I’ll pull out a few key points as to why I think this approach is far too simplistic to be meaningful

What is needed is a breakaway group of nations willing to get serious about the climate emergency. Who would join it? Most of the world’s countries, potentially.

Rupert Read has the best idea I have heard re international climate negotiations: countries that are serious should have their own conference where they collaborate on strong targets, plans, etc. Part of which should be recognising the dangers of remaining reliant on the petrostates, planning to transcend that reliance and sanctioning them

Social tipping points and physical tipping points are interrelated. With environmental stress, the former could arrive before the latter, and then cascades develop. Hamburg Climate Futures Outlook 2023: https://www.cliccs.uni-hamburg.de/results/hamburg-climate-futures-outlook.html

Without a solid spiritual foundation, humanity may well continue on its path toward self-destruction, whether it be through environmental collapse, nuclear war or Artificial Intelligence gone haywire. On the other hand, if we evolve our culture to value inner work as much as we value outer work, then our individual and collective spiritual wisdom might just catch up with our rapidly advancing technology.

there is a critical tipping threshold of 35% of the population, for plausible distributions of risk/conformity preferences and expectations.

Can policy promote beneficial norm change? The model suggests that effective interventions lower the tipping threshold.

Two factors consistently helped hasten beneficial change in our study.

Climate change can drive social tipping points – for better or for worse

But it's so essential that we go to this place that our brain gave us a solution. Evolution gave us a solution. And it's possibly one of the most profound perceptual experiences. And it's the experience of awe.

theology managed to change right from from the medieval theology

when the size of the committed minority reached~25% of the population, a tipping point wastriggered, and the minority group succeeded inchanging the established social convention.

Abstract

i can use myself as an example here i i consider myself a pretty smart person i'm in grad school i tried to be really analytical my whole 00:03:56 life and yet i showed up at college when i was 19 years old believing that all the supposedly scientific stuff that white nationalists used to support the idea of race being predictive and segregation being 00:04:09 good and all this stupid stuff i totally believed i thought they were right and i thought everybody was just denying it and it took a community of people in college over years to condemn my beliefs to 00:04:22 show me uh kindness to show me real vitriol to be these in these private conversations where we could go over the facts and it took a long time for me thinking i was really smart and analytical to 00:04:35 accept that it was morally wrong that it was ethically wrong

“And if they’re just below a tipping point, their efforts will fail. But remarkably, just by adding one more person, and getting above the 25 percent tipping point, their efforts can have rapid success in changing the entire population’s opinion.

When a minority group pushing change was below 25 percent of the total group, its efforts failed. But when the committed minority reached 25 percent, there was an abrupt change in the group dynamic, and quickly a majority of the population adopted the new norm.

06:06Weak Ties

25:13Complex Contagions

Semantic leadership   Extent to which word usage by one entity is subsequently adopted by others. Specifically, Klein measures how often novel semantic usage in a given newspaper is mirrored by other newspapers. When a newspaper is a semantic leader, its semantic usage better predicts the later usage of that word in other newspapers compared to those other newspapers' own, earlier usage of the word.

Those communities that reject business as usual and cut their energy spending and all the materialist values that go with it, just might survive the long emergency and write a different ending to this story.

right now we're not being honest with each other about our values and if that's happening then we cannot form norms you can't design norms they happen 00:47:46 out of human action not human design but they only emerge when there is a real consensus about our shared values and so we've got to get back to that i mean it seems almost like like self-evident and we'll duh but like 00:47:59 if if we're going to continue to self-silence or even lie about our beliefs like the result are going to be collective illusions at scale and whole societies can be taken down by those and listen it 00:48:11 would something like a free society living in a democracy like we take that for granted that is a blip in human history the idea that it can't disappear overnight is silly it can and it will 00:48:23 and it would be one thing if it disappeared because privately we collectively gave up on that experiment right but it's a tragedy if it disappears not because of 00:48:34 private change in values but because of collective illusions and that's that's what for me felt like the urgency to write the book right like that it just felt like things were spinning out of control 00:48:46 and yet we have more data on private opinion in america than probably anybody else i would argue um and i can tell you it's just not true right so i think that's both there's both a dangerous aspect to 00:48:58 illusions but also a hopeful one you know because history has shown us that if you recognize the illusion and you take an effort to dismantle it social change can happen at a scale and pace that would seem unimaginable 00:49:10 otherwise well i can't think of any other way to end in that message so thank you todd so much for this marathon you did with me and two parts thank you we obviously have so much shared values and we're not 00:49:22 as divided as people tell us we are [Laughter] but but now we know why right now we know why it feels that way and if we if we can recognize that we really can no longer trust our brain to accurately 00:49:36 read group consensus then we can get back to this it never really mattered right be who you are learn to be authentic um discover your real self and and work really hard to be congruent between your 00:49:48 private self and your public self the rest takes care of itself

it's essential and i just love the idea of setting an example for others you know 00:44:40 that's that's that's the way out of this trap is you start doing that and then other people in your group start doing it and then all of a sudden your group's the whole illusion breaks down the emperor has no clothes 00:44:53 or the emperor has clothes the effort does have clothes eventually eventually guess what i'm trying to say eventually yeah what's great about illusions is that they're powerful when they're enforced but they're fragile because 00:45:04 they're social lies right like like you don't want it to be true you wish it weren't true and so what you're really looking for is is wait a minute like so for some of us we just need one 00:45:15 other person to speak up to give us the the the strength to do the same other people need more but what you see is once you start getting the crack in the illusion it affects what we call like bandwagon 00:45:28 change right like it'll just swerve quickly and suddenly it looks like almost overnight the group has shifted its view so whenever you see stuff um it's funny in politics they call it momentum there's no such thing as momentum that's not what that is that is 00:45:41 that is that is an illusion where people's private behavior is like oh wait a minute this is like i can now say what i really think right i feel comfortable saying what i really think um so when you see like sort of exponential change 00:45:53 in public opinion like that's usually the that's usually that there's an illusion underneath there um because if people privately believe something it is very hard to change that and so you know doing that is like one off right i have 00:46:05 to change your mind or change someone else's mind and so you'll usually see slow linear growth or change in in public opinion when you see it change really quickly like it did with marriage equality marriage equality the public 00:46:17 approval for that i mean it's unreal since what since 2003 to today it's basically flipped in terms of its its acceptance like that doesn't happen if privately most people were against it it just doesn't 00:46:30 such a good point so much the reason why it's so hard is because like the oxytocin bonding mechanism is run so deep in our dna and our biology and and overriding that is not easy 00:46:42 because once we feel this social trust we we can lie you know we can we'll do anything well i cheat steal for our in group

Design of a hyper-response will be dependent on a comprehensive strategic planning process being enacted and ongoing discourse and revision. This strategic concept focuses on phase 1 and provides introductory ideas for phase 2.

Its success hinges on not only communication of the problem but also the capacity for humans to undertake synchronized action toward the same goal. Coordination, cooperation, teamwork, and leadership skills become significant to survival capacity.  

As the paper notes, a large body of work suggests that “the power of small groups comes not from their authority or wealth, but from their commitment to the cause”.

i think the focus was very much on energy supply and to a limited extent on things like um yeah technologies and like vehicle 01:00:07 technologies for example but um much much less in terms of getting people to particularly in developed countries to use less energy and to change diet and to travel less and fly less and all these these things and i think part of 01:00:19 that and it is also reflected in the fact that it was fairly much absent in the uk's net zero strategy is that it is seen as being politically difficult that it might be a you know it might mean that they that politicians lose votes that 01:00:33 it's just too difficult to get people to change their behavior that it's threatening that it might mean lower standards of living um in developed countries etc so i think kind of it's still it's still seen as something and that that was quite explicit i think in 01:00:45 the forward to the uk strategy um so i think in terms of how we move beyond that that's that's difficult but i think it is about reframing behavior change and demand demand management in 01:00:58 much more positive terms to say this isn't a threat there are actually opportunities there are opportunities to improve people's health and well-being to create green jobs to reskill people in new sectors and 01:01:09 and so on and it is not about you know reducing uh quality of life or well-being it's not about people losing jobs etc so this is i think there's a job here to kind of reframe it in terms of those those opportunities and those 01:01:22 co-benefits so that would be my my initial thought

social change typically spreads as ‘complex contagions,’ requiring multiple sources of social reinforcement to induce adoption,”

Social convention, which has for so long worked against us, can if flipped become our greatest source of power, normalising what now seems radical and weird. If we can simultaneously trigger a cascading regime shift in both technology and politics, we might stand a chance. It sounds like a wild hope. But we have no choice. Our survival depends on raising the scale of civil disobedience until we build the greatest mass movement in history, mobilising the 25% who can flip the system.

Another paper explored the possibility that the Fridays for Future climate protests could trigger this kind of domino dynamics. It showed how, in 2019, Greta Thunberg’s school strike snowballed into a movement that led to unprecedented electoral results for Green parties in several European nations. Survey data revealed a sharp change of attitudes, as people began to prioritise the environmental crisis. Fridays for Future came close, the researchers suggest, to pushing the European political system into a “critical state”. It was interrupted by the pandemic, and the tipping has not yet happened. But witnessing the power, the organisation and the fury of the movements gathered in Glasgow, I suspect the momentum is building again.

A final cluster gathers lenses that explore phenomena that are arguably more elastic and with the potential to both indirectly maintain and explicitly reject and reshape existing norms. Many of the topics addressed here can be appropriately characterized as bottom-up, with strong and highly diverse cultural foundations. Although they are influenced by global and regional social norms, the expert framing of institutions, and the constraints of physical infrastructure (from housing to transport networks), they are also domains of experimentation, new norms, and cultural change. Building on this potential for either resisting or catalyzing change, the caricature chosen here is one of avian metaphor and myth: the Ostrich and Phoenix cluster. Ostrich-like behavior—keeping heads comfortably hidden in the sand—is evident in different ways across the lenses of inequity (Section 5.1), high-carbon lifestyles (Section 5.2), and social imaginaries (Section 5.3), which make up this cluster. Yet, these lenses also point to the power of ideas, to how people can thrive beyond dominant norms, and to the possibility of rapid cultural change in societies—all forms of transformation reminiscent of the mythological phoenix born from the ashes of its predecessor. It is conceivable that this cluster could begin to redefine the boundaries of analysis that inform the Enabler cluster, which in turn has the potential to erode the legitimacy of the Davos cluster. The very early signs of such disruption are evident in some of the following sections and are subsequently elaborated upon in the latter part of the discussion.