Paradigm Shakes


We seem to be stuck in a dangerous and destructive paradigm. Our current approach to climate change is painfully inadequate. Will shifting paradigms be easier if we start with a few small shakes?
Karen O’Brien

Jan 20

Extremes
These are not easy times. It’s hard to watch the news and read the latest climate projections. And it’s painful to experience the reality of extreme climate events and witness so much suffering and loss. It’s even more painful to see the woeful inadequacy of political responses.
We understand the impacts of climate-related disasters. Wildfires. Floods. Droughts. Heat waves. Hurricanes. We know that they will get much worse as the atmosphere continues to warm. Yet we are doing astonishingly little to address the underlying causes.
How did we get here? Weren’t these “extremely extreme” climate events avoidable?
Patterns
I’m experiencing a sense of déjà vu. I worry that I have written about this before. I probably have… It’s just that these questions keep coming up, and the patterns we see are annoyingly repetitive. We are stuck in thought patterns that are leading to dire consequences.
Reflecting on past, present and projected patterns took me back to the IPCC special report on extreme events — the SREX report for short.* The report, published in 2012, drew attention to the risks of extreme events associated with climate change.
The SREX report highlighted the importance of low-regrets measures as starting points for addressing projected trends in exposure and vulnerability to extreme events: “They have the potential to offer benefits now and lay the foundation for addressing projected changes.” They are, in other words, important adaptation strategies.
Low regrets measures are the obvious solutions that fit within current paradigm, and they include:
• early warning systems
• risk communication between decision-makers and local citizens
• sustainable land management (e.g., land use planning; ecosystem management and restoration)
• improvements to health, water supply, sanitation, and irrigation and drainage systems
• climate-proofing of infrastructure
• development and enforcement of building codes
• and of course, better education and awareness
Low-regrets options make perfect sense. Regretfully, we are not implementing them. It’s clear that something is missing.
Opening Minds
I worked on chapter 8 of the IPCC’s SREX Report, Towards a Sustainable and Resilient Future. In the chapter, we talked about the need to move beyond the dominant paradigm by opening our minds to new perspectives. This was one of the key findings in the SREX summary for policymakers:
Progress toward resilient and sustainable development in the context of changing climate extremes can benefit from questioning assumptions and paradigms and stimulating innovation to encourage new patterns of response (medium agreement, robust evidence). Successfully addressing disaster risk, climate change, and other stressors often involves embracing broad participation in strategy development, the capacity to combine multiple perspectives, and contrasting ways of organizing social relations.
The importance of shifting paradigms comes up repeatedly in the recent IPBES Transformative Change Assessment. The report emphasizes that “[t]ransformative change involves questioning the individual and collective paradigms and cultural narratives that perpetuate the underlying causes of biodiversity loss and nature’s decline.” This includes transforming dominant economic and financial paradigms that currently prioritize private interests over nature and social equity. How do we shift these paradigms?
Shakes and Shifts
Quantum social change emphasizes our potential to consciously disrupt habitual patterns and generate new ones. We often talk about shifting paradigms as if they were momentous events that occur in an instant, as in “Eureka! I’ve shifted my paradigm!” This may be true in some cases, but more often it’s a gradual process. In fact, it may be easier to shift entrenched paradigms if we start with small tremors, rather than wait for a dramatic shift.
For me, it took a series of small shakes to shift my thought patterns. My first “paradigm shake” came in 2007, after reading Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Interpreting it through the lens of climate change, I began to question the logic of striving to be “well-adapted” to dramatic environmental changes, at the same time as we were continuously accelerating the trends.
Writing in 1970, Freire warned of the dangers of adapting to oppressive situations:
The more completely the majority adapt to the purposes which the dominant minority prescribe for them (thereby depriving them of the right to their own purposes), the more easily the minority can continue to prescribe.

Awakening individual and collective agency is risky to those who benefit from an unquestioned acceptance of the status quo. Freire points to some of the tools for maintaining power over people, including the use of myths and the discouragement of critical thinking and inquiry. He relates this to the banking concept of education, where knowledge is deposited but never critically assessed:

The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.

As disinformation spreads, fake news and fake images are increasingly deposited in our minds. It’s not surprising that many of us are well-adapted to a fragmented, polarized view of reality. The antidote Freire offers is conscientization, the process of developing a critical awareness of one’s social reality through reflection and action.
Quantum Shakes
Pedagogy of the Oppressed shook my paradigm and led me to think critically about adaptation in relation to transformation. It also primed me to look at social reality through other lenses. My next paradigm shake occurred when I discovered Alexander Wendt’s work on quantum social theory. Wendt’s auto-critique of his constructivist approach to international relations led me to question how I was thinking about the relationship between individual change, collective change and systems change, including the implications for climate action. This paradigm shake opened me to an ongoing inquiry into what quantum social change means in theory and practice.
In The Social Life of Democracy, Sundar Sarukkai points out that democracy is a mindset. He emphasizes that people in every society are influenced by their cultural beliefs, including their beliefs about the relationship between the “I” and the “we.” His argument is that to understand the nature of democracy, one has to begin with the relationship between the self and the collective.
Quantum social change recognizes that individuals and collectives are entangled through language, meaning, and shared contexts, and that our deepest values and intentions are powerful sources of societal-scale change. As power is increasingly shifting to people who have little regard for climate science, nature conservation, and the well-being of all people and species, I think that our fragmented paradigm could use a quantum shake.
Scaling Ideas
In Think Scale, social entrepreneur Sanjay Purohit points out that “solving for scale is a mindset before it is an action.” He emphasizes that things scale through the sharing of ideas, and he encourages us, amidst the uncertainties that are unfolding around us, to “pause for a moment, reimagine what will work at scale, explore alternatives, and raise the aspiration to move forward on a journey of exponential change.”
I’m ready for the journey of exponential change to a just and sustainable world. The idea that I want to share and scale is that we matter more than we think. On January 20th, I’m going to make the You Matter More than You Think audio book freely available to newsletter subscribers for two weeks. Readers are in turn welcome to share it with people who matter to them.
I hope that sharing these ideas contributes to reflection and action on why paradigms, beliefs, relationships, metaphors, entanglement, consciousness, agency, and fractals matter — and most of all, why you matter. It’s time to both shake and shift a dangerous and destructive paradigm. With love! As Paolo Freire put it, “no reality transforms itself.”


[C]risis simultaneously loosens the stereotypes and provides the
incremental data necessary for a fundamental paradigm shift.
— Thomas Kuhn

Biesta: The Beautiful Risk of Education


We seem to be in the process of creating an education system that strives to reduce all risks whilst making ever-greater demands. The new system tells our students they must work harder, be more productive, and aim ever higher, but is not prepared to allow them simple freedoms or opportunities to make choices and to decide things for themselves. It is a mechanistic system of control and productivity that sees qualifications as the over-riding purpose of education.
Recently I read a blog written by a teacher at a high performing academy where the students are required to move around in total silence and are told where to sit at lunchtime. This is justified because some students find social situations difficult, and silence ensures minimum disruption between lessons. But is this level of control desirable? Is it even educational?
Gert Biesta, in “The Beautiful Risk of Education”, argues systems of this kind have got their priorities out of balance. They are efficient at maintaining the status quo and at reproducing what already exists but are useless if what we want from education is students who can think and make judgements for themselves – “free subjects rather than docile objects”.
For Biesta, education has three aims: the attainment of academic qualifications, socialisation into a community, and ‘subjectification’ – becoming a wise human being. He understands there is a tension between these three aims and that the purpose of education is to find a productive balance. If one or more of the aims is allowed to dominate the others, then the education of the students will suffer.
The problem with the new system approach is that the aims of student attainment and socialisation have been privileged above subjectification and this has led to the development of an instrumental (as well as dehumanising and dysfunctional) process of schooling, that might get better results, but exacts a terrible cost.
To become a wise person requires experience, it is not something learnt from a book, but something developed over time through experience and reflection. If we deny students opportunities to take risks, make mistakes, and experiment with power, then we deny them opportunities to develop wisdom and to learn how to become responsible ‘grown up’ human beings.
This is the ‘risk’ of education in the title of Biesta’s book. The risk we must take as teachers if we are to allow our students experiences of freedom and responsibility. As well as the risk of engaging with ambiguity and complexity in a system prepared to share power and decision-making.
The new system justifies high levels of control and risk-reduction by claiming they are acting in the best interests of the students. By limiting their options and requiring simple obedience and hard work, the new system claims it gives students the best chance they must realise their potential. This is particularly true, they claim, of the poor who are disadvantaged from the beginning by their badly educated parents. This is evangelical education. An approach that justifies the means by the ends and claims other less regimented approaches have low expectations.
But, as Biesta points out, we don’t ‘produce’ our students: they are not products of our schools they are human beings with agency and minds of their own. The idea of emancipating the poor through education, in a system that denies them freedom and the power to influence, is patronising and self-justifying. In fact, it’s not education at all, but a system of schooling that puts the interests of the system and the economy above those of its subjects. Freedom is not something people are educated into, but something education is for. There is no graduation date for becoming a human being and having the rights of a person. And as much as we tell ourselves we are doing it on their behalf, we do not have the right to control children’s every move.
Biesta’s book is a challenging read. It is academic and heavy going in parts, but it shines a bright light on the mistakes we have made in the past and the new ones we are beginning to make for the future. He is not interested in apportioning blame or looking for scapegoats, rather he understands education is a complex multifaceted business and most people are working hard with good intentions. The problems we have, he argues, are created because we have never clearly decided on the purpose of education – what it is for and for whom. Until we do, we will continue to repeat the makes of the past.
I’m convinced by Biesta’s plea for balance. Education is not about denying children knowledge, opportunities to belong, or chances to experience freedom and responsibility. It is about striving to find methods that embrace all three and give our students the best chance that they become educationally wise human beings.
This blog was first published in Teach Primary 13TH DECEMBER 2014

Back to fossil fuels-with AI?

An edited opinion piece by John Elkington
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), AI-related energy demand is set to almost double between 2022 and 2026. Bad enough, but Generation is more pessimistic still. “There are … forecasts that are much more drastic,” it concludes. “It is easy to imagine a world in which ever more sophisticated AI causes global energy demand to soar, which in turn raises carbon emissions.”
One possibility is that cloud companies decide to meet the demands of generative AI by moving back to fossil fuels. “Fossil fuels could provide a steady, ‘behind-the-meter’ (i.e., off-grid) supply of energy for data centres,” Generation warns (https://www.generationim.com/our-thinking/insights/is-ai-sustainable/).


Experts suggest that to meet the extra energy demand, we might have to keep old gas- or coal-power plants running longer, or even build new ones. Already there are anecdotes of this happening. That is deeply concerning. Just as the world needs to make progress on cutting carbon emissions, we risk going backwards.
Ultimately, the white paper concludes, “there is great uncertainty about whether AI will prove to be sustainable or not.”


So, who must do what?
Cloud companies now have a grave responsibility, Generation insists. “They have real agency here—not only to participate in the buildout of the grid, but also to reward, punish and lobby governments which help or hinder the rollout of renewables and grid reform.”


Data centres already use a lot of energy. In combination with data transmission networks, they now account for 1-2% of energy-related greenhouse-gas emissions. As AI has become cleverer, it has become hungrier for power. According to one estimate, OpenAI’s GPT-4 required 50 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity to train—roughly the annual consumption of a small city.


Once AI models are trained, they then require power to be used in real-world applications (so-called ‘inference’). It is harder to measure the power demands of inference “largely due to its distributed nature, compared with the relatively time- and location-constrained nature of training.” But the academic evidence suggests the energy demands of inference increase with the size of the AI model. The most energy-intensive tasks are those which generate new content, such as text or images.

Interdisciplinarity makes us greater than the sum of our parts

The real world is complicated. Let’s give our students the tools to take it on with interdisciplinary education


Graduates are increasingly entering a work landscape that demands agility, flexibility and a diverse skill set, and as a result, the value of interdisciplinary education is on the rise. Universities are seeking out ways to expand students’ horizons beyond a discipline-specific degree, creating pathways for students to tackle some of the complex challenges they are likely to face in their future careers.
LSE100 is the flagship interdisciplinary course taken by all undergraduate students at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Since 2010, we have been building our students’ capacity to tackle multidimensional problems through research-rich education, giving them the opportunity to explore transformative global challenges in collaboration with their peers and leading academics from across the university.


• Making group work work: how to enable successful student collaboration
• Interdisciplinarity in teaching: what it is and how to make it work
• Building the future: the case for inter-faculty learning


The course has evolved significantly since its creation. We shifted its mode of delivery away from face-to-face lectures and towards a flipped classroom format that prioritises collaborative, interactive seminars to maximise student engagement. Teaching LSE100 to more than 20,000 undergraduates over the past decade has offered some important lessons for designing an interdisciplinary course – one that can develop students’ abilities to embrace complexity, as they work to solve the world’s most pressing issues.


Engage students with the breadth of academic research
One of our core aims at LSE100 is to bring students into the heart of the LSE tradition of thinking like a social scientist, inviting them to embrace the School’s motto of “understanding the causes of things for the betterment of society”. Key to this goal is showcasing the research of LSE academics. As part of the course, we invite contributions from researchers across the university, filming short interviews to highlight their findings and impact, which students then watch as part of their preparation for LSE100 seminars. Engaging students with the breadth of academic research is a valuable way to develop skills in synthesising and integrating insights from a wide range of perspectives, which is a core competency of interdisciplinary learning.


Signpost the value of different perspectives
In allocating students to LSE100 seminars, we work with our timetabling colleagues to ensure there is as much diversity of perspective in the classroom as possible. The best conversations happen when students are introduced to an idea or argument, then draw on their disciplinary knowledge to interrogate it. Hearing what a philosopher, lawyer, statistician, anthropologist, and political scientist have to say about the concept of fairness, for example, is hugely valuable for our students.
This exposure to new perspectives is accompanied by clear signposting throughout the course when students are engaging with different disciplines. Knowing what a sociological perspective on markets might look like, and how it differs from an economic one, is often an eye-opening experience for first-year undergraduates in thinking beyond the boundaries of their chosen degree.


Develop students’ abilities to tackle wicked problems
We design LSE100 around three complex global challenges, which we argue require an interdisciplinary perspective to meaningfully address. The challenges change over time, and students are given the opportunity to choose the challenge they’re most interested in. Our current challenges (How can we control AI? How can we create a fair society? How can we transform our climate futures?) can all be considered what design theorists Rittel and Webber identified as “wicked problems” – multifaceted, complex problems with no one straightforward solution.


Using a wicked problems framing highlights the value of an interdisciplinary approach, expanding students’ toolbox for how to tackle these thorny issues. Students are empowered to consider how they would lead and make change in a world of wicked problems, drawing not only on their disciplinary knowledge but on the theories, methods and concepts offered by fields other than their own.


Introducing the tools of interdisciplinary thinking
In thinking about the design of an interdisciplinary offering, it may be tempting to fall into a trap of multidisciplinarity – showcasing the contributions of many disciplines, but not reaching a truly interdisciplinary space where students can synthesise and integrate these insights. One way to avoid this pitfall is to draw on interdisciplinary frameworks and methods, giving students the tools they need to do interdisciplinary investigation.
In LSE100, we develop students’ skills in systems thinking with this goal in mind. Systems thinking, itself an interdisciplinary field, invites students to think not just about individual components of systems but the system itself, as well as its connections. Introducing students to feedback loops, systems mapping and the importance of interconnectedness gives them a way to tackle wicked problems, breaking down challenges into essential parts of a complex system.
Embracing complexity through interdisciplinary learning can be a hugely rewarding experience for students, helping prepare them effectively for the world of work. Alongside developing disciplinary expertise and knowledge, we should strive to train our students to think creatively and widely, both when working individually and as part of a team, aiming to create something greater than the sum of its parts.


Jillian Terry is associate professor (education) and co-director of LSE100 at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

WHAT IS TRUE NET ZERO?

From the Guardian 19/11/2024


Under the “true” net zero definition, the natural world’s vast carbon-absorbing capabilities must only be put to work to remove historical emissions so that the planet can slowly cool over time, the net zero researchers say – not to cancel out future fossil fuel pollution.
“It is a common assumption that removing carbon from the atmosphere to offset burning of fossil fuels is as effective as not burning fossil fuels in the first place. It is not. Offsetting continued fossil fuel use with carbon removal will not be effective if the removal is already being counted on as part of the natural carbon cycle and if the carbon is not permanently stored,” says Prof Kirsten Zickfeld of Canada’s Simon Fraser University, a co-author and leader of one of the 2009 net zero papers.
The intervention comes at a time of increasing concern about the Earth’s carbon sinks, one of the least understood parts of the climate change equation. During record temperatures in 2023, new research shows that the amount of carbon absorbed by the land fell dramatically due to wildfires and drought turbocharged by El Niño. Many European countries – including Finland, Germany, France, Estonia and Sweden – are experiencing large declines in their land sinks, imperilling their national climate targets in some cases. This is giving researchers cause for concern.
“Unrealistically optimistic estimates of land-based removal potential by climate models is giving us a false sense of the capacity for land to absorb our future emissions, potentially locking us into scenarios where we greatly overshoot our temperature targets – which comes with various risks and uncertainties,” says Joanne Bentley, an analyst for Zero Carbon Analytics, who has recently reviewed how nature is being used to meet the Paris agreement.
Zero Carbon Analytics found that countries are using different methods for reporting their land-based carbon removal to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, making countries appear to be further ahead of climate progress than they truly are. When harmonised, the budget for limiting warming falls by as much as 18%, they say.
“How land is classified in national climate commitments is a critical blind spot in carbon accounting. It allows vast emissions from wildfires and natural disturbances in forests to go uncounted, ultimately misrepresenting the emissions accounting process.

NET ZERO MEANINGLESS WITHOUT NATURE’s SUPPORT


There can be no net zero without nature. Each year, the planet’s oceans, forests, soils and other natural carbon sinks absorb about half of all human emissions. They feature in dozens of national plans to limit global heating to below 2C. This week, however, the scientific architects of net zero have a warning: you have misunderstood mother nature’s role in our plan.
On Monday in the journal Nature, the researchers who developed the concept in 2009 say that vague net zero definitions could mean that the world only ends up meeting the target on paper while the planet continues to warm. By including naturally occurring carbon removals from forests, oceans and other natural sources as if they were human-caused in national plans, the scientists say that countries could, in effect, “cheat” their way to towards Paris agreement targets.
“We are already counting on forests and oceans to mop up our past emissions, most of which came from burning stuff we dug out of the ground. We can’t expect them to compensate for future emissions as well,” says Oxford professor Myles Allen, who led the study.
As Cop29 in Baku enters its second week, the researchers are urging governments at the summit to clarify their definition of net zero, underscoring the need for “geological net zero”.
What would that actually mean? And how would we do it?

THE URGENT NEED FOR AN ACADEMIC REVOLUTION IN OUR UNIVERSITIES

By NICHOLAS MAXWELL- PHILOSOPHER

We might put the matter like this.  Humanity faces two fundamental problems of learning: learning about the universe and us and other forms of life as a part of the universe; and learning how to create a genuinely good, civilized, wise world.  We have solved the first problem of learning.  We did that in the 17th century when we created modern science.  But we have not yet solved the second problem. This puts us in a situation of unprecedented danger.  For, because of solving the first problem and creating modern science and technology, we have enormously increased our power to act.  We have employed this vastly increased power to act to enhance human welfare in endlessly many ways, via the development of modern medicine and hygiene, modern industry and agriculture, modern transport and communications, and in countless other ways.  But, in the absence of the solution to the second great problem of learning, these very successes, the outcome of our enhanced power to act have, as often as not, also led to harm and death.  They have led to population growth, environmental degradation, loss of wild life, mass extinction of species, gross inequality, the lethal character of modern war, the threat of nuclear weapons, pollution of earth, sea and air, and above all to the impending disasters of climate change.  All these global problems come from a single source: our immense success in solving the first great problem of learning and our lamentable failure to solve the second great problem of learning.

It is this deadly combination of science without civilization that is at the root of many of our most threatening global problems.  Before science, lack of wisdom did not matter too much.  We lacked the power to do too much damage to ourselves, or to the planet.  Now that we do have science, and the power to act that it bequeaths to us – to some of us at least –  lack of global wisdom has become a menace.  Wisdom has ceased to be a private luxury and has become a public necessity.  Solving the first great problem of learning and failing to solve the second one puts us into a situation of extreme and unprecedented danger.  As a matter of extreme urgency – now we have solved the first great problem of learning – we must discover how to solve the second one.  If we do not learn soon how to make progress towards a wiser, more civilized world, we may well end up destroying ourselves. 

But how is this to be done?  Prophets and philosophers have been holding forth on the need for wisdom for millennia, without much apparent success.  The very idea that humanity can make social progress towards a better, wiser world has become thoroughly dubious in recent times, even disreputable.

Here is the key to the solution of this crisis.  We need to learn from our solution to the first great problem of learning how to go about solving the second great problem.  As a result, we might get into efforts to achieve social progress towards a good world some of the incredible success of science in achieving intellectual progress in knowledge.

This is not an entirely new idea.  It goes back to the 18th century Enlightenment.  A key idea of the Enlightenment, especially the French Enlightenment, was to learn from scientific progress how to make social progress towards an enlightened world.  (Peter Gay’s The Enlightenment is still, in my view, the best overall account of The Enlightenment.)

In order to put this Enlightenment idea into practice properly, so that we really do learn from scientific progress how to achieve social progress towards a good, enlightened world, there are three crucial steps that must be got right.  First, we must capture correctly the progress-achieving methods of science – that which makes scientific progress possible.  Second, we must generalize these progress-achieving methods of science correctly, so that they become applicable in a potentially fruitful way to all worthwhile, problematic human endeavours.  Third, we need to get into personal, institutional and social life these progress-achieving methods arrived at by generalizing the methods of science – so that we can get into our efforts to achieve what is of value in life some of the success and progress achieved by science.

Put these three steps correctly into practice, and we would have what humanity so urgently needs: a kind of inquiry devoted to helping humanity make progress towards a civilized, enlightened, wise world.

Unfortunately, the philosophes of the 18th century French Enlightenment, Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet and the rest, in developing and implementing this profoundly important idea of learning from scientific progress how to achieve social progress towards an enlightened world, made dreadful blunders.  They got all three steps drastically wrong.  First, they failed to capture correctly the progress-achieving methods of science.  Second, they then failed to generalize scientific method correctly to facilitate progress in other fields of human endeavour besides science.  Third, and most disastrously, they failed to apply progress-achieving methods, generalized from science to the social world, and above all to the task of making progress towards an enlightened world.  Not only did they fail to formulate correctly progress-achieving methods, generalized from those of natural science, fruitfully applicable potentially to all worthwhile, problematic human endeavours.  Far worse, they did not even conceive of the task in this methodological way.  Instead, they thought the task was to develop the social sciences alongside the natural sciences.  Thus, the philosophes set about creating and developing the social sciences: economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and the rest.  Instead of attempting to apply reason, extracted from science to the task of making progress towards an enlightened world, the philosophes sought merely to make progress in knowledge about the social world.  They thought that such knowledge had to be acquired as an essential preliminary to the task of making social progress towards enlightenment and civilization.

This botched version of the profound, basic Enlightenment idea was developed throughout the 19th century by J.S. Mill, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim and others, and was then built into academia in the early 20th century with the creation of academic social sciences: economics, anthropology, psychology, sociology and the rest.  As a result, modern science, and modern academic inquiry more generally, still embody the three ancient blunders of the 18th century Enlightenment.  Academic inquiry as it exists today is the outcome of an attempt to put the profound, basic Enlightenment idea into practice – the idea of learning from our solution to the first great problem of learning how to solve the second one.  Unfortunately, it is a very seriously botched attempt.  Therefore, academia today does not, as it should, actively seek to help humanity solve those problems of living, including global problems, that need to be solved if humanity is to make progress towards a better, wiser, more civilized and enlightened world.  Instead, it devotes itself to acquiring and applying knowledge – knowledge of the natural world, and knowledge of the social world.  Judged from the standpoint of helping humanity learn how to create a better world, academic inquiry, devoted primarily to the pursuit of knowledge, is damagingly irrational in a wholesale, structural way, and this irrationality of our institutions of learning has much to do with the dangerous situation we find ourselves in today.  We fail to learn how to make progress towards a better world because our institutions of learning are profoundly dysfunctional intellectually.  They have in them three structural blunders inherited from the Enlightenment.  In devoting themselves primarily to the acquisition and application of knowledge, universities in the modern era have in effect restricted themselves to putting the solution to the first great problem of learning into practice, to the neglect of the second problem, and in doing so they have intensified the danger we are in that comes from enhanced power to act bequeathed to us by the success of science without the global civilization required to use this power wisely.

To develop universities that are actively, rationally, and perhaps effectively engaged in helping us create a more civilized world, it is essential that we cure academia of its three big defects inherited from The Enlightenment. First, we need to adopt and implement a new conception of science that acknowledges profoundly problematic metaphysical, value and political assumptions inherent in the aims of science and, as a result, adopts a meta-methodology designed to facilitate improvement of aims and associated methods as science proceeds.  Second, this aims-improving, progress-achieving conception of scientific method needs to be generalized to form a new, aims-improving, progress-achieving conception of rationality, fruitfully applicable, potentially, to all worthwhile endeavours with problematic aims.  And third, social inquiry and the humanities need to be transformed so that they take up the task of helping humanity get this new conception of rationality into the fabric of social life, into all our other human endeavours besides science: politics, industry, agriculture, economics, the media, the law, finance, international affairs. In actively engaging with people to promote cooperatively rational tackling of conflicts and problems of living, local and global, it is essential that universities, and the more general social and political effort to make progress towards civilization, seek to put into practice the aims-and-methods improving conception of rationality arrived at by generalizing and adapting the aims-and-methods methodology of science.  This needs to be done because the aim of seeking civilization, like the basic aims of science, is inherently and profoundly problematic.  Ideas about what a civilized world might be, desirable and attainable, will need to be improved as we proceed.  As a result of putting these three key steps into practice, correcting the three blunders we have inherited from The Enlightenment, humanity would have what it so urgently needs, a kind of academic enterprise rationally devoted to helping us make social progress towards a genuinely civilized, wise, enlightened world – a world that has the capacity to discover undesirable consequences of new actions made possible by new technology, and then modify actions before their undesirable consequences become too widespread.  Furthermore science, transformed because of implementing the aims-and-methods improving methodology that corrects the first blunder inherited from the past, would be better, potentially, at improving our scientific knowledge and understanding of the universe, and would be better able to respond to the most urgent and best interests of humanity. 

Here, then, in very brief outline, is an argument that, if valid, establishes the urgent need to bring about a profound intellectual and institutional revolution in universities around the world so that universities may cease to play a role in intensifying global problems that threaten our future, and may instead, come actively to help us resolve these global problems and thus begin to make social progress towards a genuinely civilized world.  Even if we lived in peaceful, civilized times, I would have thought this argument deserved to receive serious attention.  In our world, fraught with war, dictatorial regimes, poverty, democracy under threat, the menace of the climate and nature crises, and with nuclear weapons at the ready in the wings, I would have thought that an argument that claims to show that universities have some responsibility for this situation, and how they need to change to become more helpful, ought to receive more attention than the neglect my argument has actually received.

Why has it been ignored?  Perhaps the very immense scope of the argument tells against it.  It does not fit into the modern specialized academic mind.  Perhaps it is the lack of success of the argument that tells against it.  Just as nothing succeeds like success, perhaps nothing fails like failure.  Perhaps individual academics are discouraged from taking the idea seriously because of the apparent impossibility of it ever being taken up and put into academic practice.  To that objection I do have a reply.  It is first perfectly possible to create serious academic discussion of the argument – discussion of potential objections, discussion of how aspects of the idea might be put into practice, what practical objections and difficulties there might be.  Furthermore, the basic idea that knowledge-inquiry needs to be transformed into wisdom-inquiry (as I call the two kinds of academic inquiry at issue) does not, of course need to be done in one blow, all at once.  Bits and pieces of knowledge-inquiry can be modified to become bits of wisdom-inquiry.  Not all the social sciences need to be transformed in one revolutionary act, and nor do all the natural sciences either.  Some components of the changes that are needed are much easier to change than other components.  I have drawn up a list of 23 structural changes that are needed to transform knowledge-inquiry into wisdom-inquiry.  Some involve changes in disciplines; those are hard to change, because they involve changing aspects of universities all around the world.  But other changes do not involve changes in disciplines, and those can be made, university by university, each acting independently.  That apples to the idea that there should be sustained imaginative and critical exploration in the university of our fundamental problem: How can our human world exist, and best flourish embedded as it is in the physical universe?  See What Needs to Change Step 20.  It applies to steps 22 and 23 as well.  Elements of wisdom-inquiry could be created, in this or that university, and that might well form growth points for more substantial change in the future.  The matter is too urgent to leave for another generation to deal with, or likewise ignore.

There are of course any number of reasonably obvious intellectual and institutional reasons why what I advocate should be resisted.  But the argument has not even reached that stage yet.  Most academics, even most philosophers, have not even heard of it.

Some academics are actively concerned to change academia so that it comes to respond more adequately to the problems we face see Faculty for a Future for example.  I have tried to interest them in my work.  They have seemed not that interested, and it is not reflected in their activities in any way.

 That is the tragedy, I suppose, that I face as I head towards death.  All the work I have put in has turned out to be wasted because it never became sufficiently known when no one was taking such matters seriously, and now that they are, my work is ignored as an ancient irrelevance from the past.  So, there we are.  I must accept that much of my working life – much of my life – has been a wasted effort.  But what really matters to me is that the academic world should wake up, grasp the uniquely dangerous situation we are in, and set about doing something serious about it.  We really do need a transformed academic enterprise, somewhat along the lines of wisdom-inquiry, so that it becomes rationally devoted to helping humanity make progress towards a genuinely civilized, enlightened world.

Incidentally, the argument I have just outlined very briefly first appeared in a book published in 1976, called What’s Wrong With Science?, written in three weeks to meet the publisher’s deadline.  Most of the book takes the form of a furious debate between a Scientist and a ‘Philosopher’ about the issues.  My next book, From Knowledge to Wisdom, published in 1984, spells out the argument with great care and in some detail.  It took 5 years to write.  14 subsequent books develop diverse aspects of the basic argument for the urgent need for the academic revolution.  One of these, Karl Popper, Science and Enlightenment, a collection of articles, is available free online like the two already mentioned.  For a lively account of my 50 year struggle to get a hearing for the argument for the urgent need for the academic revolution see How Universities Have Betrayed Reason and Humanity—And What’s to Be Done About It.  Over the decades, I have published a number of articles, all available free online, that summarize in diverse ways the basic argument indicated above; see, for example,  What kind of inquiry can best help us create a good world?, 1992; Can Humanity Learn to become Civilized? The Crisis of Science without Civilization, 2000;  The Urgent Need For An Academic Revolution: The Rational Pursuit Of Wisdom, 2010;  Can Universities Save Us From Disaster?, 2017; How Wisdom Can Help Solve Global Problems.2019; or The Scandal of the Irrationality of Academia, 2019.     

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TRANSFORMATIVE SKILLS GUIDE

I have written recently that we need a transformative system -wide change process across our education and learning programmes and institutions to tackle the wicked global issues we face. This recently published Skills Guide puts some astonishingly accessible and credible ways to achieve this transformation. It deals with inner skills such as “thinking ,relating, collaborating and acting”-all of which might be developed within individuals but may also be demonstrated in collective groups. But it’s the application of these skills which is crucial to our very survival on planet earth. I’m posting the full text here because I hope this will be disseminated as widely as possibly as a common framework we can all adopt in our work to mitigate and adapt to our twin existential crises of climate change and the depletion of biodiversity?

Given the urgency and all-encompassing nature of climate change, every person, community, and organization must eventually participate in a response. The primary challenge is no longer to develop new technologies or policy ideas. It is rather a challenge of collaboration and implementation at an unprecedented rate, scale and depth. Transformation is needed in our built environment, our food and energy systems, our economies, and most fundamentally, in our relationships with each other and the natural world. To meet these extraordinary challenges, societies need radically better ways to collaborate, make decisions, solve problems and enact change.

Understanding the issue–its causes, impacts, and solutions–is critical in activating concern and motivating engagement with solutions. But while knowledge of Earth systems and the human influences of climate change is necessary, it is not sufficient. Also required are the human qualities and skills needed to translate understanding into effective, transformative collective action. Some of the skills we need will be practical or technical, such as installing solar panels or changing the way we grow crops.

But perhaps more important (and often overlooked) are the foundational inner skills that underpin our ability to perceive, think, and act in the world. For instance, the capacity for people’s ‘complexity awareness’ supports wise decision-making by helping us see more of the system that we are embedded in.

This guide to transformative skills for climate action expands climate literacy to encompass those inner skills, qualities and capacities that help translate scientific understanding into transformative shifts in the way we do things, individually and collectively.

The hope is that this guide will help educators and practitioners shift culture equip the whole of society with these essential inner resources.

The guide can be read here.

TRANSFORMING OUR UNIVERSITIES TO MEET THE ISSUES OF THE 21 CENTURY?

How can we overcome our blindness to what is now right before our eyes: heat, storms, fires, floods, desecrated lands, extinctions, and social injustices and what these portend for their lives. Young people are now recognising that there needs to be more urgency and  social focus in our educational systems and crucially we need to think more broadly and wisely about what it means to be human.  The youth movement catalysed by the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg are rightly demanding that we stop using the atmosphere as a dump and that we preserve Earth’s forests, rivers, soils, seas, mountains, lifeforms, and grasslands. Their education should provide a foundation of well-considered personal rights and duties, tolerance for differences and dissent, and the wherewithal for truth and reconciliation.

However, the university as presently conceived is an unlikely source of remedy. It is committed not to transformation, great or otherwise, but often to patching up flaws in the modern economic growth paradigm by gambling that it may facilitate its own repair and renewal. The educational system with millions of students each year, billions of dollars of research funding, and trillions in capital assets operates with the assurance that goes with its assumed monopoly of solutions to what ails modern societies. It exists, largely unmolested in the world of influence and money if it does not threaten the dominant culture and its underlying faith in economic growth and human domination of nature. Its organization often impedes  conversations across disciplines. Its financial dependency limits serious reckoning with large ideas of justice, peace, interdependence, and ecology.

As one senior academic recently reflected  -the example of the contemporary university exemplifies how ways of knowing and acting undermine attempts to govern more effectively in an Anthropocentric world. He argues- as do I that the current organisation of the university with all its constituent parts( e.g.-disciplines ;projects; research institutes.) is poorly equipped to foster the ways of thinking and acting needed to respond to the existential crises. Systemic failings in these  institutions include perpetuations of disciplinary silos; inadequate fostering of interdisciplinary and trans disciplinary approaches to research and teaching; inadequate problematising and opportunity framing and an over adherence to linear first order traditions of knowledge production and its dissemination in teaching and research.

The traditional university model must be critiqued and transformed in favour of a higher purpose role aligned to addressing the immense challenge and possibility of securing social and ecological wellbeing in our troubled times. There is a strange and inexplicable reluctance by our institutions of higher education across the entire globe, to overtly promote the fact that they are first and foremost, agencies of human and social development .Project civilisation is profoundly fragile – predicated on the stability of planetary systems – and our universities have extraordinary knowledge and capacity to protect it

WHY ARE SOLAR PANELS CHEAPER IN GERMANY

BY David Toke

Germany is issuing much larger volumes of auctioned contracts for large-scale solar pv and renewable energy this year compared to the UK, but what is especially notable is the ever-plunging prices for solar pv. These continue to fall well below the prices at which the Government is awarding contracts to solar farms in the UK. Indeed solar farms in the UK , won at the Government’s auction, cost prices that are around 60 per cent higher than the contracts that are being awarded by the German Government. So what’s causing this apparent chasm of difference?

Around 8 GW worth of solar pv and 10 GW of onshore wind contracts are being issued this year by the Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzgentur). That compares with the 3.3 GW of contracts issued last month to solar pv and the 1GW awarded for onshore wind by the UK Government. Even in offshore wind Germany leads the UK with 8 GW of contracts being issued this year compared to 5 GW offshore wind issued by the UK. For comparative details of the numbers in the two countries see HERE and HERE.

So far 4.4 GW of German contracts for ground-based solar pv farms have been issued this year. The latest round rewarded 2152 MW of solar farms with a maximum price of 5.24 c/kWh. See HERE.

Of course, these German prices are in current prices, and in euros. Hence when you factor in that the UK contracts are issued in 2012 value of British pounds, the UK solar windfarm contracts come out as being 60 per cent more expensive than German solar farm contracts issued almost in the same month! And this happens despite the fact that the German schemes are much smaller in size (up to a 20MW limit) and the bulk of farmland is not eligible for funding under the Federal regulations (only low value farmland or degraded land can be used). By contrast in the UK there are no funding limits on any type of farmland and schemes can be as big as they want to be.

Indeed, the German programme even has a substantial facility for issuing contracts for large scale solar projects on rooftops, with around 750 MW of such contracts being issued this year. Under this scheme noise shielding solar pv schemes (mainly on autobahns) are also given contracts. (Such concepts appear to be very foreign to British policymakers!). Even so, these rooftop and noise abatement schemes workout as being cheaper than the cost of conventional fixed tower offshore wind contracts sanctioned in 2024.

An important factor is that on average there will be more sunlight per year in Germany. The schemes are spread around Germany from north the south, and the northern ones will have little, if any, more sunlight than in the south of the UK where most of the British schemes are sited. Nevertheless, if we assume that there is 20 per cent more sunlight available to German schemes, in line with academic analysis (see HERE) this still leaves the British solar farm prices being at least a third more expensive than the German ones.

I put forward two hypotheses for explaining this difference. The first one is simply that there just a lot more people in business and in communities who rate the importance of developing renewable energy in Germany very highly. This has built up over time from the first campaigners for feed-in tariffs in the 1980s. Investment in solar pv is regarded as being an important cause, not just as a transactional activity, as many see it in the UK. This also reflects itself in the continued political support for feed-in tariffs for solar pv on home rooftops.

The grass-roots support for solar pv may also be linked to a second reason why German solar farms are cheaper than British ones (despite all the restrictions relative to British conditions), and that is the sources of capital for the projects. Local and national banks in Germany have been very keen to lend to renewable energy projects. This has allowed high rates of financial gearing. By this I mean that the projects can be financed mostly from bank loans rather than from equity sources. Equity sources require much higher rates of return. In the UK, however, it seems that equity sources of capital are much more dominant.

According to the Frauhofer Institute (see HERE) In 2023 a total of 14.7 GW of solar pv was installed in Germany. Around 30 per cent of that came from large-scale ground mounted schemes, the rest being installed on buildings. Domestic-sized pv accounted for around a quarter of the total capacity, the remainder coming from commercial-sized building projects. Historically, the majority of German solar pv has been installed on buildings.

It is a sobering thought that the solar pv installed in Germany in just one year, 2023, is approaching the entire capacity of solar pv installed in the UK over all time! On the other hand total British solar installation (of all sorts) plods on at barely 2 GW per year. Meanwhile, Germany is accelerating its solar pv installation in 2024 compared to 2023.