We can all have good lives and we don't have to manufacture that wonder
  • This is what it is to be human

• The = Earth Commission,
• proposes ‘safe and just Earth system boundaries’ (ESBs)
• that go beyond planetary boundaries as
  • they also include a justice perspective
  • suggest transformations to achieve them.

• Safe and just ESBs aim to:

  • stabilize the Earth system,
  • protect species and ecosystems,
  • avoid tipping points,
  • minimize ‘significant harm’ to people while ensuring access to resources for a dignified life and escape from poverty.

• If justice is not considered,

• the biophysical limits may not be adequate

• to protect current generations from significant harm

• Comment

• Similar to aims of doughnut economics

• = Earth system justice
• build upon = Doughnut economics socio-economic boundaries.

//

• This is a good resource to explore doughnut economics at a national scale for many countries of the world.
• The two quadrants show a major pattern and dualism between 1) many developed countries that can meet socio-economic well-being, but only at the high price of exceeding planetary boundaries, and 2) many countries that stay under planetary boundary limits, but only at the expense of poor socio-economic indicators.
• The conclusion of the study is that currently, a good life for all within planet boundaries does not exist

This cpatures the key challenges to downscaling esp to regional levels, along with a possible solution

Article is sceptical of capacity to downscale global concepts, and of the capacity to link social and ecological dimensions of the doughnut

!- local doughnut economics : challenges - incumbent power will resist constraints to socio-economic limits - local doughnut economic champions will need to provide strong leadership to counter such actors

!- doughnut economics : local governance -will require major power shifts so becomes political - there is a need for transparency, accountability and responsiveness, especially to those who are marginalized

!- downscaling : planetary boundaries and doughnut economics - neither has the traction as SDGs

!- downscaling : doughnut economics - challenges - wider stakeholder engagement than just scientific community is required

!- downscaling : doughnut economics - challenges related to place-based dynamic systems

!- downscaling : doughnut economics - challenges in downscaling

!- limitations of : doughnut economic model - the interactions, feedbacks and nonlinearities between societal activity and earth system behavior is far too complex for the doughnut economic model

!- in other words : "safe" and "just" - thinking in terms of doughnut economics, safe refers to staying within biophysical constraints and just refers to staying within socio-economic constraints of human civilization to ensure wellbeing

Her diagram explicitly shows a synthesis of planetary boundaries and circular economy. This is a connection that many in this area are tacitly aware of but is good to explicate it in a diagram of this sort..

If circular economy is about ultimate reuse and recirculating material flows to eliminate the concept of waste, then how does energy consumption fit into the picture? Obviously, CO2 emissions is a form of material waste that is an undesirable byproduct of carbon-based energy usage. Capturing CO2 and reusing it is one method, but not a very scalable solution presently.

These are umbrella categories that can allow for the classification of vast numbers of existing transition projects. With the use of disaggregated planetary boundaries, doughnut economics framework, Inner and Outer transformation, and Bend-the-Curve gamification, the impacts of each type of operation can be measured.

The Tipping Point Festival can introduce the Bend-the-Curve (BtC) gamification to engage as many cities, towns, rural communities and bioregions as possible. A 3 year research program to dis-aggregate planetary boundaries can allocate a fairshare of local biophysical targets each city, town, rural community and bioregion must aim to achieve if we as a civilization are to meet the 1.5 deg C target, as well as other Anthropocene and planetary boundary targets.

Doughnut economic framework can be adopted immediately and educated across all communities to plant seeds of local change actor chapters who can start their own local doughnut economies and begin reshaping their local economy into circular bio WEconomies.

When the dis-aggregated planetary boundary metrics are available, then each community can adopt and aim to bend their local curve, in order that we altogether bend the global curves back to a safe operating space.

it may be questionable whether we are able to develop highly accurate targets, but even if we are close enough, the greater value is to allow citizens to have a tangible and compelling and measurable reason to work together, organize and mitigate our human impacts in a systematic way. In this way, we can expose the hyperthreat by breaking it down into digestable, identifiable pieces that are cognitively more accessible and can lodge into the salience landscape of the individuals of a community.

This is the million dollar question and requires a lot of science to calculate it.

New stories and narratives, in other words, new social imaginaries of viable low carbon life styles can help bring about a shift. By adopting the viable story, it primes individuals to seek technology elements that are designed to fit that new social imaginary.

As mentioned above, community economists Michael Shuman demonstrates how relocalizing can create new patterns of behavior consistent with a desirable future.

The Swiss 2000 Watt society is another example of such a new social imaginary https://www.2000-watt-society.org/what as is Doughnut Economics https://doughnuteconomics.org/

We must engage film-makers, artists, playwrights to create stories of such alternative futures of living within planetary boundaries, doughnut economics and eco-civilizations.

Constructing social imaginaries that are alternatives to the petrocutultural, carbonscape ones is critical to shift the mindset.

Carbon pollution cannot be disentangled from colonialism and social imaginaries must consist of stories that tell alternative futures narratives that address both simultaneously.

Replace petroculture with ecoculture, doughnut economics, living within planetary boundaries and eco-civilization

New stories and narratives, in other world, new social imaginaries of viable low carbon life styles can help bring about a shift. By adopting the viable story, it primes individuals to seek technology elements that are designed to fit that new social imaginary.

The Swiss 2000 Watt society is an example of such a new social imaginary https://www.2000-watt-society.org/what as is Doughnut Economics https://doughnuteconomics.org/