So, my specific definition of "strategic ignorance" is new, but the reality it speaks to is old: the fact that the power of any dominant group typically functions through strategic ignorance, through the ability to select which voices and forms of evidence to acknowledge and which evidence to dismiss.

Strategic ignorance is effective because it is hard to detect; hard to point out without seeming conspiratorial; and hard to prosecute because perpetrators successfully efface the evidence that could indict them, or, importantly, they thwart inconvenient evidence from emerging in the first place, like Blair’s halting of the BAE Systems inquiry. Most troublingly, we don’t empirically know how often strategic ignorance works and just how effective it is, because the most "successful" examples of strategic ignorance are, quite literally, the tactics that work so well that they can never be detected.

What is the "ostrich instruction"? It’s an informal way to refer to an important legal principle, which is that deliberate avoidance of knowledge about one’s own illegal actions should not be a valid defence in law. It’s one of the reasons why, just over 15 years ago, American executives at the energy company Enron were found guilty even though their direct role in malfeasance at Enron wasn’t clear. They should and could have known about fraud, and they were found guilty. Enron has been pointed to as proof that wilful ignorance does not pay. But in my book I stress that that Enron is a fairly isolated case. As a number of other people have pointed out, from journalists Matt Taibbi and Jesse Eisenger to legal scholar Rena Steinzor, US authorities have had an abysmal record of successful prosecution of white-collar crime in recent decades. An American legal scholar based in the UK, Alexander Sarch, is doing important work on this topic. But he is an exception, and I’m a little critical of mainstream legal scholarship in my book. I suggest that legal scholars themselves have been acting ostrich-like about recent shifts in the law. For example, the old adage "ignorance of the law is no excuse" is increasingly waived in US courts when it comes to complex financial and tax crimes. This shift is one of the reasons why I argue that for many powerful and rich people, ignorance really is legal bliss.

I suggest that the very term "free market" is a type of micro-ignorance because it conceals more than it reveals by purporting to reflect a phenomenon that has never existed and can never exist in actual economic reality. Of course we have never had a "free market", and more importantly, the largest imperialist super-powers of the modern age, and especially the US and UK, did not get rich through a "free market", but through different types of government interventionism and protectionism that have long benefited society’s richest groups, often at the expense of exploited workers across the world. This fact is both widely known and oddly ignored even today in economic theory and economic policy-making. In the book, I explore the history of economic thought over a 200-year period, from late enlightenment figures including Burke and Wollstonecraft in the 18th century, through classical liberals such as Tocqueville and Bastiat in the 19th century, through to 20th century figures such as Friedrich Hayek, to understand the ways that dominant economic theories of economic growth have obscured wider recognition of the role of governments in creating economic markets over modern history.

But I’m also glad that you highlight the "political" in your question, because politics gets left out a lot of the time. People have tended to focus more on how corporate actors such as big tobacco, big pharma and big food have all engaged in the strategic production of ignorance. This can sideline the problem of strategic ignorance by governments or the judiciary. It’s one of the reasons why I argue that it is important not to treat strategic ignorance as simply a psychological problem at the individual level. I think it’s better to suggest that different groups in society have enhanced political power to make the deliberate avoidance of inconvenient truths appear more legitimate or defensible than it really is. To give one example, when he was prime minister, Tony Blair put pressure on the former attorney general Lord Goldsmith to halt an investigation into bribery at BAE Systems. Blair didn’t want the embarrassment of having corruption at a major British firm exposed, and his effort to shut down the legal investigation is a type of strategic ignorance.

Since then, I’ve been one of a group of scholars developing a new academic field known as "ignorance studies". Seriously, the field does exist, even though people sometimes chuckle at the phrase.

ociologists and historians, on the other hand, usually view it more in line with my definition above. They view strategic ignorance as both an individual and a collective phenomenon. This helps to underscore the role of institutional power and institutional actors in preventing inconvenient facts from becoming more widely known or accepted.

Behavioural economists and psychologists, on the one hand, tend to define strategic ignorance in a psychological way. They see it as the personal avoidance of inconvenient or uncomfortable facts.

"Ignorance really is blissful, especially for the powerful" Q&A with Linsey McGoey, author of "The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World".

we're going to talk in this series 00:01:10 about a series of papers that i just published in the in the journal sustainability that that series is titled science driven societal transformation

The results of this unprecedented appropri-ation of nature can now be seen much moreclearly than even 15 years ago (17), thanks torapid advances in data and tools for obser-vation, analysis, synthesis, and modeling ofmarine, freshwater, and especially terrestrialnature. These new data reveal that humanactions have directly altered at least 70% ofland surface (18, 19); 66% of ocean surface isexperiencing increasing cumulative impacts(20); around 85% of wetland area has beenlost since the 1700s (21), and 77% of riverslonger than 1000 km no longer flow freelyfrom source to sea (22).

Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earthpoints to the need for transformative change

The lesson of fallen societies is that civilization is a vulnerable organism, especially when it seems almighty. We are the world’s top predator, and predators crash suddenly when they outgrow their prey. If the resulting chaos unleashes nuclear war, it could bring mass extinction in a heartbeat, with Homo sapiens among the noted dead.

As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says in its October 2018 report, keeping global warming below 1.5 C “is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics” but will require “unprecedented changes” before 2030.

Back in Classical Greece, Plato suggested that in a just society there should be no more than a 5:1 spread in income between richest and poorest. That was a hard sell then, and still would be. But what might be reasonable today? Where should the balance be struck to help the weakest while still rewarding effort and achievement? Given the seriousness of what we face, this is a conversation we must have. The wealth already wrenched from nature might just be enough to buy us a lasting future if it were shared, managed, and ploughed into solutions.

One of the sad ironies of our time is that we have become very good at studying nature just as it begins to sicken and die under our weight. “Weight” is no mere metaphor: of all land mammals and birds alive today, humans and their livestock make up 96 per cent of the biomass; wildlife has dwindled to four per cent. This has no precedent. Not so far back in history the proportions were the other way round. As recently as 1970, humans were only half and wildlife more than twice their present numbers. These closely linked figures are milestones along our rush towards a trashed and looted planet, stripped of diversity, wildness, and resilience; strewn with waste. Such is the measure of our success.

First, our numbers have risen by 1.4 billion, nearly a hundred million per year. In other words, we’ve added another China or 40 more Canadas to the world. The growth rate has fallen slightly, but consumption of resources — from fossil fuel to water, from rare earths to good earth — has risen twice as steeply, roughly doubling our impact on nature. This outrunning of population by economic growth has lifted perhaps a billion of the poorest into the outskirts of the working class, mainly in China and India. Yet those in extreme poverty and hunger still number at least a billion. Meanwhile, the wealthiest billion — to which most North Americans and Europeans and many Asians now belong — devour an ever-growing share of natural capital. The commanding heights of this group, the billionaires’ club, has more than 2,200 members with a combined known worth nearing $10 trillion; this super-elite not only consumes at a rate never seen before but also deploys its wealth to influence government policy, media content, and key elections. Such, in a few words, is the shape of the human pyramid today.

In the deep past these setbacks were local. The overall experiment of civilization kept going, often by moving from an exhausted ecology to one with untapped potential. Human numbers were still quite small. At the height of the Roman Empire there are thought to have been only 200 million people on Earth. Compare that with the height of the British Empire a century ago, when there were two billion. And with today, when there are nearly eight. Clearly, things have moved very quickly since the Industrial Revolution took hold around the world. In A Short History of Progress, I suggested that worldwide civilization was our greatest experiment; and I asked whether this might also prove to be the greatest progress trap. That was 15 years ago.

Yet there were still many traps along the way. In what is now Iraq, the Sumerian civilization (one of the world’s first) withered and died as the irrigation systems it invented turned the fields into salty desert. Some two thousand years later, in the Mediterranean basin, chronic soil erosion steadily undermined the Classical World: first the Greeks, then the Romans at the height of their power. And a few centuries after Rome’s fall, the Classic Maya, one of only two high civilizations to thrive in tropical rainforest (the other being the Khmer), eventually wore out nature’s welcome at the heart of Central America.

Most survivors of that progress trap became farmers — a largely unconscious revolution during which all the staple foods we eat today were developed from wild roots and seeds (yes, all: no new staples have been produced from scratch since prehistoric times). Farming brought dense human populations and centralized control, the defining ingredients of full-blown civilization for the last five thousand years.

The first trap was hunting, the main way of life for about two million years in Palaeolithic times. As Stone Age people perfected the art of hunting, they began to kill the game more quickly than it could breed. They lived high for a while, then starved.

Ronald Wright: Can We Still Dodge the Progress Trap? Author of 2004’s ‘A Short History of Progress’ issues a progress report.

Prof. Meiri: "Our study tracked changes at a much higher resolution over a considerably longer period of time compared to previous research. The results were illuminating: we found a continual, and very significant, decline in the size of animals hunted by humans over 1.5 million years. For example, a third of the bones left behind by Homo erectus at sites dated to about a million years ago, belonged to elephants that weighed up to 13 tons (more than twice the weight of the modern African elephant) and provided humans with 90% of their food. The mean weight of all animals hunted by humans at that time was 3 tons, and elephant bones were found at nearly all sites up to 500,000 years ago. "Starting about 400,000 years ago, the humans who lived in our region -- early ancestors of the Neandertals and Homo sapiens, appear to have hunted mainly deer, along with some larger animals weighing almost a ton, such as wild cattle and horses. Finally, in sites inhabited by modern humans, from about 50,000 to 10,000 years ago, approximately 70% of the bones belong to gazelles -- an animal that weighs no more than 20-30kg. Other remains found at these later sites came mostly from fallow deer (about 20%), as well as smaller animals such as hares and turtles."

Dr. Ben-Dor: "Our findings enable us to propose a fascinating hypothesis on the development of humankind: humans always preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their environment, until these became very rare or extinct, forcing the prehistoric hunters to seek the next in size. As a result, to obtain the same amount of food, every human species appearing in the Southern Levant was compelled to hunt smaller animals than its predecessor, and consequently had to develop more advanced and effective technologies. Thus, for example, while spears were sufficient for Homo erectus to kill elephants at close range, modern humans developed the bow and arrow to kill fast-running gazelles from a distance." Prof. Barkai concludes: "We believe that our model is relevant to human cultures everywhere. Moreover, for the first time, we argue that the driving force behind the constant improvement in human technology is the continual decline in the size of game. Ultimately, it may well be that 10,000 years ago in the Southern Levant, animals became too small or too rare to provide humans with sufficient food, and this could be related to the advent of agriculture. In addition, we confirmed the hypothesis that the extinction of large animals was caused by humans -- who time and time again destroyed their own livelihood through overhunting. We may therefore conclude that humans have always ravaged their environment but were usually clever enough to find solutions for the problems they had created -- from the bow and arrow to the agricultural revolution. The environment, however, always paid a devastating price."

Prof. Barkai: "In light of previous studies, our team proposed an original hypothesis that links the two questions: We think that large animals went extinct due to overhunting by humans, and that the change in diet and the need to hunt progressively smaller animals may have propelled the changes in humankind. In this study we tested our hypotheses in light of data from excavations in the Southern Levant covering several human species over a period of 1.5 million years." Jacob Dembitzer adds: "We considered the Southern Levant (Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Southwest Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon) to be an 'archaeological laboratory' due to the density and continuity of prehistoric findings covering such a long period of time over a relatively small area -- a unique database unavailable anywhere else in the world. Excavations, which began 150 years ago, have produced evidence for the presence of humans, beginning with Homo erectus who arrived 1.5 million years ago, through the neandertals who lived here from an unknown time until they disappeared about 45,000 years ago, to modern humans (namely, ourselves) who came from Africa in several waves, starting around 180,000 years ago."

Findings indicate a continual decline in the size of game hunted by humans as their main food source -- from giant elephants 1-1.5 million years ago down to gazelles 10,000 years ago. According to the researchers, these findings paint an illuminating picture of the interaction between humans and the animals around them over the last 1.5 million years.

In this way, according to the researchers, early humans repeatedly overhunted large animals to extinction (or until they became so rare that they disappeared from the archaeological record) and then went on to the next in size -- improving their hunting technologies to meet the new challenge. The researchers also claim that about 10,000 years ago, when animals larger than deer became extinct, humans began to domesticate plants and animals to supply their needs, and this may be why the agricultural revolution began in the Levant at precisely that time.

A groundbreaking study by researchers from Tel Aviv University tracks the development of early humans' hunting practices over the last 1.5 million years -- as reflected in the animals they hunted and consumed. The researchers claim that at any given time early humans preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their surroundings, which provided the greatest quantities of food in return for a unit of effort.

A new study tracks the development of early humans' hunting practices over the last 1.5 million years -- as reflected in the animals they hunted and consumed. The researchers claim that at any given time early humans preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their surroundings, which provided the greatest quantities of food in return for a unit of effort.

From giant elephants to nimble gazelles: Early humans hunted the largest available animals to extinction for 1.5 million years, study finds

Multiple large-bodied species went extinct during the Pleistocene. Changing climates and/or human hunting are the main hypotheses used to explain these extinctions. We studied the causes of Pleistocene extinctions in the Southern Levant, and their subsequent effect on local hominin food spectra, by examining faunal remains in archaeological sites across the last 1.5 million years. We examined whether climate and climate changes, and/or human cultures, are associated with these declines. We recorded animal abundances published in the literature from 133 stratigraphic layers, across 58 Pleistocene and Early Holocene archaeological sites, in the Southern Levant. We used linear regressions and mixed models to assess the weighted mean mass of faunal assemblages through time and whether it was associated with temperature, paleorainfall, or paleoenvironment (C3 vs. C4 vegetation). We found that weighted mean body mass declined log-linearly through time. Mean hunted animal masses 10,500 years ago, were only 1.7% of those 1.5 million years ago. Neither body size at any period, nor size change from one layer to the next, were related to global temperature or to temperature changes. Throughout the Pleistocene, new human lineages hunted significantly smaller prey than the preceding ones. This suggests that humans extirpated megafauna throughout the Pleistocene, and when the largest species were depleted the next-largest were targeted. Technological advancements likely enabled subsequent human lineages to effectively hunt smaller prey replacing larger species that were hunted to extinction or until they became exceedingly rare.

We did not find strong evidence to suggest that climate, climatic fluctuations, rainfall, or vegetation over the last 1.5 million years, influenced the size of animals hunted and consumed by humans. Rather, mean body size declined linearly on a backdrop of multiple glacial-interglacial cycles. New human lineages subsisted on smaller prey than their predecessors and used more advanced tools to cope with hunting smaller prey. We suggest that hominins were likely the leading cause of Pleistocene

The Southern Levant, situated between modern day southern Syria via Israel to Sinai, has a spatiotemporally dense and continuous Paleolithic archaeological record offering a unique opportunity to detect faunal changes, including those predating the appearance of Homo sapiens (Bar-Yosef, 1980; Stutz, 2014). It is thus a suitable model to test long-term changes in the body mass of mammalian assemblages, in view of paleoclimates and changing human lineages, to decipher whether climate and/or humans are responsible for animal body size declines. The excellent archaeological record can further illuminate whether size declines are observed since hominins first colonized the region, or whether they start with the emergence of Homo sapiens (Louys et al., 2021), or are concentrated in the last glacial and its aftermath. We tested whether the size, and size changes, in hominin prey through the Pleistocene and early Holocene were related to time, the prevailing human lineages and cultures, paleoenvironment, and temperatures.

Levantine overkill: 1.5 million years of hunting down the body size distributionAuthor links open overlay panelJacobDembitzeraRanBarkaibMikiBen-DorbShaiMeiriac

Each of the transitions has been a progress trap, and every escape into a new way of life has relied on more energy and more information. The authors note that civilizations can collapse, but not into a previous way of life. Farmers don’t go back to hunting and gathering; they desert their kings, priests, and cities and go back to small-scale farming. When the first global society of the early 1900s collapsed after the First World War, countries reverted to tariffs and relatively small-scale capitalism — and large-scale wars. If the Trump regime has its way, we’ll see a similar reversion. But Lewis and Maslin note that each transition arrives faster than the previous one, and a fifth transition could be upon us very soon. The Great Acceleration is accelerating. In the past 40 years, we have digitized 500 times the information coded biologically in the human species. We consume more energy than ever before, and our demand for it will increase by 48 per cent between 2012 and 2040. More people are travelling and exchanging more information. Accelerating into a wall? The authors argue that “The simultaneous rapid increases in the number of people, level of energy provision and quantity of information being generated, driven by the positive feedback loops of reinvestment of profit, and ever-growing scientific knowledge, suggest that our current mode of living is the least probable of our three future options. Such rapid, radical changes suggest that a collapse or a switch to a new mode of living is more likely.” If We Can’t Stop Hothouse Earth, We’d Better Learn to Live on It read more Climate change, Lewis and Maslin say, makes collapse look likely. Violent weather events create food shortages, population displacements, rebuilding costs, and economic dislocation as global supply chains break down. The problem for the Anthropocene, they argue, is “how to equalize resource consumption across the world within sustainable environmental limits.” This involves moving much faster to renewable energy sources and leaving the damn fossil fuels in the ground. It also involves carbon capture and sequestration, on a far greater scale than was accomplished by the destruction of the American indigenous civilizations. So we might plant new forests and burn their wood for energy while trapping and burying the carbon dioxide emissions.

Since 1945 this “Great Acceleration” has permitted the tripling of the human population and the crowding-out of the rest of the planet’s biosphere. Lewis and Maslin tell us: “Populations of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals have declined by an average of 58 percent over the last forty years… On land, if you weighed all the large mammals on the planet today, just 3 percent of that mass is living in the wild. The rest is made up of human flesh, some 30 percent of the total, with domesticated animals that feed us contributing the remaining 67 percent.”

That led to the third transition: Europeans no longer needed on the farm became mill workers and coal miners. Scientific progress encouraged coal-fuelled industries and the telegraph spread information worldwide.

the conquest of the Americas was also a second human transition: an escape from agriculture to profit-driven enterprise: “Western Europeans began colonizing large areas of the rest of the world, creating the first globalized economy.” Lewis and Maslin call this the “Columbian exchange,” when humans, animals, plants, and microbes established themselves in places they had never been before. Energy from new foods, and information from printing, helped drive this new transition. Farming resumed in the Americas to feed and clothe the Europeans, using the labour of African slaves.

So the first transition, they say, was about 10,500 years ago with the beginning of agriculture. Some have said farming was our biggest mistake: it supported more of us, but at the cost of more disease, poor nutrition, grinding labour, and hierarchical societies that turned into warring empires. But we gained more energy from domesticating animals, and more information by the invention of writing. “Serendipitously,” the authors write, “farming created environmental conditions across our home planet that were unusually stable. This gave time for large-scale civilizations to develop.” That is, humans launched global warming not in the 1800s but with the first agriculture. By burning off forests to make farmland, we began to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — coincidentally, just as the earth was moving on schedule back into another glacial period. Over the next few thousand years farming spread across Asia, Africa, Europe, and much of the Americas, keeping the planet just a little too warm for a return of the glaciers.

The authors argue that the Europeans accidentally triggered the Little Ice Age by marching into Mexico and South America with guns, germs, and steel — especially germs. Diseases like smallpox and measles travelled on Indigenous trade routes far ahead of the Spanish and Portuguese. In the century after the conquest of Mexico, Lewis and Maslin claim, 50 million Indigenous people died of disease or slavery. In that truly genocidal century, farming civilizations collapsed from Brazil to North America. The survivors left the cities and temples they’d built and reverted to village-level farming. Forest and jungle took over the old empires before the Iberians rode in to take over the villages. Lewis and Maslin argue that as forests reoccupied the farmlands that had fed 50 million people, they absorbed enough carbon dioxide to trigger the Little Ice Age. Antarctic ice cores show a drop in global carbon dioxide starting in 1520 that did not begin to rise again until 1610.

We emerged from the apelike human phase thanks to fire and language. Together, those advantages made us apex predators: we could learn to hunt and forage from our elders and then gain more energy by cooking the food we gathered. After 200,000 years some of us still live that way, but it was what Lewis and Maslin call a “progress trap.” After modern humans left Africa, they effectively exterminated most of the larger mammals they encountered: the mammoths, giant sloths, sabre-tooth tigers, and countless others. In effect, they overshot their resources.

Lewis and Maslin argue that humanity has gone through four major transitions since we left 200,000 years of hunting and gathering. Each transition has been marked by a dramatic access to energy and an equally dramatic increase in information.

The debate might seem too trivial to care about, but as authors Simon Lewis and Mark A. Maslin demonstrate, the stakes are very high indeed. They show that scientists since the 18th century have recognized human influence on the face of the earth. What we have learned since then, and especially in the past 50 years, shows our influence has grown only greater; we just don’t want to admit it, because then we’d have to try to clean up the mess we’ve made.

Can Humanity Get Out of Its Latest ‘Progress Trap’? A review of ‘The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene.’

Non-uniform tropical forest responses to the ‘Columbian Exchange’ in the Neotropics and Asia-Pacific

all kinds of regressions along the way um and there's many things that are getting worse um but for most um for most indicators of human well-being uh the world is in a 00:02:18 great trajectory and the last few centuries have been um a great direction uh however we're now confronted with a series of x-risks um or how uh david one of the 00:02:30 researchers in the um in our team likes to put public bads in extreme public baths that we have to have to really avoid and these especially the ones that are human caused um 00:02:44 present extreme challenges for us to get through and we we sort of control the speed at which we'll uh hit these uh but especially things like nuclear war and engineered pandemics and on ai 00:02:57 uh those kinds of risks

this is going to be a really critical year uh for public goods uh generation um and here at year i'm using 00:00:40 you know starting from now through the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. uh so what i'm going to go through is a case for why this year really matters and why this decade really matters in 00:00:53 the century

funding the commons

Chapter 5: Demand, services and social aspects of mitigation

Realisable service level efficiency improvements could38reduce upstream energy demand by 45% in 2050.

To enhance well-being, people demand5services and not primary energy and physical resources per se. Focusing on demand for services and6the different social and political roles people play broadens the participation in climate action.

The richest 10 percent accounted for over half (52 percent) of the emissions added to the atmosphere between 1990 and 2015. The richest one percent were responsible for 15 percent of emissions during this time – more than all the citizens of the EU and more than twice that of the poorest half of humanity (7 percent).

And with hope, we can change the world.

Maybe it’s time we talk about it?

Gandhi once said, “Anything that exists is possible.

It’s as if we need the gravitational pull of both worlds to keep us on track, locked on a good and righteous path. Without both worlds pulling on us, we would crash into one, or simply lose our way, hurtling through the universe on our own, intersecting nothing, helping no one.

biophilia

It is now impossible for the world’s leaders to say that they “didn’t know” that this was going on, and that we didn’t have the power to prevent it all along. We scientists have been working hard, collecting evidence, writing reports, and presenting it all to the world’s leaders and the broader public. No one can honestly say that we haven’t been warning the world for decades.

feelings of gloom, and serious bouts of anxiety and depression, are common and becoming more serious.

The Space Between Two Worlds

Milkoreit et al. (23) propose a common definition of social tipping points (STPs) as points “within an SES at which a small quantitative change inevitably triggers a non-linear change in the social component of the SES, driven by self-reinforcing positive-feedback mechanisms, that inevitably and often irreversibly lead to a qualitatively different state of the social system.” There are historical examples of dynamic social spreading effects leading to a large self-amplification of small interventions: For example, the writings of one man, Martin Luther, injected through newly available printing technology into a public ready for such change, triggered the worldwide establishment of Protestant churches (24). An example in the field of climate policy is the introduction of tariffs, subsidies, and mandates to incentivize the growth of renewable energy production. This has led to a substantial system response in the form of mutually reinforcing market growth and exponential technology cost improvement (25, 26).In this paper, we examine a number of potential “social tipping elements” (STEs) for decarbonization (27, 28) that represent specific subdomains of the planetary social-economic system. Tipping of these subsystems could be triggered by “social tipping interventions” (STIs) that could contribute to rapid transition of the world system into a state of net zero anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth’s climate by 2050

In the dead end It is just as nonsensical To speak of being totally interconnected As it is To speak of being totally separate . Neither is possible In this world as it is Each is an expression of psychological attachment To an unrealistic ideal A rock or a hard place Egoic fortitude or collective concrete Where all is at standstill . To let go of one To hold on to the other Is no way to go . Each needs to be loosened With infinite grace If life is to flow And love is to grow

TogetherNeither one or otherNor all oneAlone

IN SUMMARY:- we will have NO HOPE of release from the iniquities, paradoxes, inconsistencies and falsities of objective rationalisation until and unless we recognise the receptive influence of omnipresent space and the responsive flow of energetic information around every body. ONLY THEN will a truly compassionate and regenerative way of life become possible.

A love triangle in the making of heartfelt experienceAt the seat of all knowingIn the wisdom of not knowingThe natural inclusion of being in becomingThe in-breath in out-breathIn common passion

This is why becoming aware of natural inclusion matters:- http://www.spanglefish.com/exploringnaturalinclusion/index.asp?pageid=701959Core Values & Principles of Natural Inclusion(ality) — the mutual inclusion of intangible spatial stillness and energetic motion in all material forms (Watercolour on paper by Alan Rayner, 30/11/2021)See this simple illustration:- https://youtu.be/3Xu0lg0vz5c

Abandonment of the abandonment of life’s purpose

Abandonment of the abandonment of mechanistic focus

That cuts what is in here apart from what is out there

Now all I had learned on my travelsFell into a new kind of placeEven maths and hard sciencesNo longer at oddsWith Art or HumanityBut serving to showA side of the storyInsufficient to stand on its own

You ask me who you are; To tell a story you can live your life by; A tail that has some point; That you can see; So that you no longer; Have to feel so pointless; Because what you see is what you get; If you don’t get the meaning of my silence; Because you ain’t seen nothing yet

Intangible, invisibleYet here, there and everywhereEternallyWithout limit

Burning in the Endless Freedom of Space

Within a cage of fixed boundaries

For a change of career

which often come into my mind ‘out of the blue’ rather than deliberate intent.

contaminating interference

Between selfish genetic survival machines

But, there was a problem. To study biology as a ‘science’ was not the same as experiencing ‘life in the wild’ in the caring companionship of others. If anything, it was wild life’s antithesis:- a competition to be first or best while following strict codes of practice designed to eliminate subjective human ‘error’ and conform to an unquestionable norm prescribed by prior authority.

When I was around eight years old, having recently made the trip with my family back ‘home’ to London from where I was born and lived my earliest years in Nairobi, Kenya, I contracted measles, the first of many childhood illnesses that confined me to bed and disrupted my schooling. My father sat by my bedside and read stories to me about the planets and outer space, infecting me with his love of scientific exploration. I was given books to read about natural history and I learned to identify the garden birds in the tree that grew outside my bedroom window. I made watercolour paintings of these and others that I had never seen from illustrations on the pages of ‘Collins Pocket Guide to British Birds’. Then, whenever I was well enough, I was taken out into the countryside and spent many happy days bird-spotting for myself. I was taken on my first ‘fungus foray’ to a place called Burnham Beeches, west of London. It was led by the redoubtable figure of a man called Bayard Hora and I was awestruck by what I many years later described as ‘The Fountains of the Forest’ as they erupted from ground and trees in manifold shapes and colours, not least the legendary ‘fly agaric’ (Amanita muscaria), the ‘parasol’ (Macrolepiota procera) and numerous ‘brittle gills’ (Russula spp). I found that their Latin names came easily to me and I delighted in showing off my recall to peers and teachers.

but suppressed through a series of abandonments made in a vain effort to conform with societal expectations.

Within 2 years, I became explicitly aware, in a visionary moment, of what I now call ‘natural inclusion’. I

I came to feel that either something was foundationally wrong with the culture or something was foundationally wrong with me. It was and is a very insecure feeling. Sensing that I had voyaged very far from home, I abandoned ship in mid-ocean. And drifted.

But didn’t know how to express

Perhaps three major transitions

first i think it's important to remember that net zero is a new phrase it's it's nothing we haven't had newton this language of net zero this framing of net zero is is something just appeared just in 00:11:54 the last few years if you look at the sr 1.5 report 2018 in the summary for policy makers then um it's mentioned 16 times if you look at the ar-5 the previous report from the ipcc and their synthesis report 00:12:06 for the summary for policy makers it's not mentioned once you look in the the committee on climate uk committee on climate change's sixth budget report and it's it's a long report 427 pages 00:12:18 it's on numerous times on every page it's somewhere between it's referred to somewhere between three thousand and five thousand times they use the expression net zero look at the previous fifth budget report from the committee on 00:12:31 climate change in 2015 it's not mentioned once now it is true to say that the language of net cumulative missions in various ways has been referred to if you like within the science but the appealing translation and the 00:12:44 ubiquitous use of net zero by everyone is a very new phenomena and one i think that we've taken on board unproblematically because it allows us to to basically um avoid near-term action on climate 00:12:57 change and we can hide all sorts behind it so it's important to recognize that net zero net zero 2050 net zero 20 20 45 for sweden firstly this is not based on the concept of a total carbon budget 00:13:10 and it's interesting note that the uk previously had legislation that was based on the total carbon budget for the uk as i mean i think the budget was too large but it was deemed to be an appropriate contribution to staying below 2 degrees centigrade but now 00:13:24 that's gone now we simply have this net zero 2050 framing so this whole language it moves the debate from what we need to do today which is what carbon budgets force us to 00:13:36 face it moves it off to some far-off point 2045 or 2050 which we have to think about that in which which policymakers in sweden and the uk will still be policymakers in 2045 and 50 they'll either be dead 00:13:49 or retired as indeed with the scientists that are behind a lot of this net zero language so it's in that sense it's we are passing that net zero is a is a generational passing of the challenge of the buck um to our children and our children's 00:14:02 children it's also worth bearing in mind that net zero typically assumes some sort of multi-layered form of substitution between different greenhouse gases so carbon dioxide for me thing between different sources 00:14:15 carbon dioxide from a car can be compared with agricultural fertilizer and nitrous oxide emissions but these these are very different things but across decades a flight carbon dioxide 00:14:27 from a flight we take today can be considered in relation to carbon capture in a tree that's planted in 2050 that's growing in 2070. this assumption within net zero that a ton is a ton is a ton regardless of different 00:14:40 chemistries different atmospheric lifetimes of the gases in the atmosphere and and different levels of certainty and indeed levels of risk and hugely different things this is this is incredibly dangerous and again it's another 00:14:52 it's another thing that makes net zero attractive and appealing in a machiavellian way because it allows us to hide all sorts of things behind this language of net zero the other thing about net zero is that 00:15:07 perhaps with no exceptions but typically anyway it relies on huge planetary scale carbon dioxide removal cdrs often well that's the latest acronym i'm sure there'll be another one out in the next year or two 00:15:20 um carbon dioxide removal captures two important elements first negative emission technologies nets as they're often referred to and second nature-based solutions um nbs so these two approaches one is sort of 00:15:32 using technology to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and the other one is using various nature-based approaches like planting trees or peat bog restoration and things like this that are claimed to absorb carbon dioxide 00:15:45 and just to get a sense of the scale of negative emissions that's assumed in almost every single 1.5 and 2 degree scenario at the global level but indeed at national levels as well we're typically assuming hundreds of 00:15:57 billions of tons of carbon dioxide being absorbed from the atmosphere most of it is post 2050 and quite a lot of it is beyond 2100 again look at those dates who in the scientific community that's 00:16:09 promoting these who in the policy realm that's promoting these is going to be still at work working in 2015 and 2100 some of the early career researchers possibly some of the younger policymakers but most of us will 00:16:21 will say be dead or um or retired by them and just have another flavor if those numbers don't mean a lot to you what we're assuming here is that technologies that are today at best small pilot schemes will be 00:16:34 ramped up in virtually every single scenario to something that's that's akin to the current um global oil and gas industry that sort of size now that would be fine if it's one in ten scenarios or you know five and a 00:16:47 hundred scenarios but when virtually every scenario is doing that it demonstrates the deep level of systemic bias that we've got now that we've all bought into this language of net zero so it's not to outline my position on 00:16:59 carbon dioxide removal because it's often said that i'm opposed to it and that's simply wrong um i i would like just to see a well-funded research and development programs into negative emission technologies nature-based solutions and so forth 00:17:12 and potentially deploy them if they meet stringent sustainability criteria and i'll just reiterate that stringent sustainability criteria but we should mitigate we should cut our emissions today assuming that these carbon dioxide removal techniques of one 00:17:25 sort or another do not work at scale and another important factor to bear in mind here and there's a lot of double counting that gotham goes on here as far as i can tell anyway is that we're going to require some level of carbon 00:17:36 dioxide removal because there's going to be a lot of residual greenhouse gas emissions not you know not co2 principally methane and n2o nitroxites and fertilizer use um we're going to come from agriculture anyway if you're going to feed 9 billion 00:17:49 people now quite what those numbers are there's a lot of uncertainty but somewhere probably around 6 to 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent every single year so we'll have to find some way of compensating for the warming from feeding the world's population and certainly there are plenty of things we 00:18:01 can do with our food eating habits and with our agricultural practices but nonetheless it still looks like there will be a lot of emissions from the agricultural sector and therefore we need to have real zero emissions 00:18:14 from energy we cannot be using all of these other techniques nets mbs and so forth to allow us to carry on with our high energy use net zero has become if you like a policy 00:18:28 framework for all and some argue and there's been some question discussion in some of the um journalist papers around climate change recently saying well actually that's what it's one of its real strengths is it brings everyone together 00:18:40 but in my view it it's so vague that it seriously undermines the need for immediate and deep cuts and emissions so i can see some merit in a in an approach that does bring people together but if it sells everything out in that process then i think it's actually more 00:18:53 dangerous than it is of benefit and i think net zero very much falls into that category i just like to use the uk now as an example of why i come to that conclusion

it's really worth reading some of the things 00:18:00 that they're saying on climate change now and so what about 2 degrees C that's the 46th pathway that's the thousand Gigaton pathway the two degrees so you 00:18:13 look at the gap but between those two just an enormous that's where where no English edding we're all part of this and that's where we know we have to go from the science and that's where we keep telling other parts of the world begun to try to achieve the problem with 00:18:26 that and there's an engineer this is quite depressing in some respects is that this part at the beginning where we are now is too early for low-carbon supply you cannot build your way out of this with bits of engineering kit and 00:18:39 that is quite depressing because that leaves us with the social implications of what you have to do otherwise but I just want to test that assumption just think about this there's been a lot of discussion I don't know about within Iceland but in the UK quite a lot me 00:18:51 environmentalist have swapped over saying they think nuclear power is the answer or these one of the major answers to this and I'm I remain agnostic about nuclear power yeah it's very low carbon five to 15 grams of carbon dioxide per 00:19:03 kilowatt hour so it's it's similar to renewables and five to ten times lower than carbon capture and storage so nuclear power is very low carbon it has lots of other issues but it's a very low carbon but let's put a bit of 00:19:15 perspective on this we totally we consume in total about a hundred thousand ten watts hours of energy around the globe so just a very large amount of energy lots of energy for those of you I'm not familiar with these units global electricity consumption is 00:19:30 about 20,000 tarantella patelliday hours so 20% of lots of energy so that's our electricity nuclear provides about 11 a half percent of the electricity around the globe of what we consume of our 00:19:42 final energy consumption so that means nuclear provides about two-and-a-half percent of the global energy demand about two and a half percent that's from 435 nuclear power stations provide two 00:19:56 and a half percent of the world's energy demand if you wanted to provide 25% of the world's energy demand you'd probably need something in the region of three or four thousand new nuclear power stations to be built in the next 30 00:20:08 years three or four thousand new nuclear power stations to make a decent dent in our energy consumption and that assumes our energy consumptions remain static and it's not it's going up we're building 70 so just to put some sense 00:20:21 honest you hear this with every technology whether it's wind wave tidal CCS all these big bits of it technology these are going to solve the problem you cannot build them fast enough to get away from the fact that we're going to 00:20:34 blow our carbon budget and that's a really uncomfortable message because no one wants to hear that because the repercussions of that are that we have to reduce our energy demand so we have to reduce demand now now it is really 00:20:48 important the supply side I'm not saying it's not important it is essential but if we do not do something about the men we will not be able to hold to to probably even three degrees C and that's a global analysis and the iron would be 00:21:00 well we have signed up repeatedly on the basis of equity and when we say that we normally mean the poorer parts of the world would be allowed to we'll be able to peak their emissions later than we will be able to in the West that seems a 00:21:13 quite a fair thing that probably but no one would really argue I think against the idea of poor parts the world having a bit more time and space before they move off fossil fuels because there that links to their welfare to their improvements that use of energy now 00:21:27 let's imagine that the poor parts the world the non-oecd countries and I usually use the language of non annex 1 countries for those people who are familiar with that sort of IPCC language let's imagine that those parts of the 00:21:39 world including Indian China could peak their emissions by 2025 that is hugely challenging I think is just about doable if we show some examples in the West but I think it's just about past possible as 00:21:51 the emissions are going up significantly they could peak by 2025 before coming down and if we then started to get a reduction by say 2028 2029 2030 of 6 to 8 percent per annum which again is a 00:22:02 massive reduction rate that is a big challenge for poor parts of the world so I'm not letting them get away with anything here that's saying if they did all of that you can work out what carbon budget they would use up over the century and then you know what total carbon budget is for two degree 00:22:16 centigrade and you can say what's left for us the wealthy parts of the world that seems quite a fair way of looking at this and if you do it like that what's that mean for us that means we'd have to have and I'm redoing this it now 00:22:28 and I think it's really well above 10% because this is based on a paper in 2011 which was using data from 2009 to 10 so I think this number is probably been nearly 13 to 15 percent mark now but about 10 percent per annum reduction 00:22:40 rate in emissions year on year starting preferably yesterday that's a 40 percent reduction in our total emissions by 2018 just think their own lives could we reduce our emissions by 40 percent by 00:22:52 2018 I'm sure we could I'm sure we'll choose not to but sure we could do that but at 70 percent reduction by 2020 for 20-25 and basically would have to be pretty much zero carbon emissions not just from electricity from everything by 00:23:06 2030 or 2035 that sort of timeframe that just this that's just the simple blunt maths that comes out of the carbon budgets and very demanding reduction rates from poorer parts of the world now 00:23:19 these are radical emission reduction rates that we cannot you say you cannot build your way out or you have to do it with with how we consume our energy in the short term now that looks too difficult well what about four degrees six that's what you hear all the time that's too difficult so what about four 00:23:31 degrees C because actually the two degrees C we're heading towards is probably nearer three now anyway so I'm betting on your probabilities so let's think about four degrees C well what it gives you as a larger carbon budget and we all like that because it means I can 00:23:43 attend more fancy international conferences and we can come on going on rock climbing colleges in my case you know we can all count on doing than living the lives that we like so we quite like a larger carbon budget low rates of mitigation but what are the 00:23:54 impacts this is not my area so I'm taking some work here from the Hadley Centre in the UK who did some some analysis with the phone and Commonwealth Office but you're all probably familiar with these sorts of things and there's a range of these impacts that are out there a four degree C global average 00:24:07 means you're going to much larger averages on land because mostly over most of the planet is covered in oceans and they take longer to warm up but think during the heat waves what that might play out to mean so during times 00:24:18 when we're already under stress in our societies think of the European heat wave I don't know whether it got to Iceland or not and in 2003 well it was it was quite warm in the West Europe too warm it's probably much nicer 00:24:31 in Iceland and there were twenty to thirty thousand people died across Europe during that period now add eight degrees on top of that heat wave and it could be a longer heat wave and you start to think that our infrastructure start to break down the 00:24:45 cables that were used to bring power to our homes to our fridges to our water pumps those cables are underground and they're cooled by soil moisture as the soil moisture evaporates during a prolonged heatwave those cables cannot 00:24:56 carry as much power to our fridges and our water pumps so our fridges and water pumps can no longer work some of them will be now starting to break down so the food and our fridges will be perishing at the same time that our neighbors food is perishing so you live 00:25:08 in London eight million people three days of food in the whole city and it's got a heat wave and the food is anybody perishing in the fridges so you think you know bring the food from the ports but the similar problems might be happening in Europe and anyway the tarmac for the roads that we have in the 00:25:19 UK can't deal with those temperatures so it's melting so you can't bring the food up from the ports and the train lines that we put in place aren't designed for those temperatures and they're buckling so you can't bring the trains up so you've got 8 million people in London 00:25:31 you know in an advanced nation that is start to struggle with those sorts of temperature changes so even in industrialized countries you can imagine is playing out quite negatively a whole sequence of events not looking particulate 'iv in China look at the 00:25:44 building's they're putting up there and some of this Shanghai and Beijing and so forth they've got no thermal mass these buildings are not going to be good with high temperatures and the absolutely big increases there and in some parts of the states could be as high as 10 or 12 00:25:56 degrees temperature rises these are all a product of a 4 degree C average temperature

The world's demand for noble gases will likely concentrate on China, Sundqvist added, and the county will "get a good price for [its] product."

Moscow began restricting exports of inert, or "noble" gases, including neon, argon and helium to "unfriendly" countries at the end of May, according to a report by Russian state news agency TASS. All three gases are used to produce the tiny electronic chips found in a raft of consumer products, from smartphones to washing machines to cars, and which have been in critically short supply for months.

Chipmakers brace for more trouble as Russia limits exports of rare gases

The experts were asked to independently provide a comprehensive list of levers and leverage points for global sustainability, based on the potential for disproportionate effects to address and reverse the deterioration of nature while meeting societal needs. They were asked to consider actions by the full range of possible actors, and both top-down and bottom-up effects across various sectors. The collection of all responses became our initial set of levers and leverage points. Ensuing processes were then informed by five linked conceptualizations of transformative change identified by the experts (Chan et al., 2019): ● Complexity theory and leverage points of transformation (Levin et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2007; Meadows, 2009); ● Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems (Berkes, Colding, & Folke, 2003; Folke et al., 2010); ● A multi-level perspective for transformative change (Geels, 2002); ● System innovations and their dynamics (Smits, Kuhlmann, & Teubal, 2010; OECD, 2015) and ● Learning sustainability through ‘real-world experiments’ (Geels, Berkhout, & van Vuuren, 2016; Gross & Krohn, 2005; Hajer, 2011).

(a) What are the key levers and leverage points in social systems that might drive transformative change towards sustainability? (b) How are these derived from and perceived within and across academic literatures and in practice? (c) How might the levers and leverage points work together?

An important step towards such widespread changes in action would be to unleash latent capabilities and relational values (including virtues and principles regarding human relationships involving nature, such as responsibility, stewardship and care

In contrast to the unhelpful but common argument about whether ‘the problem’ is population growth or consumption, it is not novel to argue that the problem is both—plus waste. Because of ongoing need for progress on all three, this point of intervention is nonetheless key. Unlike research on impact as a function of population, affluence and technology (1 = PAT), we point to strong opportunities to decouple affluence from material consumption [leverage point 1]. We also side with those who argue that more efficient production is insufficient, and that volumes of production and consumption are key variables

need for transformative changes in consumption patterns is particularly pertinent for wealthier nations and the rising global middle-class, given higher per capita levels of material consumption and aspirational effects on others. In contrast, for the most disadvantaged people in the world, material consumption must increase to meet multiple SDGs including eradicating poverty and hunger (McMichael et al., 2007); this may also help reduce unsustainably high rates of population growth in many regions if coupled with education and empowerment of women

Embracing visions of a good life that go beyond those entailing high levels of material consumption is central to many pathways. Key drivers of the overexploitation of nature are the currently popular vision that a good life involves happiness generated through material consumption [leverage point 2] and the widely accepted notion that economic growth is the most important goal of society, with success based largely on income and demonstrated purchasing power (Brand & Wissen, 2012). However, as communities around the world show, a good quality of life can be achieved with significantly lower environmental impacts than is normal for many affluent social strata (Jackson, 2011; Røpke, 1999). Alternative relational conceptions of a good life with a lower material impact (i.e. those focusing on the quality and characteristics of human relationships, and harmonious relationships with non-human nature) might be promoted and sustained by political settings that provide the personal, material and social (interpersonal) conditions for a good life (such as infrastructure, access to health or anti-discrimination policies), while leaving to individuals the choice about their actual way of living (Jackson, 2011; Nussbaum, 2001, 2003). In particular, status or social recognition need not require high levels of consumption, even though in some societies, status is currently related to consumption (Røpke, 1999).

trust in neighbours, access to care, opportunities for creative expression, recognition

In this respect, relational notions of a good quality of life, such as ‘buen vivir’ from Latin America (D'Alisa, Demaria, & Kallis, 2014; Gudynas, 2011; Hopkins, 2008), may be key to achieving long-term sustainable outcomes

pathways examined here addressed a nexus with six foci of analysis, which were chosen to represent important nature-related challenges to sustainable development and to reflect the underlying bodies of literature (e.g. food production is split between the land and the oceans). These six were considered separately while attending to interdependencies: ● Feeding humanity without deteriorating nature on land; ● Meeting climate goals while maintaining nature and nature's contributions to people; ● Conserving and restoring nature on land while contributing positively to human well-being; ● Maintaining freshwater for nature and humanity; ● Balancing food provision from oceans and coasts with nature protection; and ● Resourcing growing cities while maintaining the nature that underpins them.

nexus analysis

hese levers and leverage points emerged from consideration of six linked focal issues, including producing food, protecting biodiversity (both on land and in the water), maintaining freshwater supplies and mitigating climate change, all while providing for our growing cities (Aguiar et al., in review; Chan et al., 2019). It thus draws upon a comprehensive ‘nexus’ analysis

Two linked concepts are relevant to prioritizing indirect drivers: leverage points (where to intervene to change social–ecological systems) and levers (the means of realizing these changes, such as governance approaches and interventions). Both concepts are intended to identify which changes, for which social variables, are likely to have disproportionately large positive effects on social–ecological systems

Given that the fate of nature and humanity depends on transformative change of the human enterprise (IPBES, 2019a, 2019b), indirect drivers clearly play a central role.

Levers and leverage points for pathways to sustainability

indirect drivers have yet to receive comprehensive directed attention in the context of their impacts on nature and its contributions to people, despite recognition of their importance in some literature oriented towards sustainability transitions or transformations

a safe climate and a healthy biosphere require profound changes to direct drivers, such as phasing out fossil fuels or halting deforestation. However, direct drivers resist intervention because they underpin our current economies and governance institutions (Ehrlich & Pringle, 2008). Thus, interventions often spark considerable opposition from vested interests who benefit from the status quo, including its prevalent externalization of costs.

To address these complex social–ecological problems, our focus must expand beyond the direct drivers of change (i.e. processes directly affecting nature, land/sea-use change, direct exploitation, climate change, pollution, invasive species, etc., Brondízio et al., 2019; Díaz et al., 2015). In particular, our focus must include indirect drivers (including formal and informal institutions, such as norms, values, rules and governance systems, demographic and sociocultural factors, and economic and technological factors

It is also clear that interventions in pursuit of just a few goals risk having negative effects on others and missing opportunities to realize synergies and manage trade-offs (Palomo et al., 2019; Singh et al., 2018; Tallis et al., 2018). Examples abound: mitigating climate change via geoengineering could threaten other sustainability targets via unequal distribution of costs and international conflict (Gregory, Satterfield, & Hasell, 2016; Keith, 2000). Similarly, intensive food production poses risks to biodiversity (Beckmann et al., 2019), fuels nutrient run-off that can trigger marine hypoxic zones and associated fisheries losses (Donner & Kucharik, 2008) and demands so much water that hydrological cycles and freshwater ecosystems can be undermined (Davis et al., 2015). Given such interacting effects, how might interventions address a broader suite of sustainability goals?

New insights on infant word learning

"The idea is that over long periods of time, traces of memory for visual objects are being built up slowly in the neocortex," Clerkin said. "When a word is spoken at a specific moment and the memory trace is also reactivated close in time to the name, this mechanism allows the infants to make a connection rapidly." The researchers said their work also has significant implications for machine learning researchers who are designing and building artificial intelligence to recognize object categories. That work, which focuses on how names teach categories, requires massive amounts of training for machine learning systems to even approach human object recognition. The implication of the infant pathway in this study suggests a new approach to machine learning, in which training is structured more like the natural environment, and object categories are learned first without labels, after which they are linked to labels.

"If you are held up at gunpoint, your brain secretes a bunch of the stress neurotransmitter norepinephrine, akin to an adrenaline rush," he said. "This changes the electrical discharge pattern in specific circuits in your emotional brain, centered in the amygdala, which in turn transitions the brain to a state of heightened arousal that facilitates memory formation, fear memory, since it's scary. This is the same process, we think, that goes awry in PTSD and makes it so you cannot forget traumatic experiences."

So, if some of you are still feeling a bit too certain, I'd like to do this one. So, if we have the lights down. And what we have here -- Can everyone see 25 purple surfaces on your left, 00:15:03 and 25, call it yellowish, surfaces on your right? So now, what I want to do, I'm going to put the middle nine surfaces here under yellow illumination, by simply putting a filter behind them. Now you can see that changes the light that's coming through there, right? Because now the light is going through a yellowish filter and then a purplish filter. I'm going to do the opposite on the left here. 00:15:31 I'm going to put the middle nine under a purplish light. Now, some of you will have noticed that the consequence is that the light coming through those middle nine on the right, or your left, is exactly the same as the light coming through the middle nine on your right. Agreed? Yes? Okay. So they are physically the same. 00:15:56 Let's pull the covers off. Now remember -- you know that the middle nine are exactly the same. Do they look the sa

the brain didn't actually evolve to see the world the way it is. We can't. Instead, the brain evolved to see the world the way it was useful to see in the past. 00:11:53 And how we see is by continually redefining normality. So, how can we take this incredible capacity of plasticity of the brain and get people to experience their world differently? Well, one of the ways we do it in my lab and studio is we translate the light into sound, and we enable people to hear their visual world. And they can navigate the world using their ears. 00:12:22 Here's David on the right, and he's holding a camera. On the left is what his camera sees. And you'll see there's a faint line going across that image. That line is broken up into 32 squares. In each square, we calculate the average color. And then we just simply translate that into sound. And now he's going to turn around, close his eyes, and find a plate on the ground with his eyes closed. 00:12:47 (Continuous sound) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) (Sound changes momentarily) Beau Lotto: He finds it. Amazing, right? So not only can we create a prosthetic for the visually impaired, but we can also investigate how people literally make sense of the world. But we can also do something else. We can also make music with color. 00:13:20 So, working with kids, they created images, thinking about what might the images you see sound like if we could listen to them. And then we translated these images. And this is one of those images. And this is a six-year-old child composing a piece of music for a 32-piece orchestra. And this is what it sounds like. (Electronic representation of orchestral music) 00:14:06 So, a six-year-old child. Okay? Now, what does all this mean? What this suggests is that no one is an outside observer of nature, okay? We're not defined by our central properties, by the bits that make us up. We're defined by our environment and our interaction with that environment, by our ecology. And that ecology is necessarily relative, historical and empirical.

Even the beautiful bumblebee, with its mere one million brain cells, which is 250 times fewer cells than you have in one retina, sees illusions

also true for complex perceptions of motion. So, here we have -- let's turn this around -- a diamond. And what I'm going to do is, I'm going to hold it here, 00:08:53 and I'm going to spin it. And for all of you, you'll see it probably spinning this direction. Now I want you to keep looking at it. Move your eyes around, blink, maybe close one eye. And suddenly it will flip, and start spinning the opposite direction. Yes? Raise your hand if you got that. Yes? Keep blinking. Every time you blink, it will switch. So I can ask you, which direction is it rotating? 00:09:20 How do you know? Your brain doesn't know, because both are equally likely. So depending on where it looks, it flips between the two possibilities

What is color for?" And instead of telling you, I'll just show you. What you see here is a jungle scene, 00:02:08 and you see the surfaces according to the amount of light that those surfaces reflect. Now, can any of you see the predator that's about to jump out at you? And if you haven't seen it yet, you're dead, right? (Laughter) Can anyone see it? Anyone? No? Now let's see the surfaces according to the quality of light that they reflect. And now you see it. So, color enables us to see 00:02:32 the similarities and differences between surfaces, according to the full spectrum of light that they reflect. But what you've just done is in many respects mathematically impossible. Why? Because, as Berkeley tells us, we have no direct access to our physical world, other than through our senses. And the light that falls onto our eyes is determined by multiple things in the world, not only the color of objects, 00:02:56 but also the color of their illumination, and the color of the space between us and those objects. You vary any one of those parameters, and you'll change the color of the light that falls onto your eye. This is a huge problem, because it means that the same image could have an infinite number of possible real-world sources

Here we have that exact same illusion. We have two identical tiles on the left, one in a dark surround, one in a light surround. And the same thing over on the right. Now, I'll reveal those two scenes, but I'm not going to change anything within those boxes, except their meaning. 00:07:11 And see what happens to your perception. Notice that on the left the two tiles look nearly completely opposite: one very white and one very dark, right? Whereas on the right, the two tiles look nearly the same. And yet there is still one on a dark surround, and one on a light surround. Why? Because if the tile in that shadow were in fact in shadow, and reflecting the same amount of light to your eye 00:07:35 as the one outside the shadow, it would have to be more reflective -- just the laws of physics. So you see it that way. Whereas on the right, the information is consistent with those two tiles being under the same light. If they're under the same light reflecting the same amount of light to your eye, then they must be equally reflective. So you see it that way. Which means we can bring all this information together to create some incredibly strong illusions.

let me show you how quickly our brains can redefine normality, even at the simplest thing the brain does, which is color. 00:05:29 So if I could have the lights down up here. I want you to first notice that those two desert scenes are physically the same. One is simply the flipping of the other. Now I want you to look at that dot between the green and the red. And I want you to stare at that dot. Don't look anywhere else. We're going to look at it for about 30 seconds, which is a bit of a killer in an 18-minute talk. (Laughter) But I really want you to learn. 00:05:55 And I'll tell you -- don't look anywhere else -- I'll tell you what's happening in your head. Your brain is learning, and it's learning that the right side of its visual field is under red illumination; the left side of its visual field is under green illumination. That's what it's learning. Okay? Now, when I tell you, I want you to look at the dot between the two desert scenes. So why don't you do that now? (Laughter) 00:06:21 Can I have the lights up again? I take it from your response they don't look the same anymore, right? (Applause) Why? Because your brain is seeing that same information as if the right one is still under red light, and the left one is still under green light. That's your new normal. Okay? So, what does this mean for context? It means I can take two identical squares, put them in light and dark surrounds, and the one on the dark surround looks lighter than on the light surround. 00:06:47 What's significant is not simply the light and dark surrounds that matter. It's what those light and dark surrounds meant for your behavior in the past.

we see by learning to see. The brain evolved the mechanisms for finding patterns, finding relationships in information, 00:04:38 and associating those relationships with a behavioral meaning, a significance, by interacting with the world. We're very aware of this in the form of more cognitive attributes, like language. I'm going to give you some letter strings, and I want you to read them out for me, if you can. Audience: "Can you read this?" "You are not reading this." "What are you reading?" Beau Lotto: "What are you reading?" Half the letters are missing, right? 00:05:04 There's no a priori reason why an "H" has to go between that "W" and "A." But you put one there. Why? Because in the statistics of your past experience, it would have been useful to do so. So you do so again. And yet you don't put a letter after that first "T." Why? Because it wouldn't have been useful in the past. So you don't do it again.

There's no inherent meaning in information. It's what we do with that information that matters.

Imagine that this is the back of your eye, okay? And these are two projections from the world. 00:03:22 They're identical in every single way. Identical in shape, size, spectral content. They are the same, as far as your eye is concerned. And yet they come from completely different sources. The one on the right comes from a yellow surface, in shadow, oriented facing the left, viewed through a pinkish medium. 00:03:48 The one on the left comes from an orange surface, under direct light, facing to the right, viewed through sort of a bluish medium. Completely different meanings, giving rise to the exact same retinal information. And yet it's only the retinal information that we get. So how on Earth do we even see? So if you remember anything in this next 18 minutes, remember this: 00:04:13 that the light that falls onto your eye, sensory information, is meaningless, because it could mean literally anything. And what's true for sensory information is true for information generally.

(Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) (Music) 00:07:16 (Applause) (Cheers) (Applause) Beau Lotto: Ah, how wonderful, right? So right now, you're probably all feeling, at some level or another, awe.

one of the best ways to diversify complexify your search space your assumptions is through experience and one of the great ways to 00:01:18 do that is actually through technology so we think about technology and most of our technologies are good technologies but what defines a great technology what is a transformative technology 00:01:30 the good technologies are the ones that enable us to do what we can already do faster easier more efficient and that's because so much of our society focuses on efficiency it's about maximizing performance right 00:01:42 we're great engineers but we're crap philosophers right we're very good at making things more efficient but that's only one side of innovation we also need the other side of innovation which is creativity 00:01:55 right and so the best technologies are the ones in my view that make the invisible visible they enable us to see things that we can never have seen before 00:02:06 they create assumptions they expand our space of assumptions

if the process of seeing differently is the process of first and foremost having awareness of the fact that everything you do has an assumption 00:00:14 figure out what those are and by the way the best person to reveal your own assumptions to you is not yourself it's usually someone else hence the power of diversity the importance of diversity 00:00:26 because not only does that diversity reveal your own assumptions to you but it can also complexify your assumptions right because we know from complex systems theory that the best solution is most likely to 00:00:40 exist within a complex search space not a simple search space simply because of statistics right so whereas a simple search space is more adaptable it's more easily to adapt it's 00:00:52 less likely to contain the best solution so what we really want is a diversity of possibilities a diversity of assumptions which diverse groups for instance enable

Some of the more plausible specifications of parameters and functional formsconcerning damages, technologies and distribution can generate results more akin to thoseof the international consensus than to those of Nordhaus. But such sensitivity make theresults of very limited usefulness.

esults over the past two decades have increasinglyshown that the “optimal” trajectory and the SCC are extraordinarily sensitive3 to the precisespecification of the model (Neelin et al., 2010; Budolfson et al., 2017; Gillingham et al.,2018).

Efforts to incorporate, even in a limited way, some of these issues and introduce moresevere damage functions and different assumptions on technology or distribution generatemarkedly different conclusions about the optimum trajectories.

the world has been much morefocused than the IAMs on a different set of issues, the risks of catastrophic consequences.These potentially catastrophic risks are in large measure assumed away in the IAMs.

Designing policy for climate change requires analyses which integrate the interrelationshipbetween the economy and the environment. We argue that, despite their dominance in theeconomics literature and influence in public discussion and policymaking, the methodologyemployed by Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) rests on flawed foundations, which becomeparticularly relevant in relation to the realities of the immense risks and challenges of climatechange, and the radical changes in our economies that a sound and effective response require. Weidentify a set of critical methodological problems with the IAMs which limit their usefulness anddiscuss the analytic foundations of an alternative approach that is more capable of providinginsights into how best to manage the transition to net-zero emissions

THE ECONOMICS OF IMMENSE RISK, URGENT ACTION AND RADICAL CHANGE:TOWARDS NEW APPROACHES TO THE ECONOMICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE

2020 Economic State of British Columbia'sForest Sector

Before Maslow’s Hierarchy: The Whitewashing of Indigenous Knowledge

Why is it nearly invisible?

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.

What may be required, therefore, is a significant reduction of societal demand for all resources, of all kinds.”

Moreover, civilization has used renewables not to reduce fossil fuel demand but to augment energy consumption.

“a sustainable retreat.”

This promise does not correspond with reality either. Even if the global fleet of internal combustion vehicles (about 1.5 billion) were to stop growing, “decarbonizing 50 per cent of it by 2030 would require that we manufacture about 600 million new electric passenger vehicles in nine years — that’s about 66 million a year, more than the total global production of all cars in 2019. In addition, the electricity to run those cars would have to come from zero-carbon sources. What are the chances of that?”

An in-depth 2021 study by Simon Michaux at the Geological Survey of Finland illustrated this inconvenient reality. It calculated that to replace a single coal-fired powered plant of average size producing seven terawatt-hours per year of energy would require the construction of 213 average sized solar farms or 87 wind turbine array facilities. Renewables just have to work harder. The global economy currently operates 46,423 power stations running on all types of energy, but mostly fossil fuels noted Michaux. To green the sector up and still keep the lights on will require the construction of 221,594 new power plants within the next 30 years.

Although “renewable energy promoters claim that we can replace our current energy needs without fossil fuels,” adds Berman, the truth is this: “The triumph of technology may allow that but it will do little to end the ongoing ecosystem disaster.”

They also ignore that it took 160 years to build the current energy system at a time when petroleum and minerals were abundant and cheap. Now they propose to “electrify the Titantic” as ecologist William Ophuls puts it, at a time of expensive fossil fuels, indebted financial systems and mineral shortages.

In basic English, “it takes two coal workers, 169 solar workers and 1,100 wind workers to equal the work of one natural gas worker.”

techno-greens

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

congruence was a big notion from one of my favorite psychologist carl rogers the humanistic 00:43:52 psychologist i don't know if you made that link yeah i did and i i got a little bit of a reference to him and it was fun with the publisher because i was like i i feel like rogers doesn't get the credit i 00:44:04 agree in the same way i i think it's like he's one of the most uh under explored um sort of insights but yeah the congruence was central to roger's view of things and like when you like think 00:44:16 about and rogers then swerves right into all the areas that you're the leading expert in and so that's why for me i felt like you would like this which is this congruence part of uh our ability 00:44:28 to get to self-actualization it doesn't guarantee it but i don't know how you live a self-actualized life if you're incongruent

most people are dying to do 00:42:37 this like there's just something hollow to living someone else's life right and if i could impress anything on listeners or viewers like a lot of reasons why we're doing this 00:42:49 right now to ourselves is because we believe the group is against us but just think how would you behave if you knew that most people in your groups that matter to you we're in agreement with you like 00:43:02 think about what that changes about your behavior and and your your potential for happiness and flourishing and i'm telling you it's just where we are right now in this society and like i think social media has a lot of 00:43:14 upside but with respect to collective illusions it is a fun house of mirrors it is almost a guarantee to distort uh what you think the group consensus really is so we just got to be thoughtful about the ways not just the 00:43:26 ways we engage on online because that's just always going to be there but learning about collective illusions and getting some skill and not letting those distortions affect how we treat one another in real life because that's where it really really 00:43:39 becomes a problem

authentic responsibility

we need to treat one another with respect despite our differences like this is like an aspiration for people 00:41:01 right except for they thought it was in the bottom quarter of stuff for everybody else so what happens if i'm like i i would like to get back to treating other people's respect but i don't think 00:41:12 they care about that for me back to that ambiguous interactions that we have all the time i'm gonna read disrespect into most everything i see right and so i i think it's really critical like 00:41:25 like i talked about this as like congruence right this need for our private selves and our public selves to be as as closely aligned as possible we've known for a long time that that's that's a critical part of fulfillment 00:41:37 and self-actualization i mean how how do you get there you're the expert on that like how do you how do you get there if you have a divided self like my private self is different than my public self like so we know that at an individual 00:41:48 level but given the the fact of collective illusions i believe this idea of congruence may be the most important thing you can do for other people right because it doesn't help anyone when we misread each 00:42:00 other so profoundly

those social or cultural norms are actually what helped move a lot of people from like essentially 00:37:52 if i want to belong if the norms of my group are be honest about what you believe then a whole bunch of people who would otherwise do whatever else the group wants them to are now being honest about themselves and essentially protected against the biggest downsides 00:38:06 of these illusions and when people either because of their need for self-expression or their adherence to to help the social norms that promote that when we're all being honest and 00:38:17 respectful about what we really think illusions have nowhere to go right like they're really hard to form in the first place

not all of us are going to have super 00:37:28 high need for self-expression you know most of us are probably like me i'm more of a people pleaser than i would even want to be

evolution works on a much longer time scale right than than 00:35:09 any given life and so we need to we rely pretty heavily on helpful social norms right these cultural norms that actually teach us the right way to engage with each other and that can transcend any 00:35:22 one generation um and you know we worked really hard um in the west you know not just i mean this has happened everywhere but it you know we're where we're from um to acquire norms from from that we would 00:35:35 have called you know liberal democracy right that tolerance and respect and and these things and individual rights and you know it you see those things start to erode now and you start to see some of that base 00:35:48 nature taking back over the tribalism and the seeing the other as the enemy um the outgrouping of people and it we know from history it doesn't end well there right like the erosion of these norms 00:36:02 not only will continue to exacerbate collective illusions they i i think they're the biggest threat to free society that we face in a very long time yeah yeah you made a very convincing case for that

et's say i identify as a republican and i'm like because i believe in free markets and free people and i'm like well i actually don't mind people should love who they want to love but now i 00:33:02 feel like if i say that i might be ostracized from the thing for which i identify right and so you're going to lead a lot of people to stay silent or lie about what they believe what timber kern calls preference falsification um 00:33:14 just in the name of belonging so i'm always very leery of groups that aggregate that difference right like like why do i need a party that is here's our 20 things that you have to swallow wholesale or you're not a 00:33:26 republican or you're not a democrat to me that's always a sign that someone's trying to manipulate you

politicians were especially sensitive to collective illusions even more so because if you think about it all they want to do is get reelected right like that's like the job of a politician is to get reelected so they are exquisitely sensitive to 00:30:57 what they think their constituents believe right and so it makes them susceptible to this and so like and you probably know this like if i don't know about you but like the number of at the national level the number of 00:31:09 of republican elected officials who will tell me privately of course i know this wasn't rigged right but then they'll tell you but but i think most of my constituents do now they're not going out and lying about it 00:31:21 they'll just say nothing right thinking that their silence isn't causing any harm but in fact it's causing great harm this is so um eye-opening because i'm thinking about other domains now i'm just curious like how many 00:31:34 christians actually believe in an afterlife like if you actually privately ask them like go down the standard beliefs of like christianity or i don't mean to pick on christianity by the way any any any religion any religion 00:31:47 i'm so curious have you done that study i'm curious oh but that's that'd be a great study because here's one of the tricky parts with with group belonging is that you know you think about groups whether especially like political 00:31:59 parties whatever they aggregate a bunch of different dimensions of things right like like if so it's funny like why do i with our two-party system why do i have to be why do i have to hate gay people to believe in free markets 00:32:12 right like it doesn't make any sense but they they so you know groups that that pull together you know a lot of different things um it's almost what we do find is it's the same kind of jagged profile thing we talked about last time 00:32:25 which is we know for sure there's no like average democrat or republican in terms of their own beliefs against the party's stated platform um and so like i would be shocked if that's not the case when it comes to religious 00:32:37 identity right but it's certainly something we could do be good research

one of the things that we found in our own data right now is 00:29:30 the after effects of 2020 right well you have one candidate who continues to say that it was stolen right and the way the media reports that is so public opinion if you call 00:29:42 republicans just do a traditional poll we just we just did this um we found 57 we'll say oh yeah it was definitely stolen right uh that number in private is closer to 00:29:55 14

the thing is about humans is that this this stuff generalized the group stuff kind of generalizes from individual relational stuff like it's it's a you look at codependent relationships 00:24:00 one-on-one you start to see similar dynamics you know like you start to it's just have you thought about it the individual like the individual uh uh illusion level and how those basic first principles have reasoning for 00:24:13 first principles here you know yeah you're upset correct so so it's actually it's like fractal quality to it right so you see illusion in in in just between two people or small groups

why is the moment you ask someone is a woman as electable as a man how come the moment you ask that everything changes yeah this is this was one of those really remarkable we didn't do this 00:21:01 research so i can brag about it right right it's regina bateson this is really fantastic research looking at gender bias in politics right because it's unbelievable 00:21:14 like women are so underrepresented in intellectual politics it's just you can't it's but like here's the thing like it's important to understand what's driving that and and for sure let's just be clear just straight up sexism 00:21:27 certainly is involved sometimes like that that's certainly the case but what what uh dr bateson found what i think was really fascinating is that given our winner-take-all um like sort of two-party system 00:21:41 so much is dependent on what the gatekeepers think who who because now like if we were doing something like ranked choice voting it doesn't really matter i don't have to care what i think anybody else thinks right but in a winner-take-all system i 00:21:54 have to do a little bit of guessing about who do i think most people are going to vote for right because otherwise my vote is quote unquote wasted right if i take a flyer on that so what was interesting is if you look at how women perform when they are 00:22:08 nominated in general elections women win at the same rate as white men it's just so i suggest obviously it's not a general election problem and what what she found was that it was like 00:22:20 party leaders especially donors right they're like well wait a minute i'm not sexist but i think most people in the party are so i don't think you're going to be able to win and so they don't get the support they don't get the the 00:22:32 resources and it becomes self-fulfilling it's so clear when you put it that way how that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy but there there is so much pressure within certain groups to say this the the dominant ideology and just 00:22:44 like don't like if you can't it's like a cult right because like the second you question maybe you're like what does the evidence actually show they're like you're out you're not being loyal um wow 00:22:57 yeah so that's it's actually um in the book i i was looking at what i call these conformity traps like these these three kinds of situations where you are likely to slip into blind conformity and you are quite likely to do that 00:23:10 under an illusion to begin with and you know this this sort of identity trap where you've got these groups that matter so much to who you are right and and especially when it's just one group that group has cult-like power 00:23:23 over you

what we find and what we have found and partly why i wrote the book is the trick with illusions is your brain is certain it knows what the group thinks so if just being told it with data that it's not true it the number of times people 00:19:45 say man i i wish it were true but i know it's not and you're like so what we found our strategy we felt like is when the more that people came to understand 00:19:57 the phenomenon of collective illusion the more likely it is that they were willing to take new data and say okay wait now that i know that this is possible and i know that like i can't really trust my brain to tell me what the group thinks they 00:20:10 were open to good data where otherwise it just seemed like the data itself like and if you think about it like how many other organizations have shown us like look how much common ground we have and yet it doesn't seem to move the need so our bet is to socialize the concept of 00:20:24 collective illusions get people to understand this and then hopefully we can now start to have the conversation with data about who we really are as a people i mean like to me it's it's it's incumbent on us to actually meet people 00:20:36 where they are and and i think this is an important concept so it's on me to try to communicate in a way that people understand and can relate to

no matter what we've looked at so we've studied everything from you know again what you mean by a successful life uh your our aspirations for the future of the country um 00:16:09 what how do we want to treat one another uh what do you want out of our key institutions like education and the workplace criminal justice these things and it's just like we've got so much more in common i know it's so easy to say right and people try 00:16:22 to say across all demographics we share a lot in common what i think collective illusions help us understand is why doesn't it feel like that and i think this is important because 00:16:34 you know there's an old in social psychology there's a thomas theorem right which is if it's real in our imaginations it becomes real in its consequences so it doesn't matter that we actually share so 00:16:47 much common ground if we believe we are divided then our behavior will act accordingly right and the consequences become self-fulfilling so i think this is a critical time for us to understand a concept like collective illusions 00:16:59 because not only does it mean perhaps there's actually some common ground for us to build a free and and flourishing society together but that the way we would deal with some of our problems is different like if we 00:17:12 really are divided so be it right there are ways to bridge honest differences and still get somewhere but if it is a collective illusion then what we do next is different and sometimes leaning into an illusion as if it's 00:17:24 private opinion can literally make the illusion stronger [Music] yeah i i would rather people have a kind of best self bias and the other person like see the best in them and be biased 00:17:37 and be wrong than the other way or that other kind of error because you you're you're so right it's true that when you actually lead with the bias of we're divided you take ambiguous stimuli and you're 00:17:49 more likely to view negativity in that it's like why why are you angry at me and it's like no i actually just have a neutral face right now you know like do you know you're hitting on a really important point right which is 00:18:02 despite what most people think most situations are pretty pretty ambiguous right like and so we are projecting a lot of assumptions in interactions and so if i am coming into it thinking all out 00:18:15 sequel someone i'm just meeting probably disagrees with me on really important things and in fact i might not even think their their view might be i might think is even immoral or whatever i am i am the way i'm engaging with them 00:18:29 is likely to produce the very outcome that i didn't want and so it matters that we get this right and you know i think what's so unfortunate and we can talk more about this but like it's really dangerous when you know 00:18:42 two-thirds of americans admit to self-silencing right now and you know i know kato had done that research we've we've replicated that it's it's it's a thing and it cuts across all demographics it's just like 00:18:53 we're we're just not being honest with each other about what we think in part because we believe most people don't agree with us right like and so if we can get back to just having conversations treating one another with respect i think we'll be shocked at the 00:19:06 common ground that we find when we have those conversations

in the book i 00:14:51 tried to stay away from politics mainly because what i found was if you don't understand the concept of collective illusion if your first introduction to it is something very polarizing that issue tends to just be the all the thing you 00:15:04 can think about right so it's like you want your head around the actual concept but what's interesting from the political standpoint is not surprisingly our national politics are driving a lot of these illusions and it's happening on 00:15:17 both sides um but it's it's really leading to both both seeing the other side as very extreme when it's not really true but most importantly and even more damaging 00:15:30 we're seeing within any one political party the misunderstanding of our own party

the things that cluster up top they were things like um 00:12:21 relationships uh character related things um and then like education but not from i want to go to the most elite school possible just i want to they want to get they want to get training to do things that matter to 00:12:33 them right they wanted purposeful lives and they want to be good people and let me give you one specific example so in the aggregate the number three most important trade-off priority for people this was this was just in the united 00:12:46 states was to be viewed as trustworthy [Music] like and yet they don't think anybody else really cares about it it's the third most important thing to 00:12:59 them and yet they don't think that it's like they think people would prioritize it very very low now think about the problem right i want to be trusted i believe i'm trustworthy but i don't think anybody else really cares and i don't really 00:13:12 think they're trustworthy how does how does a democracy function if we really don't think not only are people untrustworthy but that they don't even care about it and it's just not true so this is the kind of damage that illusions do to 00:13:24 societies

at the individual 00:11:56 level the trade-off priorities are unbelievably individual like it just there's no average you're saying yeah there's no like when you looked at the average

illusions don't get much bigger than that and and that research has important implications because one of the really really serious consequences of collective illusions is 00:10:15 that this generation's illusions unless you do something about them tend to become next generation's private opinion and here's here's what i mean by that with respect to fame um you know some of our colleagues 00:10:28 at ucla have been studying the effects of media on middle school kids for for years this kind of understanding what values are they internalizing as their own and up until a few years ago 00:10:41 whenever they looked the dominant things that they were internalizing tend to be character related and kind of what you'd hope right i want to be a good person i want to be honest i want to have friends a few years ago it changed and it hasn't 00:10:54 changed back every year now the dominant theme is i want to be famous i want to be a youtube star like i remember one of the in the qualitative interviews they did one of the kids said i want to have a million followers and they said at what it 00:11:06 doesn't matter it doesn't matter it doesn't matter right and you know it's it's pretty sad right because it's like it would be one thing if they were internalizing the actual values of 00:11:18 society but we've all learned the hard way that most of what constitutes that sort of wealth status power is it's really not a very fulfilling certainly not a self-actualized life right um and 00:11:31 our children are now internalizing that empty view of success as their own all because we've allowed this illusion to propagate throughout society

it's called conjoin and it's widely used in business so like here i have an iphone right i'm not just plugging that but you know 00:08:33 yeah i'll be stalking out and you know when you have to figure out what kind of combination of features and price point to put in a phone you need to understand trade-off priorities right so not just what people want but what will they sacrifice for it 00:08:46 so we use that method looking at public opinion right like in this case privately what do people what are trade-off priorities for a good life and what's so interesting like 00:08:57 everything um okay with this method rather than just asking a point blank it's kind of cool what we do is say out of those 76 items you would get a question and it would say okay here's person a and it would be six 00:09:11 randomly grabbed attributes from that list of 76 or person b with another random six and say which which of these two people is closer to your view of a successful life 00:09:23 you're like i don't know a and you do it again and you do it again and again and again and over time you're trading off every attribute against every other attribute but you don't know it right okay so that's the that part of it with 00:09:34 conjoint so what we did was we did we'd ask what do you think and then the same exact thing what do you think most people would say what would they choose and what was fascinating in the aggregate this idea of being famous 00:09:48 shook out as the number one perceived priority for people and it was not even close like it it was by far the most dominant attribute we think for other people in private it was dead last 00:10:02 number 76

the human brain is an energy hog like and you can learn a lot about a lot of our uh biases and problems from the kinds of shortcuts that the brain takes 00:06:41 in the name of energy conservation well it looks like estimating group consensus is one of those shortcuts right because all it's equal your brain tends to assume that the loudest voices repeated 00:06:53 the most are the majority and and i think about that i think wow that doesn't seem like a good a good shortcut at all but i guess if you go back and f through evolution and when most of our time was spent and like 00:07:05 seeing like the dumbar number kind of you know groups it probably it obviously had to work well enough right to just be here with us but now when you think about with social media 00:07:18 and these massive imaginary communities like nations where you're never going to meet more than a tiny tiny percentage of the people in your group that shortcut becomes problematic um and 00:07:31 we can talk about it like i mean social media in particular makes it very very easy to distort perceived group consensus

if you accept that this is pretty widespread and we we can talk about all the evidence for that the question is then why like how why are we so susceptible to being spectacularly wrong about the 00:04:13 group and then end up like making something true that never was true and it's really like two underlying mechanisms right so the first is this conformity bias which that's not very novel like we know we've known for a 00:04:25 long time that is a species humans are a conforming species

so what 00:03:11 is a collective illusion then right so like what's the definition simply they simply stated right collective illusions are situations where the majority in a group ends up going along with something that they 00:03:23 don't privately agree with simply because they incorrectly think that most other people in the group agree with it and and as a result entire groups can end up doing things that almost nobody really wanted

i had known about this phenomenon which we call collective illusions historically has been called things like pluralistic ignorance um the illusion of universality things like this and because we'd known about it uh we 00:02:21 started asking people not only what they thought about certain issues but what they thought most people thought right and what was so shocking it was that actually the first time we ever did it was in like 2015 and it was 00:02:33 almost like a throwaway question and we weren't even sure what we'd get and what we found over and over again since is that it almost doesn't matter what topic we ask about if it's socially important it's like a coin toss whether we're 00:02:46 wrong about what the majority really believes and so we're living in this time when these collective illusions may actually be one of the defining features of modern society and as we can talk about they have such 00:02:59 like damaging consequences for the individual and the group and i felt like this could no longer just be an academic conversation like we need to have a conversation with the general public about this issue

i talked to todd rose about this notion of collective 00:00:51 illusions you know humans are a tribal species prone to conformity and in a lot of instances we act according to what our in-group wants rather than what we want as individuals ironically todd's research shows that we make poor 00:01:04 inferences about the majority consensus and that failing to recognize collective illusions can have negative consequences on our identities relationships values and society to avoid falling into conformity traps todd encourages us to 00:01:17 live congruent private and public lives that adhere to our personal convictions

The projected timing of climate departurefrom recent variability

Commemorative Moment 1st Plenary Meeting

by 00:11:01 default hard wired for system systemic localized solutions to our global and existential challenges

multilateral cooperation is key to accelerate such action that new and additional voices need to be heard and engaged with especially 00:10:11 those of youth women indigenous groups and local communities the need to centre action on the principles of reaching out to the furthest first and leaving no one behind something like gandhian talisman

the need for incentives to favor actions and implementation of existing commitments over more negotiations the issue of longer-term visioning is a repeated ask especially through a 00:09:21 greater engagement of youth and decision making as they have a greater stake in the future

we have heard repeated calls for scaling 00:08:32 up actions

the inter-connectedness of the crises we face climate pollution biodiversity and 00:07:54 inequality require our change require a change in our exploitative relationship to our planet to a more holistic and caring one but that can only happen with a change in our behavior

going beyond gdp as a measure of well-being and progress is a key aspect of the shift that is required which you've noted well in the report

given the impacts that humans are having on the planet our flourishing can no longer be limited just by what we do in 00:07:16 our lifetimes nor our development opportunities of the current and future generations dependent only on the productive capacity that we leave as legacy but it depends on is also on the health 00:07:27 of the underlying natural systems and resources that support our well-being

everywhere environmental injustices abound and this is another aspect of this conference which is very central to our thinking the environmental injustice's current and future have given rise to a growing 00:06:25 trust deficit in our various conversations and consultations towards stock 150 four kinds of trust deficits have manifested themselves between developed and developing countries between states and non-state 00:06:38 actors across generations and with marginalized groups such as indigenous peoples women and local communities with a breakdown of trust and the unfulfilled promises on commitments 00:06:50 there's a growing impatience and sometimes even anger to write the wrongs of years of consumption choices production patterns and finance flows that have resulted in a degrading planet 00:07:02 and growing inequity ill health mistrust and hopelessness for the many and a good life for the few

Capital and Ideology examines the creation of what Piketty terms “ownership societies” that valued and maintained high concentrations of private wealth, along with their brief reversal in the mid-20th century (aided by new instruments of social democracy, including the nationalization of key infrastructures and services, public education, health and pension reforms, and progressive taxation).

According to Piketty (2020, p. 20), the “most worrisome structural changes facing us today [include] the revival of inequality nearly everywhere since the 1980s.”

Revisiting the “Great Levelling”: The limits of Piketty’s Capital and Ideology for understanding the rise of late 20th century inequality

European farmland could be biggest global reservoir of microplastics, study suggests

Sewage sludge is commonly used on agricultural land as a sustainable and renewable source of fertiliser throughout European countries, in part due to EU directives that promote the diverting of sewage sludge away from landfill and incineration and towards energy production and agriculture.

“Our results highlight the magnitude of the problem across European soils and suggest that the practice of spreading sludge on agricultural land could potentially make them one of the largest global reservoirs of microplastic pollution,”

the team estimate that microplastics removed from raw sewage at wastewater treatment plants go on to make up roughly 1% of the weight of sewage sludge, which is commonly used as a fertiliser on farms across Europe.

Energy efficiency has never been more crucial! The time to unleashing its massive potential has come

Perhaps one of the most important questions to be asked is “What are we not ‘seeing’?.” … “A collaborative project of the late botanists Erwin Lichtenegger and Lore Kutschera celebrates the power and beauty of these otherwise hidden systems through detailed drawings of agricultural crops, shrubs, trees, and weeds. Digitized by the Wageningen University & Research, the extensive archive is the culmination of 40 years of research in Austria that involved cultivating and carefully retrieving developed plant life from the soil for study. It now boasts more than 1,000 renderings of the winding, spindly roots, some of which branch multiple feet wide.”

What can we do with a shift in thinking backed by a total of $3.6 trillion in funds under management? I’m backing strategic circular initiatives to convert the highest return on value for anyone’s money. Stay tuned as we crack open new investment opportunities.

What happens in Indonesia when a textile manufacturer illegally dumps dye waste!

Demand-side solutions require both motivation and capacity for change (high confidence).34Motivation by individuals or households worldwide to change energy consumption behaviour is35generally low. Individual behavioural change is insufficient for climate change mitigation unless36embedded in structural and cultural change. Different factors influence individual motivation and37capacity for change in different demographics and geographies. These factors go beyond traditional38socio-demographic and economic predictors and include psychological variables such as awareness,39perceived risk, subjective and social norms, values, and perceived behavioural control. Behavioural40nudges promote easy behaviour change, e.g., “improve” actions such as making investments in energy41efficiency, but fail to motivate harder lifestyle changes. (high confidence) {5.4}

Wealthy individuals contribute disproportionately to higher emissions and have a high potential28for emissions reductions while maintaining decent living standards and well-being (high29confidence).

ocio-cultural and lifestyle changes can accelerate climate change mitigation (medium26confidence). Among 60 identified actions that could change individual consumption, individual27mobility choices have the largest potential to reduce carbon footprints. Prioritizing car-free mobility by28walking and cycling and adoption of electric mobility could save 2 tCO2eq cap-1 yr-1. Other options with29high mitigation potential include reducing air travel, cooling setpoint adjustments, reduced appliance30use, shifts to public transit, and shifting consumption towards plant-based diets

The indicative potential of demand-side strategies across all sectors to reduce emissions is 40-70%15by 2050 (high confidence)

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drawer.open(); });}); }} var _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____ = function(name) {return (self._wb_wombat && self._wb_wombat.local_init && self._wb_wombat.local_init(name)) || self[name]; }; if (!self.__WB_pmw) { self.__WB_pmw = function(obj) { this.__WB_source = obj; return this; } } { let window = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("window"); let self = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("self"); let document = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("document"); let location = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("location"); let top = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("top"); let parent = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("parent"); let frames = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("frames"); let opener = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("opener"); let arguments; { whenDocReady(function() { jQuery('#city_selector_menu_city_id').autocomplete({ source: 'https://www.numbeo.com/common/CitySearchJson', minLength: 1, delay: 3, autoFocus: true, select: function(event, ui) { event.preventDefault(); $('#name_menu_city_id').val(ui.item.label); $('#city_selector_menu_city_id').val(ui.item.label); $('#menu_city_id').val(ui.item.value); jQuery('#menu_dispatch_form').submit(); }, focus: function(event, ui) { event.preventDefault(); } , appendTo: '#container_menu_city_id', }) .keydown(function(e){ if (e.keyCode === 13){ if ($('#menu_city_id').val() == '') { e.preventDefault(); } var val = $('#city_selector_menu_city_id').val(); $('#name_menu_city_id').val(val); } }); // end autocompleter definition $('#city_selector_menu_city_id').toggleClass('city-selector-menu'); $('#city_selector_menu_city_id').toggleClass('city-selector-menu'); }); // end document ready }} var _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____ = function(name) {return (self._wb_wombat && self._wb_wombat.local_init && self._wb_wombat.local_init(name)) || self[name]; }; if (!self.__WB_pmw) { self.__WB_pmw = function(obj) { this.__WB_source = obj; return this; } } { let window = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("window"); let self = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("self"); let document = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("document"); let location = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("location"); let top = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("top"); let parent = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("parent"); let frames = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("frames"); let opener = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("opener"); let arguments; { whenDocReady(function() { var winWidth = $(window).width(); if (winWidth < 768) { $('#city_selector_menu_city_id').focus(function() { $('#logo_td').hide(); $('#city_selector_menu_city_id').addClass('city-selector-menu-active'); }); $('#city_selector_menu_city_id').focusout(function() { $('#logo_td').show(); $('#city_selector_menu_city_id').removeClass('city-selector-menu-active'); }); } }); }} Crime Index by City 2022 var _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____ = function(name) {return (self._wb_wombat && self._wb_wombat.local_init && self._wb_wombat.local_init(name)) || self[name]; }; if (!self.__WB_pmw) { self.__WB_pmw = function(obj) { this.__WB_source = obj; 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return this; } } { let window = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("window"); let self = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("self"); let document = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("document"); let location = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("location"); let top = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("top"); let parent = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("parent"); let frames = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("frames"); let opener = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("opener"); let arguments; { whenDocReady(function() { jQuery('#city_selector_subscription_city_id').autocomplete({ source: 'https://www.numbeo.com/common/CitySearchJson', minLength: 1, delay: 3, autoFocus: true, select: function(event, ui) { event.preventDefault(); $('#name_subscription_city_id').val(ui.item.label); $('#city_selector_subscription_city_id').val(ui.item.label); $('#subscription_city_id').val(ui.item.value); }, focus: function(event, ui) { event.preventDefault(); } , appendTo: '#container_subscription_city_id', }) .keydown(function(e){ if (e.keyCode === 13){ if ($('#subscription_city_id').val() == '') { e.preventDefault(); } var val = $('#city_selector_subscription_city_id').val(); $('#name_subscription_city_id').val(val); } }); // end autocompleter definition }); // end document ready }} You are looking at Crime Index 2022. These indices are historical and they are published periodically. It's a snapshot of the current indices at a specific point in time. To access current rankings (updated continuously) please visit Crime Index Rate (Current). var _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____ = function(name) {return (self._wb_wombat && self._wb_wombat.local_init && self._wb_wombat.local_init(name)) || self[name]; }; if (!self.__WB_pmw) { self.__WB_pmw = function(obj) { this.__WB_source = obj; return this; } } { let window = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("window"); let self = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("self"); let document = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("document"); let location = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("location"); let top = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("top"); let parent = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("parent"); let frames = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("frames"); let opener = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("opener"); let arguments; { (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); }} More information about these indices Select date: 2022 2021 Mid-Year 2021 2020 Mid-Year 2020 2019 Mid-Year 2019 2018 Mid-Year 2018 2017 Mid-Year 2017 2016 Mid-Year 2016 2015 Mid-Year 2015 2014 Mid-Year 2014 2013 2012 Select Region: Africa America Asia Europe Oceania Select display column: Crime Index Safety Index Search: RankCityCrime Index 1 Caracas, Venezuela 84.27 2 Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea 82.16 3 Pretoria, South Africa 82.02 4 Johannesburg, South Africa 80.73 5 San Pedro Sula, Honduras 80.69 6 Durban, South Africa 80.60 7 Fortaleza, Brazil 78.21 8 Kabul, Afghanistan 78.13 9 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 77.57 10 Recife, Brazil 76.39 11 Port of Spain, Trinidad And Tobago 76.14 12 Salvador, Brazil 76.04 13 Baltimore, MD, United States 75.04 14 Detroit, MI, United States 74.81 15 Rosario, Argentina 74.47 16 Memphis, TN, United States 73.85 17 Porto Alegre, Brazil 73.56 18 Cape Town, South Africa 73.40 19 Bloemfontein, South Africa 73.03 20 San Salvador, El Salvador 71.87 21 Tijuana, Mexico 71.16 22 Bradford, United Kingdom 70.76 23 Albuquerque, NM, United States 70.66 24 Saint Louis, MO, United States 70.56 25 Kingston, Jamaica 70.33 26 Sao Paulo, Brazil 70.20 27 Lima, Peru 70.17 28 Coventry, United Kingdom 69.45 29 Guayaquil, Ecuador 69.33 30 Mexico City, Mexico 69.07 31 Meerut, India 68.89 32 San Juan, Puerto Rico 68.84 33 Windhoek, Namibia 68.63 34 Cali, Colombia 68.57 35 Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic 68.07 36 Damascus, Syria 67.95 37 Luanda, Angola 67.20 38 Milwaukee, WI, United States 66.94 39 Campinas, Brazil 66.50 40 Chicago, IL, United States 65.95 41 Lagos, Nigeria 65.94 42 New Orleans, LA, United States 65.64 43 Oakland, CA, United States 65.57 44 Goiania, Brazil 65.26 45 Almaty, Kazakhstan 65.24 46 Bogota, Colombia 64.90 47 Klang, Malaysia 64.52 48 Manila, Philippines 64.39 49 Surrey, Canada 64.34 50 Dhaka, Bangladesh 64.07 51 Cleveland, OH, United States 64.06 52 Male, Maldives 63.94 53 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 63.85 54 Belo Horizonte, Brazil 63.77 55 Houston, TX, United States 63.77 56 Lethbridge, AB, Canada 63.64 57 Rochester, NY, United States 63.44 58 Gosford, Australia 63.36 59 Buenos Aires, Argentina 63.07 60 Atlanta, GA, United States 63.02 61 Guatemala City, Guatemala 62.46 62 Philadelphia, PA, United States 62.38 63 Puebla, Mexico 62.36 64 Curitiba, Brazil 62.29 65 Tripoli, Libya 62.22 66 Guadalajara, Mexico 61.77 67 Red Deer, Canada 61.75 68 Marseille, France 61.65 69 Birmingham, United Kingdom 61.53 70 Anchorage, AK, United States 61.20 71 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania 60.80 72 Cairns, Australia 60.74 73 Quito, Ecuador 60.72 74 Harare, Zimbabwe 60.67 75 Quezon City, Philippines 60.66 76 Ghaziabad, India 60.66 77 Baghdad, Iraq 60.48 78 Catania, Italy 60.36 79 Brasilia, Brazil 60.23 80 Nantes, France 60.06 81 North Bay, Canada 59.99 82 Minsk, Belarus 59.85 83 Sudbury, Canada 59.48 84 Delhi, India 59.31 85 Nairobi, Kenya 58.94 86 Nice, France 58.85 87 Washington, DC, United States 58.71 88 Sault Ste. Marie, Canada 58.60 89 San Francisco, CA, United States 58.59 90 Naples, Italy 58.52 91 Darwin, Australia 58.41 92 Kelowna, Canada 58.26 93 Noida, India 57.97 94 Winnipeg, Canada 57.82 95 Kansas City, MO, United States 57.74 96 Santiago, Chile 57.64 97 Indianapolis, IN, United States 57.58 98 Malmo, Sweden 56.75 99 Manchester, United Kingdom 56.03 100 Johor Bahru, Malaysia 55.96 101 Athens, Greece 55.89 102 Louisville, KY, United States 55.77 103 Gurgaon, India 55.73 104 Jacksonville, FL, United States 55.64 105 Oshawa, Canada 55.64 106 Casablanca, Morocco 55.59 107 Petaling Jaya, Malaysia 55.53 108 San Jose, Costa Rica 55.37 109 Bangalore, India 55.18 110 Las Vegas, NV, United States 55.12 111 Brampton, Canada 55.01 112 Paris, France 54.96 113 Tehran, Iran 54.86 114 Algiers, Algeria 54.82 115 Minneapolis, MN, United States 54.78 116 Spokane, WA, United States 54.78 117 Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia 54.54 118 Cambridge, Canada 54.41 119 Montevideo, Uruguay 54.38 120 Gaborone, Botswana 54.32 121 Hamilton, Canada 54.16 122 Cancun, Mexico 53.87 123 Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 53.84 124 Thessaloniki, Greece 53.75 125 London, Canada 53.68 126 Odessa (Odesa), Ukraine 53.55 127 Jakarta, Indonesia 53.50 128 Karachi, Pakistan 53.41 129 Montpellier, France 53.34 130 Regina, Canada 53.33 131 London, United Kingdom 53.25 132 Rome, Italy 53.15 133 Drogheda, Ireland 53.05 134 Grenoble, France 52.98 135 Phnom Penh, Cambodia 52.97 136 Ufa, Russia 52.94 137 Lille, France 52.88 138 Miami, FL, United States 52.81 139 Amadora, Portugal 52.74 140 Bilbao, Spain 52.55 141 Rostov-na-donu, Russia 52.52 142 Liege, Belgium 52.38 143 Bari, Italy 52.28 144 Mysore, India 52.02 145 Medellin, Colombia 51.99 146 Wollongong, Australia 51.89 147 San Miguel de Allende, Mexico 51.81 148 Florianopolis, Brazil 51.79 149 Rennes, France 51.73 150 Cebu, Philippines 51.73 151 Phoenix, AZ, United States 51.73 152 Brussels, Belgium 51.73 153 Dublin, Ireland 51.70 154 Portland, OR, United States 51.48 155 Dnipro, Ukraine 51.44 156 Orlando, FL, United States 51.41 157 Nottingham, United Kingdom 50.78 158 Kamloops, Canada 50.53 159 Seattle, WA, United States 50.46 160 Dallas, TX, United States 50.29 161 Tucson, AZ, United States 50.19 162 Geelong, Australia 50.08 163 Guanajuato, Mexico 50.06 164 Liepaja, Latvia 49.96 165 Turin, Italy 49.87 166 Cairo, Egypt 49.78 167 Los Angeles, CA, United States 49.75 168 Lyon, France 49.72 169 Lucknow (Lakhnau), India 49.13 170 Rawalpindi, Pakistan 49.11 171 Asuncion, Paraguay 48.99 172 Saskatoon, Canada 48.89 173 San Antonio, TX, United States 48.83 174 Cincinnati, OH, United States 48.76 175 Bali, Indonesia 48.64 176 Sacramento, CA, United States 48.58 177 Kharkiv, Ukraine 48.54 178 Addis Ababa, Ethiopia 48.41 179 Podgorica, Montenegro 48.40 180 Indore, India 48.37 181 Barcelona, Spain 48.10 182 Vitoria, Brazil 48.00 183 Craiova, Romania 47.93 184 Gothenburg, Sweden 47.91 185 Tampa, FL, United States 47.87 186 Tunis, Tunisia 47.80 187 Toulouse, France 47.80 188 Nanaimo, BC, Canada 47.75 189 Istanbul, Turkey 47.54 190 Panama City, Panama 47.47 191 Monterrey, Mexico 47.44 192 Novosibirsk, Russia 47.30 193 Yekaterinburg, Russia 47.25 194 Pattaya, Thailand 47.20 195 Skopje, North Macedonia 47.08 196 Liverpool, United Kingdom 47.07 197 New York, NY, United States 47.07 198 Bordeaux, France 47.06 199 Newcastle, Australia 47.03 200 St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada 46.94 201 Beirut, Lebanon 46.87 202 St.Catharines, Canada 46.79 203 Kuching, Malaysia 46.76 204 Kolkata, India 46.55 205 Richmond, VA, United States 46.50 206 Ajax, ON, Canada 46.22 207 Accra, Ghana 46.08 208 Stockholm, Sweden 46.08 209 Nashville, TN, United States 46.05 210 Honolulu, HI, United States 45.98 211 Omaha, NE, United States 45.84 212 Bologna, Italy 45.77 213 Moncton, Canada 45.61 214 Peterborough, United Kingdom 45.59 215 Auckland, New Zealand 45.59 216 San Jose, CA, United States 45.58 217 Hamilton, New Zealand 45.56 218 Kiev (Kyiv), Ukraine 45.45 219 Glasgow, United Kingdom 45.33 220 Charlotte, NC, United States 45.30 221 Mumbai, India 45.18 222 Palermo, Italy 45.06 223 Denver, CO, United States 45.01 224 Chisinau, Moldova 44.80 225 Milan, Italy 44.56 226 Buffalo, NY, United States 44.50 227 Sarajevo, Bosnia And Herzegovina 44.49 228 Chandigarh, India 44.38 229 Frankfurt, Germany 44.35 230 Kristiansand, Norway 44.06 231 Melbourne, Australia 44.06 232 Belfast, United Kingdom 44.02 233 Sheffield, United Kingdom 44.01 234 Hyderabad, India 43.96 235 Tirana, Albania 43.90 236 Leeds, United Kingdom 43.71 237 Columbus, OH, United States 43.42 238 Edmonton, Canada 43.41 239 Gold Coast, Australia 43.28 240 Cologne, Germany 43.16 241 Windsor, Canada 42.92 242 Vaughan, Canada 42.88 243 Mississauga, Canada 42.65 244 Sofia, Bulgaria 42.52 245 Hamburg, Germany 42.47 246 Lodz, Poland 42.05 247 Berlin, Germany 42.05 248 Perth, Australia 41.93 249 Iloilo, Philippines 41.69 250 Genoa, Italy 41.60 251 Pune, India 41.58 252 Bangkok, Thailand 41.50 253 Hanover, Germany 41.47 254 Burnaby, Canada 41.39 255 Cuenca, Ecuador 41.33 256 Kochi, India 41.20 257 Toronto, Canada 41.14 258 Uppsala, Sweden 41.12 259 Bremen, Germany 40.96 260 Novi Sad, Serbia 40.94 261 Halifax, Canada 40.76 262 Leipzig, Germany 40.66 263 Chennai, India 40.57 264 Bristol, United Kingdom 40.54 265 Colombo, Sri Lanka 40.41 266 Brooklyn, NY, United States 40.35 267 Bonn, Germany 40.04 268 Coimbatore, India 39.96 269 Christchurch, New Zealand 39.88 270 Ankara, Turkey 39.74 271 Thiruvananthapuram, India 39.67 272 Lviv, Ukraine 39.59 273 Limerick, Ireland 39.47 274 Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom 39.30 275 Saint Petersburg, Russia 39.12 276 Pittsburgh, PA, United States 39.09 277 Kitchener, Canada 39.09 278 Riverside, CA, United States 38.97 279 Katowice, Poland 38.95 280 Florence, Italy 38.84 281 Makati, Philippines 38.80 282 Lahore, Pakistan 38.74 283 Alexandria, Egypt 38.74 284 Karlsruhe, Germany 38.41 285 Hanoi, Vietnam 38.14 286 Belgrade, Serbia 38.09 287 Amman, Jordan 38.01 288 Kaunas, Lithuania 37.99 289 Riga, Latvia 37.78 290 Baguio, Philippines 37.76 291 Moscow, Russia 37.67 292 Visakhapatnam, India 37.43 293 Cardiff, United Kingdom 37.40 294 Nagpur, India 37.26 295 Vancouver, Canada 37.16 296 Guangzhou, China 37.14 297 Varna, Bulgaria 37.11 298 Austin, TX, United States 37.06 299 Constanta, Romania 36.97 300 Cagliari, Italy 36.92 301 Kathmandu, Nepal 36.92 302 Boston, MA, United States 36.91 303 Klaipeda, Lithuania 36.85 304 Penang, Malaysia 36.77 305 Brighton, United Kingdom 36.75 306 San Diego, CA, United States 36.71 307 Rabat, Morocco 36.68 308 Victoria, Canada 36.67 309 Antwerp, Belgium 36.43 310 Rotterdam, Netherlands 36.41 311 Cork, Ireland 36.27 312 Jerusalem, Israel 36.24 313 Oulu, Finland 36.22 314 Queretaro, Mexico 36.14 315 Boise, ID, United States 36.08 316 Barrie, Canada 35.87 317 Jaipur, India 35.65 318 Calgary, Canada 35.65 319 Aberdeen, United Kingdom 35.52 320 Porto, Portugal 35.44 321 Budapest, Hungary 35.40 322 Surat, India 35.21 323 Puerto Vallarta, Mexico 35.00 324 Split, Croatia 34.88 325 Brisbane, Australia 34.81 326 Navi Mumbai, India 34.64 327 Raleigh, NC, United States 34.47 328 Oslo, Norway 34.38 329 Shanghai, China 34.32 330 Banja Luka, Bosnia And Herzegovina 34.12 331 Madison, WI, United States 34.00 332 Tashkent, Uzbekistan 33.97 333 Aguascalientes, Mexico 33.75 334 Sydney, Australia 33.66 335 Amsterdam, Netherlands 33.63 336 Lund, Sweden 33.62 337 Dusseldorf, Germany 33.44 338 Beijing, China 33.36 339 Guelph, Canada 33.28 340 Astana (Nur-Sultan), Kazakhstan 33.19 341 El Paso, TX, United States 33.08 342 Vadodara, India 33.04 343 Shenzhen, China 33.03 344 Hobart, Australia 32.86 345 Nuremberg, Germany 32.75 346 Salt Lake City, UT, United States 32.71 347 Nicosia, Cyprus 32.66 348 Limassol, Cyprus 32.63 349 Ahmedabad, India 32.57 350 Gdansk, Poland 32.05 351 Kingston, Canada 31.80 352 Nizhny Novgorod, Russia 31.70 353 Osaka, Japan 31.66 354 Havana, Cuba 31.33 355 Palma de Mallorca, Spain 31.08 356 Incheon, South Korea 30.92 357 Baku, Azerbaijan 30.86 358 Kuwait City, Kuwait 30.80 359 Stuttgart, Germany 30.53 360 Seville (Sevilla), Spain 30.42 361 Montreal, Canada 30.36 362 Bratislava, Slovakia 30.29 363 Ad Dammam, Saudi Arabia 30.27 364 Dresden, Germany 30.23 365 Cambridge, United Kingdom 30.18 366 Edinburgh, United Kingdom 30.04 367 Izmir, Turkey 30.04 368 Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany 29.90 369 Luxembourg, Luxembourg 29.72 370 Madrid, Spain 29.71 371 Iasi, Romania 29.49 372 Burlington, Canada 29.34 373 Adelaide, Australia 29.29 374 Wellington, New Zealand 29.28 375 Islamabad, Pakistan 29.27 376 Galway, Ireland 29.07 377 Jeddah (Jiddah), Saudi Arabia 28.99 378 Lisbon, Portugal 28.88 379 Wroclaw, Poland 28.11 380 Bursa, Turkey 28.10 381 Bucharest, Romania 27.94 382 Bergen, Norway 27.86 383 Davao, Philippines 27.78 384 Waterloo, Canada 27.77 385 Singapore, Singapore 27.64 386 Krakow (Cracow), Poland 27.58 387 Poznan, Poland 27.49 388 Haifa, Israel 27.46 389 Alicante, Spain 27.40 390 Vilnius, Lithuania 27.33 391 Copenhagen, Denmark 27.33 392 Malaga, Spain 27.26 393 Oakville, Canada 26.93 394 Utrecht, Netherlands 26.64 395 Riyadh, Saudi Arabia 26.49 396 Vienna, Austria 26.47 397 Ottawa, Canada 26.41 398 Lausanne, Switzerland 26.34 399 Brno, Czech Republic 26.30 400 Antalya, Turkey 26.22 401 Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel 26.19 402 Geneva, Switzerland 26.16 403 Warsaw, Poland 26.16 404 Richmond Hill, Canada 25.87 405 Seoul, South Korea 25.77 406 Amarillo, TX, United States 25.57 407 Helsinki, Finland 25.49 408 Brasov, Romania 25.43 409 The Hague (Den Haag), Netherlands 25.36 410 Mangalore, India 25.31 411 Gent, Belgium 25.26 412 Merida, Mexico 25.11 413 Valencia, Spain 25.09 414 Markham, Canada 25.09 415 Tbilisi, Georgia 25.07 416 Graz, Austria 25.00 417 Trieste, Italy 24.71 418 Aalborg, Denmark 24.48 419 Kigali, Rwanda 24.35 420 Eindhoven, Netherlands 24.29 421 Prague, Czech Republic 24.17 422 Stavanger, Norway 23.83 423 Tokyo, Japan 23.59 424 Rijeka, Croatia 23.52 425 Coquitlam, Canada 23.41 426 Chiang Mai, Thailand 23.31 427 Timisoara, Romania 23.17 428 Tallinn, Estonia 22.89 429 Canberra, Australia 22.47 430 Tampere, Finland 22.12 431 Yerevan, Armenia 22.01 432 Hong Kong, Hong Kong 21.92 433 Reykjavik, Iceland 21.76 434 Cluj-Napoca, Romania 21.75 435 Tartu, Estonia 21.70 436 Ljubljana, Slovenia 21.45 437 Irvine, CA, United States 21.44 438 Zagreb, Croatia 21.39 439 North Vancouver, Canada 21.35 440 Manama, Bahrain 21.08 441 Arhus, Denmark 21.03 442 Muscat, Oman 20.91 443 Groningen, Netherlands 20.64 444 Yakutsk, Russia 20.59 445 Basel, Switzerland 20.48 446 Trondheim, Norway 20.16 447 Mecca, Saudi Arabia 19.23 448 Bern, Switzerland 18.34 449 Lugano, Switzerland 17.55 450 Munich, Germany 17.51 451 Zurich, Switzerland 16.78 452 Dubai, United Arab Emirates 16.30 453 Funchal, Portugal 15.39 454 Quebec City, Canada 15.22 455 Taipei, Taiwan 14.32 456 Sharjah, United Arab Emirates 14.17 457 San Sebastian, Spain 13.97 458 Doha, Qatar 13.83 459 Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates 11.86 Showing 1 to 459 of 459 entries var _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____ = function(name) {return (self._wb_wombat && self._wb_wombat.local_init && self._wb_wombat.local_init(name)) || self[name]; }; if (!self.__WB_pmw) { self.__WB_pmw = function(obj) { this.__WB_source = obj; return this; } } { let window = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("window"); let self = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("self"); let document = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("document"); let location = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("location"); let top = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("top"); let parent = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("parent"); let frames = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("frames"); let opener = _____WB$wombat$assign$function_____("opener"); let arguments; { whenDocReady(function() { var t_t2 = $('#t2').DataTable({ 'columnDefs': [ { 'searchable': false, 'orderable': false, 'targets': 0 } ], 'paging': false, 'order': [[ 2, 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{packages:["corechart"]}); google.setOnLoadCallback(rankings_curr); function rankings_curr() { var data = google.visualization.arrayToDataTable([ ['City', 'Crime Index', { role: 'style' }], ['San Jose, CA, United States', 45.58, 'color: #4D89F9'], ['Sydney, Australia', 33.66, 'color: #4D89F9'], ['New York, NY, United States', 47.07, 'color: #4D89F9'], ['Prague, Czech Republic', 24.17, 'color: #4D89F9'], ['London, United Kingdom', 53.25, 'color: #4D89F9'] ]); var options = { title: 'Crime Index 2022', backgroundColor: 'transparent', legend : { textStyle: { color : '#f1FDFE'}}, fontName: 'sans-serif' , titleTextStyle: { fontSize: 14} , chartArea: {left:30,top:35, right:10, bottom:50, width:'96%', height:'60%' }, vAxis: { minValue:0 } }; var chart = new google.visualization.ColumnChart(document.getElementById('rankings_curr_div')); chart.draw(data, options); } }} Crime Index 2022San Jose, CA, UnitedStatesSydney, AustraliaNew York, NY, UnitedStatesPrague, Czech RepublicLondon, United Kingdom0100CityCrime IndexSan Jose, CA, United States45.58Sydney, Australia33.66New York, NY, United States47.07Prague, Czech Republic24.17London, United Kingdom53.25Crime Index 2022 Other rankings by Numbeo: Quality of Life Index 2022 Cost of Living Index 2022 Health Care Index 2022 Pollution Index 2022 Property Prices Index 2022 Traffic Index 2022 This page in other languages: DeutschKriminalitäts-Index 2022 PortuguêsIndicador de Crime 2022 ItalianoIndice della Criminalità 2022 FrançaisIndice de Criminalité 2022 EspañolÍndice de Criminalidad 2022 About Press Newsletter API Copyright © 2009-2022 Numbeo. 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The advantage of ocean currents is their stability. They flow with little fluctuation in speed and direction, giving them a capacity factor — a measure of how often the system is generating — of 50-70%, compared with around 29% for onshore wind and 15% for solar.

Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) estimates the Kuroshio Current could potentially generate as much as 200 gigawatts — about 60% of Japan’s present generating capacity.

Chinese scientists call for plan to destroy Elon Musk's Starlink satellites

humans go from being a destructive force to a restorative force at a planetary level.