The Politics of Delay

Martin Tye wrote in a post on the ex-bird site:

"Scale of demand" is the key component of #Sustainability.

Almost anything is #sustainable if demanded on a small enough scale,
& almost nothing if demanded on too large a scale.

— Martin Tye (@martinrev21) October 24, 2024

I replied with a thread, that I have reproduced with some corrections and clarifications here:

Yes, large scale is a risk. But not of unsustainable full coverage; rather, of sustainable-yet-incomplete coverage.

Either way not meeting climate goals, but depending how you describe predictions, you'll be seen as wise or not.

They'll say “it's working, but not yet done, wait more.”

Capitalism relies for its correct function on strategic choices by businesses about who not to serve. This is why government must never be asked to “run like a business.” Some issues must be handled fully. Government projects are just not all correctly described or modeled as profit & loss centers.

Capitalism, at least until we overconsume generally and it kills us, reacts to scarcity by hiking prices (price elasticity), so rather than too-large demand causing the system to implode, it will “just” not reach coverage—or not yet reach coverage. The public is ill-equipped for such conversation.

I'm no mathematician, but I'll risk their terminology in order to make a brief point: Many Capitalists' alleged or accepted “truths” (to include some mere “rules of thumb”) presume asymptotic effect. Climate physics adds a bounding box, inside of which such curves are truncated. It matters where that truncation occurs. It calls for different lemmas and fights common wisdom.

For example, capitalists might say “if X occurs, prices will naturally come down,” but if there is a bounding box, a time limit, then it matters whether “eventually” falls inside or outside of the box.

It may be that certain things we're used to seeing converge eventually do not converge in the short term, and that's all the time we have. So our rule of thumb that “the market will sort it out” might be true if we have infinite time, but false if we do not. Moreover, if they weren't going to converge at all, that fact may be hidden behind a time horizon. We might need to think very differently in a bounded-time scenario than we do if we think we have unbounded time. This might change how we have to judge what market-based strategies are acceptable.

So the difficulty is that we must convince people that certain rules of thumb they'll want to use to evaluate proposals are wrong, while at the same time proposing new ways to do something that will need some way of being judged. Changing both “manner of practice” AND “theory of testing” at same time is conversationally hard. It's needed, of course. But be ready for confusion, suspicion, and pushback.

Denialists have reimagined and reconfigured themselves as “delayists so they can say “we're getting there” or “we're going in the right direction.” It makes it not sound as much like lying. Unless people actually believe in the bounding time box. Folks still today, as we reach and possibly already exceed certain Climate tipping points, make economic and political choices that presume infinite time.

Author's Notes:

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I created the plot in Python using numpy and matplotlib, then touched it up in Gimp.