Burntwood Lecture, Steve Rayner - Rethinking Environmental Problems

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: I'm Heather Barrett-Mould, I'm Chair of the Institution for Environmental Science and I'd like to welcome you here this evening. It's very good to see so many people. Fabulous venue, isn't it? Really lovely. Welcome to the 13th Burntwood Lecture. This is an opportunity for an eminent speaker to talk about an important contemporary issue. If you'd like to tweet or post photos, nice things preferably, that's the hashtag, so please feel free. So for those of you who are feeling a bit overworked, underappreciated, you might be pleased to hear that tonight's speaker once called on scientists to join a knowledge strike in protest against world leaders' continued non-action on environmental issues, saying scientists must stop allowing themselves to be aligned with government's failure to make decisions. He suggested governments were hiding behind the excuse that more research is necessary, the typical answer, isn't it? So the majority of our members in the IES work in applied science, be it providing evidence for impact assessing, modelling, or permitting. This means they're often dealing with problems that have ethical dimensions, multiple stakeholders, confused spatial and temporal boundaries, all the hard stuff. Scientific and technical skills alone are not sufficient to navigate through this complex web. Throughout the year, the IES has been grappling with how the scientific work of our members interacts with value systems, social systems, and politics. One of our journals dealt with contentious issues in the environmental debate, issues such as ecocide, hydroelectric dams, and overpopulation. Our guest editor, Gail Burgess, wrote this in her editorial for the journal, and you might remember this. Over the years, environmental scientists have been exposed to more than their fair share of controversy. Perhaps this should be expected. We are the canaries in the scientific coal mine, playing the part of an early warning system on behalf of the planet, raising the alarm when the unpredicted consequences of humanity's various technological, industrial, and other evolutions become apparent. Another of our main themes this year has been exploring issues around energy generation. Our energy fact sheets throughout the year, capturing the opinions of different stakeholders, government, scientists, industry, and campaign groups. Highlighted how divisive these technologies can be. As scientists, we all have our own views on these issues, but it's important that we recognise the positions and concerns of other groups, and seek some kind of balance, particularly in our dealings with policymakers and the general public. What's more, it's dangerous to homogenise stakeholder concerns. In reality, each group represents various viewpoints, driven by a diverse and confusing range of financial, political, social, and ethical motivations. And nor are these groups necessarily static. So, even though you've got all these different dimensions, they're still not staying still. Different positions are constantly being challenged and renegotiated. Whose views should be given primacy? Do we need to be a bit more humble about our evidence and our role in the debate? As Einstein noted, all our science measured against reality is primitive and childlike. Our February journal examined the energy trilemma. How to provide affordable energy, ensure security of supply, and minimise damage to the environment. Balancing these three, often conflicting goals, requires not just scientific knowledge, but also an appreciation of human need, an understanding of economics, knowledge of geopolitics, and the ability to communicate clearly to affected communities. So, it seems that a new type of thinker, or at least thinking, is required to tackle these environmental challenges. So, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our speaker, who could be described as Renaissance man. Not sure how he takes to that. With academic qualifications in philosophy, theology, and anthropology. A career that's seen him serve on various US, UK, and international bodies addressing science, technology, and the environment. Including Britain's Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the Royal Society's Working Group on Climate Geoengineering. Until 2008, he also directed the National Science and Society Research Programme of the Economic and Social Research Council. He's the James Martin Professor of Science and Civilisation, and Director for the Institute for Science, Innovation, and Society at Oxford University, where he also co-directs the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities, and the Oxford Geoengineering Programme. So, it really is nice that he's been able to take time out in order to come and do this lecture tonight. He's also Honorary Professor of Climate Change and Society at the University of Copenhagen, and Senior Fellow at the Breakthrough Institute. So, please join me in welcoming Steve Rayner to present the Burntwood Lecture. [00:06:39] Speaker 2: Thank you very much, and thanks to all of you for coming. What do the following things have in common? Crime, North Korea, poverty, cancer, drugs, terror, and climate change. I'll let you ponder that for a moment. And, of course, you all got the answer straight away, didn't you? We're still at war with all of them. J. Edgar Hoover declared war on crime in the 1930s. The Korean War was a fighting war between 1950 and 1953, but officially we only have an armistice with Korea. We are still technically at war with the country. Harold Wilson declared war on poverty in the 50s. Richard Nixon declared war on cancer in the 70s and on drugs in 1971. George Bush declared war on terror in 2001, and Richard Branson declared war on climate change in 2008. And I put it to you that the reason why I put all these things together is that when people start declaring war on things that are not really shooting wars with guns, you're facing what social scientists call a wicked problem. It's a problem that won't go away. It's a sign of desperation, essentially, to declare war on something. The term wicked problems was actually invented in the late 1960s, first published in the early 70s by Horst Rittle and Marvin Weber. They were planning professors at the University of California, Berkeley. And they coined the phrase to describe complex social problems in the planning field. Unfortunately, of course, since then, the term wicked has taken on a very different connotation. And when my daughter uses it, it means something really good. But we'll skip over that for the time being. Essentially, what they did in their seminal paper on this topic was they compared the kinds of planning, no-brainer problems that planners were dealing with in the early part of the 20th century, the late 19th century, things like putting sewers underground, getting water supplies into communities and so on and so forth, with what they saw as being much more difficult, complex, intractable problems of late 20th century planning, which involved issues like the redevelopment of whole areas and moving large segments of population around the city. And they furthermore contrasted these kinds of problems with the kind of puzzle-solving problems that they characterized science as having been dealing with, particularly through most of the first half of the 20th century with the complexities of developing social policy under these conditions. And furthermore, they said, to make matters even more difficult, we were entering, and this was already in the 1960s and 70s, a period in which there was greater diversity of claims to actually have a say in how society is organized. And so you had more value conflicts emerging as basically decisions were no longer simply being made by middle-aged white men, but we were having more diversity of gender participation, of ethnic participation, intergenerational claims, and so on and so forth. The characteristics of wicked problems, as Weber and Rittle and Weber described them, are variously described in the literature, and in fact, if you go on the web and you Google on wicked problems, you'll find multiple lists, this happens to be mine, I think it's a reasonably parsimonious list there. They're persistent and insoluble. In that sense, they're not really problems. In the sense that a problem ought to have a solution. There are more conditions under which we have to live life, things we have to cope with. They're very often symptoms of deeper problems, and there's often, as you dig deeper, you get into circularity. So, you know, what's the cause of crime, poverty, what's the cause of poverty, bad education, you know, and so on and so forth. There's often very little room for trial and error learning in the sense that in these planning issues that Rittle and Weber were talking about, you can't uproot a whole segment of a population in a city, decant them out into a different area, build something new there, and then decant them back again, knock it all down and decant them back again if it doesn't work. So there's not the same capacity for trial and error learning as there is with conventional knowledge. The problem isn't so much with wicked problems that there's a lack of evidence. It's that the evidence is very often contradictory and very much dependent on your own worldview and standpoint. So they are characterized by what social scientists call contradictory certitudes. And I'll say a little bit more about those in a minute. The proposed solutions to wicked problems often create new problems. One of the areas I'm doing a lot of work in at the moment is in the area of the ethical and governance challenges posed by proposals to do climate geoengineering. Should we put sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere to cool the planet, for example? That's a wonderful example of how a proposed new solution raises a whole range of novel problems that might be involved in actually carrying those kinds of proposals through to implementation. And finally, these kinds of wicked problems very often involve entrenched interests. So, for example, the entrenched interests of the fossil fuel industry in the problem of climate change. So, all in all, what we're dealing with here is a set of problems for which we're really trying to find ways of coping rather than definitively solving. And we're looking for feasible solutions rather than optimal solutions. And very often the pursuit of optimality can lead us away from a proper pursuit of feasibility. Here's another way of trying to understand wicked problems. This is based on the work of Silvio Funtefitz and Jerry Rivetz. And it basically differentiates wicked problems from somewhat more tractable complex problems and quite tractable tame problems along two dimensions in this cartoon. I call it a cartoon, not a graph. On the x-axis, you have increasing uncertainty and ignorance as you move away from the origin of the picture. And you have increasing societal decision stakes as you go up the y-axis. And where both decision stakes and systems uncertainty are relatively low, these are where you have tame problems. This is where you actually have consensual knowledge. There isn't a lot of political stakes in disagreeing. Isn't it interesting that the climate change sceptics in the United States seldom start arguing about the number of protons in the nucleus of beryllium. There isn't the same kind of values that are at stake in that kind of scientific proposition. So you can have consensus around that kind of science. As you move further out, though, issues become complex. You have some of the knowledge that you have when you're dealing with tame problems, but you're relying a lot more on the craft skills of the practitioner. You enter a realm, really, of expert judgment, of clinical-type consultancy. And then, finally, if you go further out on either dimension, it's important to emphasize either dimension, not just both dimensions. You enter this area of wicked problems where, basically, arguments are advanced from the position of conflicting worldviews. And I put it to you, it's very interesting. If you think for a moment, probably the fiercest arguments you experience are the ones where the participants actually have the least amount of evidence to argue about. And that's because we're falling back on basic intrinsic values and the things which are absolutely fundamental to the way we apprehend the world and our place in it. So to just give three quick examples from the area of nuclear technology, you might say a tame problem would be a choice between two valves to put in a reactor core cooling system. You know a lot about the suppliers. You've got a lot of actuarial information about the behavior of the components. That's a bit of a no-brainer. If you make a mistake, well, you have to close the reactor down, but it's not the end of the world. It's just going to cost a bit of money. A complex expert judgment in the same field might be the choice between two different reactor types or two different suppliers of reactors. Whereas if we're getting out into the wicked area, it's what should be a national policy with respect to nuclear power. Should we have a national nuclear power strategy? Should we build more reactors and commit ourselves to nuclear energy in that way? So that gives some examples. And mostly what I'm going to be talking about are the wicked problems, the conflicting worldview ones. So here's an example of a wicked problem that I happen to be quite well acquainted with, having spent 23 years of my professional life working in the U.S. And that's the Chesapeake Bay program. For some of you may know that the Chesapeake Bay is the largest marine bay in the United States. And it is famous, of course, as being extremely productive. The Maryland crab, the iconic crab for the state of Maryland, comes from the Chesapeake Bay, a very longstanding seafood industry base there. And the Chesapeake Bay, through the course of the 20th century, developed problems with respect to nutrient loading in the bay, phosphates and nitrates. And in 1983, the U.S. government established the Chesapeake Bay program, which encompassed the four watershed states, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania. The District of Columbia, the Environmental Protection Agency, its budget at the current moment is somewhere in the region of $60 million a year. And it is dedicated to reducing the nutrient loading on the bay. It does this with the aid of a very complex set of linked models. They have an estuary model, which is, if you like, a water quality model. There's an airshed model, which models the whole of the United States from a line between Texas and North Dakota right across to the eastern seaboard. And there is a watershed model, there's the estuary model, which is a water quality model, and then there is the airshed model. And all of these have complicated sub-models and they're linked in various ways, all of which make some really quite heroic assumptions. So, for example, in terms of the hydrology modeling, it assumes that the behavior of the bay can be understood by taking a seven-year average of the average conditions of the hydrology of the bay. Now, anybody who knows this system will tell you that, in fact, the condition of the bay is almost entirely governed by extreme events. When you have heavy rainfall, you have runoff, you have scouring of the riverbeds and so on and so forth. So, taking that average hydrology is embodying one example of heroic assumptions. Another is the assumption that it takes only two years for changes in deposition of nutrients onto the land surface to make their way into the, affecting the water quality, whereas we, in fact, know that it takes between two and 70 years, depending on where that deposition occurs. However, the model is run and on the basis of the model results, the Chesapeake Bay program can show continued improvements in the water quality of the bay over the life of its program. The only problem is when you start moving from talking to the people who do the computer modeling to the poor guys and girls who go out in the boats and get cold fingers dipping test tubes in, taking water out and testing it. And when you talk to them, they'll spend the first 40 minutes complaining to you how it is that the modelers get all the glamour, they get all the publications in the professional journals, and they get all the funding and all the rest of it, and the people who actually go out and do the monitoring feel very hard done by, and then they'll tell you, and by the way, there's no change in the water quality of the mainstream of the bay. Basically, we can't detect any change. Now, that doesn't mean to say that over time, the actions that are being taken by the program might cumulatively in 70 years' time be beneficial, but we actually don't know that from the monitoring of the bay. But what's even more interesting is the way in which the computer modeling is represented as if it were the monitoring of the bay. So, I'll give you an exact quotation from the website. The bay models are used to track nutrient loads to ensure the cap on nutrient loading is not exceeded. But it doesn't, because it's not actually monitoring the bay. So, little wonder that there are real controversies then when you start taking the positions of the Chesapeake Bay program with the kinds of views that the people who actually depend for their livelihoods on the bay, the people who are doing the crab fishing, and so on, their view of how the bay works. And this reflects, I think, another really interesting dimension to the wickedness of problems, which is the difference of standpoint from which we apprehend the world. And this is a figure that I've borrowed from a fellow anthropologist, Tim Ingold, and it's taken from the Italian Enlightenment scholar Enrico Maffei's work Scala Naturale, The Natural Staircase, and it shows Maffei with his aristocratic patron in the middle of a series of concentric stairs that rise in a sort of amphitheater kind of way from the center there. And the idea is that actually, as one becomes more learned, one steps on a higher staircase and learns about the world from the inside out. And Ingold compares this with the kind of view that we take from modern science, particularly in satellite imagery, in which we actually are apprehending the world from the outside in. And Ingold, as you can see from this quote here, suggests that these differences in standpoint are not simply differences of scale, but fundamentally different ways of apprehending the world. And very often when we're encountering wicked problems, we're encountering clashes between these two modes of apprehension. Especially when, increasingly, our encounter with nature is mediated by technology, whether it's medical technology and scanning devices, or it's satellite imagery, which produces these kind of pretty colored images here, which then require the interpretation of the expert in order to be accessible to the lay person. In fact, I would argue, most people today no longer encounter nature directly. They encounter it heavily mediated through the categories of science. External nature, they encounter through the categories of environmental science and ecology. And internal nature, through the concepts of medicine. And I think that's important, because we've got to, if we take this into account in relationship to what Ingold has suggested, it's perhaps cast light on things such as why it is that there are very different views, or have been historically very different trajectories, for genetically modified crops in Europe and in the United States. When I arrived in this country in 2002, after a long period of living in the US, I was quite surprised by the fierce opposition that I encountered to genetically modified foods, having been probably rather unthinkingly eating them for many years before arriving here. And so I was puzzled by this. And I was also puzzled by the fact that Americans seem to have a very hostile view of the way in which the Europeans were regarding GM foods, accusing Europeans of simply using concerns about GM foods as trade barriers in the light of the establishment of the World Trade Organization. But it seems to me, as somebody who has a foot in both camps, so to speak, and is in fact even a dual national of the US and the UK, that there is a deeper cultural process that lies at the heart of this. If I talk to most North Americans and say, "What comes into your head when I say the word 'nature'?" They think of wilderness areas, they think of national parks, they think of the places where no human hand has set foot. They think nature for North Americans for the most part is where people are not. If you say what do you think of nature to most British people and to most northern Europeans, they will give you some version of the countryside. They'll talk about trees and hedgerows and sheep and little country churches and village pubs and this kind of thing. It's certainly a very different image of nature of being something of milieu within which we actually live rather than somewhere separate and apart from us. And in fact Americans have very few illusions about their food, despite the ideology of the family farm. Very few illusions about the fact that their food is industrially produced. You fly over the Great Plains, you see these massive soybean factories, open air factories making soybeans all across the US. It's interesting as well in this respect that if you are in the polls that were done about five or six years ago, people in Britain who objected strenuously to the idea of the foods didn't have any objection at all. In fact voiced strong support for genetically modified pharmaceuticals. The pharmaceuticals are made in factories, that's where that kind of thing belongs. It doesn't belong in the milieu in which I'm living, in my terroir and so on and so forth. So I would argue that things like the GM foods debate, the whole question of the management of the Chesapeake Bay represent wicked problems. And there have been various proposals that are ways to tame wicked problems. And amongst the most prominent of these are those of Nancy Roberts who is a professor at the Naval Academy in Monterey. And she says that there are three strategies that people can use to simplify wicked problems to tame them. There is a hierarchical strategy which is basically you simplify the issues, you box them up, and then you apply procedures and routines in order to analyze them. She also identifies a competitive strategy where she says you use expertise and craft skills to control the resources and to manage the situation. And then finally there's the egalitarian strategy which is you open up the problem to a wider range of stakeholders. Now you'll notice I've started to introduce some color into the type here. Follow the colors because there is continuity throughout some of the rest of the slides here. So I just want to think a little bit about whether these taming strategies work. The idea of taming wickedness through science is of course the hierarchical strategy. Basically it's science-based policy, evidence-based policy. In the US when I was still there it was always science-based, when I came here it was evidence-based which I think was a bit broader. But of course we still have lots of arguments about what constitutes evidence. And there are many in the scientific community, I'm afraid, and some in the policy community who don't think that qualitative evidence is valid at all. Obviously that's not a position that I would take. But in trying to tame wickedness through science what tends to happen is we have a proliferation of science assessments at all levels. They're well researched for the most part and informative. But unfortunately we find in many cases they generate what Dan Sarawitz has described as a surfeit of science. Which allows the policy maker to then cherry pick from these various reports. And the classic case of that was actually the NAPAP program, the National Acidic Precipitation Assessment Program in the United States. That was carried out throughout the 1980s and ultimately was inconclusive in determining policy for the US with respect to acid rain. And a different solution was found by the Congress which I'll talk about a little bit more in the future. So there's a real problem in trying to tame wickedness through science. Another way is the idea of the competitive route which is let's see if we can tame wickedness through markets, remove the dead hand of government and regulation to unleash human creativity, allow markets to find efficient solutions to problems, we invoke the wisdom of crowds and so on. But these also are problematic which is in the sense that markets really rely on having very good information about what's being traded and also depend very much on symmetry of information among the traders. And we know that in many of these cases with wicked problems with kinds of environmental problems and other indeed policy problems that I've been alluding to here, information asymmetry and uneven market power is in fact part of the problem. And then thirdly, the attempt to try to tame wickedness through participation. We've seen an increasing focus in the last 20 or 30 years on consultations with various terminologies, planning cells, consensus conferences, citizens, juries, etc. These all assume incidentally that societal decisions are in some sense aggregative, which is itself problematic. There's a technical issue there called Arrow's paradox, which I don't have time to go into in detail. But basically, Arrow got a Nobel Prize for demonstrating you can't actually generate a collective utility function by aggregating individual utility functions in any kind of democratic way. But perhaps even worse, these methods always run into issues about representativeness and legitimacy. They tend to be very costly if they're done well, when they're done on the cheap, they're very ineffective. And I think, for example, a lot of these issues came up in the GM Nation consultation over genetically modified crops, where, for example, the government was uncomfortable that the open access commentary through the website was truly representative of the public because of the argument that these were people who were, in some sense, stakeholders, had an interest. And then there was an effort to go out and try and find people who didn't really care about GM crops to get their opinions about GM crops, which itself is paradoxical. So the question is whether any of these three strategies actually enables us to tame a wicked problem or does it just dig us in deeper? And I think it's very interesting that when the advocates of any of these three strategies find that something's not working, they tend to say, well, that's because we're not trying hard enough. We haven't reached our climate change mitigation targets because we didn't set tough enough targets and we didn't try hard enough to get there. But what that ignores is the notion, which I think the insight which is important, which is each of these taming responses is itself a way of disorganizing the alternative responses. And that itself leads to contestations about knowledge. And each of these responses reflects a coherent worldview of nature and society. And I want to argue that nature and politics are, in fact, inextricably linked with each other. We say that we would like to keep them separate, but I would argue that that's actually impossible. And in doing so, I'm reminded of my early career as a philosophy undergraduate when I was fascinated to discover that nearly all philosophers have a theory about the way the world is and a theory about the way the world should be. So they all have an epistemology, an ontology on the one hand, an ethics and a politics on the other hand. But what particularly caught my imagination was the fact that in almost every case, the theory about the way the world is always seemed to add legitimacy by saying, by invoking the naturalness of the political and ethical preference. So on your right here we have Plato giving Marx the finger. And, of course, Plato was very upset with the Athenian state for the execution of Socrates. He wanted a very stable class of guardians. He also believed in the existence of a world of forms. The world of forms in which there is the perfect example of everything we encounter in everyday life. The perfect glass exists in the world of forms. This is just an imperfect reflection of it. You may have heard of Plato's metaphor of the shadows on the cave wall. The imperfect projections of the perfect objects that are fixed and unchanging forever. Fast forward a couple of thousand years. Marx and Engels are in the pub outside the British Museum getting terribly excited about boiling water. Why? Why are Europe's leading revolutionaries getting excited about boiling water? You can read about this in Engels' Dialectics of Nature, by the way. Well, because, of course, nothing happens as you keep putting more heat, more energy into the water until suddenly at 100 degrees Celsius it turns from liquid to socialism. I mean liquid to vapour. So you can see that in both cases what these philosophers are doing is using the idea of nature to legitimate their political preference. And what I discovered in going into anthropology as a graduate student is it's not just philosophers. Everybody all over the world does it all the time. So, coming back to our three strategies for taming wicked problems, we can see that in fact each one of them is very consistent with a particular view of nature that's represented in these simple little icons. So the competitive view of nature, the competitive strategy, the competitive political philosophy, sees nature basically as very forgiving. It's a resource to be mined. On the other hand, the egalitarian says no, no, no, nature actually is in a delicate balance. Rather than a ball inside a cup which you can perturb, and after a temporary disruption will return to equilibrium, the ball is on the upturned cup, any slight perturbation, and you'll have a catastrophic change of state that's irreversible. And then the hierarchical position is something of a synthesis of these, but is actually a third position, which is that nature is more like a ball in a landscape that you can perturb a certain amount, but not too much. Or you will get a catastrophic result. Now, the interesting thing, of course, is if you're Al Gore or George Bush, you don't actually need to consult scientists. Because Al Gore knows that nature is ephemeral, and George Bush is absolutely sure that nature is competitive, is basically benign and forgiving. It's the poor souls who actually have to figure out, hmm, okay, if there is a ball on a surface, how deep is the depression there? Where is the ball on that landscape? Is it in the bottom there, nice and comfortable, or is it precariously at the top? And so that's exactly why it's from that kind of point of view that we generate all the science assessments, because we're trying to monitor and understand exactly what the state of the system is. Interestingly enough, they also have a very characteristic view of the economy. Did you notice what happened there? Notice? The competitive and egalitarian views switch. George Bush said, I'm not going to put the American way of life at risk over climate change. The American way of life is not up for grabs. So the relatively small expenditures that were being proposed in terms of climate change mitigation measures, he was concerned that it was going to actually crash the US economy. On the other hand, Al Gore set up an investment company with his mate David Blood. Why they didn't call it Blood and Gore, I will never know. They called it Generation Investments Incorporated or something much more mundane than that. But basically the idea is, look, we can do all these investments in green energy and environmental measures and so on, and there may be some temporary short-term expenses, but basically the system will return to equilibrium, and probably a better equilibrium than the one that we started. And similarly, the poor old souls at the Treasury are doing the equivalent of what the EPA is doing when it comes to nature, which is trying to actually figure out what is the state of the economy in relationship to the position of the ball in the landscape. So what I'm getting at here is that rather than taking one of these taming strategies and pursuing it, we are actually faced with an irreducible two-dimensional possibility space for dealing with wicked problems. And not only that the solution has to lie within that space, but it actually has to pay attention to all three corners, whether it's actually paying direct attention to a corner or to a coalition along one of the sides or edges of that triangle. Each point of view must be heard and responded to. responded to is important, not necessarily compromised with, but responded to. So let's look at another example. I'm going to focus in here a little bit about climate change because I think climate change surely is the mother of all wicked problems, at least in the environmental field at the present moment. And I would argue that in fact the way we have conventionally gone about thinking of climate change is an unhelpfully reductionist one. We basically reduced all the complexity of climate change as a problem of the environment, of international relations, the economy, of technology, of equity, of international developments and so on and so forth, to an old-fashioned 1960s end of the pipe pollution problem. We have created notional national pipes and we are trying to cap what comes out of the ends of the pipe. And I'm going to suggest that that's not in fact a very useful way to think about climate change. The reason I think we got lured into that way of thinking about it was because of three very attractive but ultimately misleading analogies that were informing the architecture at the time when the climate change regime was being designed. And those were basically the ozone regime, the US sulfur trading program and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. I'll start with the ozone regime. Okay, climate change is like ozone depletion, right? It's about gases going into the atmosphere and causing damage. And we know that we solved that with respect to ozone depletion through this architecture of having a framework convention and implementation protocols. Unfortunately, however, I think climate change is a much more complex problem than ozone depletion caused by chlorofluorocarbons, which at best was a complex problem, actually a relatively tameable problem. CFCs were produced by a small number of companies in a small number of countries and there was a readily available technological substitute and there was evidence of immediate damage. None of those conditions, I would argue, applies to climate change. What we could have learned from the ozone regime, but we didn't learn, was the fact that the ozone regime addressed production, not emissions. There's no mention of emissions in the Montreal Protocol. It's all about the production technology. And I think that if we had focused in on the, as I will dilate in a moment, focused in on the production technology from the beginning, we would have got a lot further than we have at the present moment. The sulfur trading program was another input into the design of the regime. Basically, this was a program that was designed to deal with the problem of acid rain in the US. This was Congress's solution to the inconclusiveness of that NAPAP science program that I referred to earlier. And the idea was, well, we'll cut through all that. We'll introduce sulfur emissions trading that will enable eastern utilities to trade emissions permit with western utilities that burn much cleaner coal than the dirty coal being burned by the utilities in the east. And that worked very well. Worked splendidly. But again, not a good analogy for climate change. You're talking about a small number of traders, electric utilities, trading a single gas, sulfur dioxide, within a single legal regime to enforce contracts. And I would argue that none of those conditions applies to international sulfur trading. Sorry, to international carbon trading. I would say, by the way, that I can be convinced that carbon trading might be a worthwhile thing to do within national boundaries as part of a national policy. But as a notion that you're going to have carbon trading between states, I'm deeply skeptical that that actually is a viable route. And I think it's part of the reason, if we take all these three things together, why it is that we're now in the pickle we're in, which is we are on the top line here of these trajectories. These are the RCP scenarios produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. These are the projections of what could happen in the future based on different combinations of assumptions about economic development and technology penetration. And we're currently on that business as usual trajectory globally, with emissions increasing something just a bit over 3% per annum, despite all the efforts of the last 20 years. But not everybody is convinced that this is a problem. This is a figure that I borrowed from Dan Kahan, an American colleague at Yale, who has done some very nice quantitative research into the relationship between political orientation and concern about climate change in the United States. And you can see that there's a very direct correlation here between the extent to which people think climate change is a serious problem, a serious risk to human health, safety and prosperity, and the political affiliation of the respondents, a very direct line. And, of course, the conventional science response to this has been to argue that we need more science, we need more science, we need better science, and we need better communicated science. And it's rather like the English trying to talk to foreigners. The idea is if we talk more slowly and loudly, they will eventually understand. Only they don't. Because this is Dan Kahan's result for the United States, but there are comparable studies of issues here in the UK which show that, in fact, if you measure science comprehension by a number of standardized indicators of science comprehension, actually the polarization around climate change gets worse, not better. In other words, the more you understand about science, the more likely you are, as a layperson, to disagree about whether climate change is presenting a serious and present danger. So that's a bit of a challenge. By the way, note the colors again. Because one of the things that I will argue is that, in fact, the colors here correspond to the argument that I was making previously about the three different strategies for confronting wicked problems and the three kinds of political philosophies, views of nature, views of the economy that are embodied there. And clearly, this is in the US, so the Republicans are in blue -- sorry, the Republicans are in red. And you can see that there, the idea is very much that there's concern as much about the idea of government intervention in markets and things of that sort, that are really at the root of the issue. And in fact, I find, personally, when I talk to several Republicans who publicly will identify themselves as being climate skeptics, if not outright climate denialists, they will allow in private, after a couple of beers at least, look, there's probably, you know, there's no smoke without fire, there's probably something in this climate change stuff. But I'm not going to admit that publicly, because those damn Democrats will use it as an excuse to mess in the markets. And I think we have to understand that what we've been witnessing in the last 20 years is a surrogate debate, apparently, about science. But it's really a surrogate for a debate about values. I have a theory as to why that is the case, by the way, but I'm not going to go into it right now. So what do we do? If you can't tame it, reframe it. Okay, that's the slogan. That's the takeaway message. And in fact, in a number of publications since the mid-1990s, I and a group of other scholars who would position themselves somewhere between the extremes of climate catastrophism and climate complacency have indeed been attempting to bring about a reframing of the climate change issue through various publications. The most recent one is the book on the left, The Hartwell Approach to Climate Policy, which has just been published by Rutledge. And basically the way we've done this is to take on board the aphorism of the, if you like, a sort of proto-environmentalist in a way, the English landscape gardener, Capability Brown, Lancelot Capability Brown. And his aphorism was, "Confront the object, but draw nigh obliquely." And what he was doing there was drawing a contrast between continental European landscaping, where you go through the gate, you see the chateau framed in the gateway, and you go up along the boulevard, lined by the trees, designed to impress you with their grandeur to the front of the chateau. Whereas in Capability Brown's case, and of course this is just down the road from me, this is Blenheim Palace in Woodstock, Capability Brown had a different idea. It was that you come through the gate and you see the stately home in the distance, but then your coach lurches off down some side road, and you go around through little bits of woodland and round little hillocks. And when you're convinced you're completely lost, you turn around and you're in front of the house. And we thought this was a kind of a nice metaphor to suggest that perhaps the best way to achieve carbon emissions reductions is not to take carbon emissions reductions head on, but to look for a different strategy that will have the same result. Now, I'm an anthropologist, so that formula scares the hell out of me. You guys, it's probably a no-brainer, but I reduce it to the simple formula, emissions are a function of population wealth and technology. So, if that's the case, we have three possible levers we could pull in relation to emissions. I'm going to argue that population isn't a realistic lever, particularly in any democracy, because of the nature of demographics and the inertia in the population system. If you want to affect carbon concentrations by mid-century, well, the end of the century, let alone mid-century, you'd have to kill people. And the bad news is it's us you'd have to kill. It's the northern Europeans, Americans, Australians. It's not the Indians and the Africans. Not likely to be a big winner, I would argue, certainly not in any democracy. So that leaves us with wealth and technology, and I'd argue wealth isn't much of a lever to pull either. We know it works. When the economy crashes, we see carbon emissions go down. We certainly saw that happen with the reunification of Germany, for example, and the collapse of the Eastern European industry. But on the other hand, we have to ask whether that is actually a viable and ethical path to take. Basically, it's saying we're going to deny people in China and India the right to develop the same kinds of standards of living that we enjoy, or and/or we're going to ask those Americans to compromise their standard of living, and George Bush has already made it very clear that that's not on the agenda for at least the Republican Party in the United States. And furthermore, we've got one and a half billion people on the planet who actually lack access to reliable energy. So I would argue that leaves us with technology. I would emphasize, as a social scientist, technology isn't just bits of kit. It's not just nuts and bolts. They're social systems intermediated by materials and devices. They're configurations of people and things that work. They are systems. And when very often people tell you we have all the technology we need to deal with climate change, I would say that's not quite right. We have bits of kit. We have bits of systems. But we lack certain important elements. We lack, for example, integrated grid storage for intermittent renewables. At the moment we do silly things like pump water uphill and then let it come out in the night and go through a turbine. Not a very effective way to do this. The grid storage problem, some folks like Stephen Chu have argued, isn't a problem because we all have our own solar cells and our own batteries on our homes. That might work for sprawling suburban America. It's not going to work particularly in the developing world where we see very rapid urbanization in high rise cities. You're simply not going to have enough surface area to put solar cells on the top of every skyscraper and allow people to have batteries in their flats to deal with that. So that's one area. Another area I would argue is cost. I think we've seen tremendous improvements in the cost of wind turbines and solar cells over the last ten years. A lot of that actually incremental improvement brought about in China. But we still really haven't got the cost down to the stage where they can compete with coal, let alone shale gas. So I'm going to argue that in fact what we need is research, development, demonstration and deployment of technology. And to that you don't require a global intergovernment agreement where everything is agreed before anything can be done. Which is basically the pathway that we've been on for most of the last 20 years. These kinds of investments can be made from the bottom up. And I would argue that this kind of climate pragmatism that focuses on energy modernization actually does speak to all three agendas. It speaks to the collectivist insofar as it does seek to address the issue of human dignity. How do we get electricity to that 1.5 billion people who don't have it without frying the planet? But clearly it's the notion that human dignity has to be an important component of this energy modernization approach. For the competitive market approach energy modernization offers opportunities for innovation and new product development. And for the hierarchical approach where the stability of the country, the stability of the system is the driving underlying value. It offers energy security. And I think that this kind of approach to wicked problems is a promising one. Because I am convinced by the saying attributed to Walter Lippmann, the famous American political commentator. That democracy is not about getting people who think differently to think the same way. It's about getting people who think differently to do the same thing. Can we find solutions to wicked problems that actually address the concerns of the three competing fundamentally different views of nature and different views of the economy? And I think this is illustrated further by some interesting work that was done in the 1990s by the American political scientist Robert Putnam. who described the disparities in the institutional performance of the regional governments in Italy. Particularly contrasting the high performing provinces in the north and the low performing provinces in the south. Both in terms of public administration and in terms of their economic development. And he explored all the obvious variables such as, oh, you know, people say the south is further away from the European heartlands. And therefore, somehow or other, the European values of hard work and the Protestant ethic hasn't gotten down that far to Sicily and southern Italy and all the rest of it. Well, that sort of dodges the question, well, why wasn't the Alps the barrier when there's no barrier really around Rome that would actually prevent those ideas spreading? Wealth and public expenditure was another variable he looked at. It turns out actually that the southern provinces get more money to spend than the northern provinces. That didn't explain it. Educational levels, well, again, in the southern provinces you had more people in positions of leadership who had doctoral degrees than in the north where they could get proper jobs. So you had higher levels of education. None of those variables worked. The one thing that did correlate and correlated not only the cluster of the north and south but in rank order of all of the 20 provinces was the existence of civic organizations. In other words, in addition to the hierarchy of government and to the market orientation, the competitive market orientation, you also had this civic sector, the collectivist point of view. These are basically hobbyist organizations, sporting clubs, choirs, camera clubs, and so on and so forth. And it's the only statistically significant variable that Putnam can find. And it also fits very well historically with predicting the time at which the civic bodies were present and the subsequent economic development. And you can actually see the order in which those things occurred suggesting that there is actually some causal relationship. Now, Putnam's explanation for this I found very unsatisfactory. He argued that, in fact, when you have these voluntary organizations, it promoted social cohesion and trust. That because people were meeting with each other outside of the market, outside of government, because they were playing cricket with each other on Wednesdays and they were going to church together on Sundays or whatever, that somehow or other this meant that there was a greater level of societal trust. I can only say he never spent any time in an English village. And he certainly didn't spend any time with the groups of people I did my doctoral thesis on, which were Trotskyist and Maoist organizations in the 1970s in Britain, which were very close-knit egalitarian groups where backstabbing and witch hunting was the norm, never the exception. So I wasn't convinced by that. But what I do think is an alternative explanation that's a powerful way of accounting for Putnam's data, which I think is very compelling, is the idea that actually once you introduce that civic, voluntaristic, collaborative element, you now have three ways of doing things in the system. When you only have the market and hierarchy, as you had in the southern provinces, all you have is a switch. All you can do is swing between them. It's a game of snakes and ladders. It's up and down, backwards and forwards. As soon as you have three elements, you can start to combine them in different sequences and different combinations and different alignments. And so you have the possibility of the emergence, actually, of a complex governance system. It's a bit like the difference between snakes and ladders and chess. But in order to have the kind of strategy switching that is facilitated by having these three views rather than the simple strategy pendulum or switch, the two views, you need to have some experience with alternative models models and viable alternative models available. And I would argue that, in fact, contestation between these three ways of looking at the world is actually functional. Our chair this evening talked about being the canaries in the coal mine. The egalitarian way of looking at the world where nature is, in fact, the ball on the upturned bowl, in fact, does serve an extremely valuable early warning function like the canary down the coal mine. The trouble is if you leave egalitarians to themselves, they can be subject to factional squabbling and paranoia. The competitive approach gives us the opportunities for innovation. But if you leave them to themselves to dominate the system, you're likely to end up with a monopoly and an extortion. The hierarchists are the people who are good at system maintenance. These other two aren't very good for thinking in the long term. If you think about it for a moment, it's hierarchies that have produced pyramids, cathedrals, mass irrigation systems, and so on and so forth. But if you leave them to themselves, you get complacency and corruption. So essentially, by having the three in tension with each other, you can maximize the benefits on the center column and minimize the pathologies on the right-hand column. So just to give a couple of quick examples, many people think that the military is hierarchical. It's not actually. It's a combination of all these three things. The military is a high reliable organization, as is in fact an aircraft carrier, which I'll come to in a minute. Soldiers don't die for king and country, for hierarchy. They die for their mates. That's the egalitarian element. They're in a command structure. They have to be. That's the hierarchical element. But if you don't have some charismatic, reasonably charismatic leaders, then they don't tend to operate extremely well. It's only when you have all three elements present that military organizations are high reliability and work well. Similarly, American aircraft carriers have been researched as high reliability organizations. And one of the reasons is actually you have, again, all three ways of, all three orientations towards the world present. You have the people who fly the high performance jets, the people with the right stuff, the competitive individualists. You have the command structure of the aircraft carrier and the captain in charge. But you also have an egalitarian element, which is that when there is a landing on a U.S. aircraft carrier, the lowest able seamen on the flight deck can abort that landing. If they see something that's dangerous, they can overrule the commands of the commanding officer of the ship. And that's the way in which introducing that egalitarian element helps to produce that high performance. These kinds of combinations are not always planned, of course. And, in fact, in many of the most interesting cases, they actually emerge. The term that we use for these is clumsy solutions, partly because of their emergent quality and partly because they are not elegant from any single standpoint. We've already said why the elegant solutions, those simplifying strategies, don't work. And this was a term that was actually originally introduced, I won't go into it now, by the American legal scholar Michael Shapiro to describe the different ways in which judicial selection is achieved within the United States. I want to give you another environmental example in closing, though, which was that of U.S. nuclear power policy. In the 1980s, I had the pleasure of frequently interacting with Alvin Weinberg, the father of the commercial light water reactor at the Oak Ridge Associated Universities in Tennessee, where I was based at the National Lab. We used to have a continuous argument where Al Weinberg would say, "The U.S. has no nuclear energy policy. It needs to have a nuclear energy policy." And I'd say, "Al, it has a clear nuclear energy policy." Everybody's agreed it. It's to continue research and development but have a moratorium on adding new capacity. Everybody's agreed, but nobody's going to agree they've agreed. It's an implicit settlement that emerged out of the conflict over nuclear energy, which allowed each of the positions to reserve their position for some future point when that settlement broke down. But that settlement has pretty much endured for most of the last 30 years. A final example is the solution to water stress in Southern California. For many years, economists in the United States have tried to promote what's called, in the U.S., conservation rate pricing. Here in the U.K., it's called rising block pricing. It's basically the inverse idea of you get a discount for buying in bulk. It's actually the more you use, the more you pay per unit of use. And, of course, economists wanted to introduce this on the basis of promoting water efficiency, and they ran into trouble time and time again that those proposals were resisted by the citizens and the rate payers with the water companies. One particular small water district in California, the San Capistrano Water District, however, which is part of the larger metropolitan water district, came up with a novel solution. San Capistrano has no water resources of its own. It has to buy every drop from the metropolitan water district. So they have a big incentive to conserve. The plan they came up with was the following. We will give every household a basic allowance of water per capita for washing, cooking and cleaning at a very basic rate. We will then go out and we get the real estate records for the city and we will measure the plot size of all of the homes in the city. And we will allocate per square meter a certain amount of water that will vary from month to month depending on the growing season and the expected rainfall. That will allow the householder to maintain that lot in reasonable condition using appropriate plantings. And they got the local university to figure out all that for them. And then they said, we will then add that to their basic ration at a second price. And then there will be a third price level which will be a punitive one, which is if they really want to empty their swimming pool every month and refill it, they can. But they are going to pay a lot of money for it. And this rate structure was accepted because it was argued not on the basis of efficiency but on the basis of fairness. The basic allocation to everybody was parity. It was fairness. It was the egalitarian principle. The allocation according to lot size, proportionality, a hierarchical principle. Proportional either to need or proportional to contribution. In this case, proportional to need. And then the third principle is priority, that I should be able to establish the priorities for my own expenditure, which I am free to do for that higher rated portion. And in fact, on that basis of the fairness argument in which there was something for each of the different points of view to latch onto and see, yes, there's something that is acceptable to me in this proposal. They've been able to spread this system through to some of the other water districts in Southern California. So I close with that example. I think there are big challenges. I think there are big opportunities. I think embracing what we call clumsiness, this more complex approach of basically your mother was wrong about two sides to every argument. In a nutshell, there's always three sides to every argument. And embracing that moves us from simple techniques for selecting among well-defined alternatives to new skills, I think, for creating imaginative solutions to wicked problems. But that's not easy in a world of binary politics. Just imagine the situation in which somebody tries to make a political statement and says, well, you know, I think we should probably ensure that we get all the voices together, ensure that they're all heard, and there will be an emergent solution that comes out of that interaction. Just imagine what the press would do with that. It's a very difficult thing to reconcile with the kind of media-driven binary oppositional politics that we have today. It really requires something more fundamental than simply tinkering with the way we make these kinds of environmental decisions. It also requires a movement towards a new style of politics moving away from 19th, early 20th century opposition between capital and labor to a new 21st century politics that's capable of actually coming to grips with wicked problems. And that's not just a design problem. That's actually a challenge to our imagination. Thank you. [01:01:48] Speaker ?: Thank you.