Politics and the Gita - IV

Gamdhi lived by the principles of truth that he got from Gita. So also would be the claim by Godse. During the trial after Gandhi's assassination, Godse said in his final statement, “My respect for the mahatma was deep and deathless. It therefore gave me no pleasure to kill him. Indeed, my feelings were those of Arjuna when he killed Dronacharya, his Guru at whose feet he learned the art of war”. But Godse could not forgive Gandhi for his pro-Muslim bias. Godse said “I felt convinced that such a man was the greatest enemy, not only of the Hindus, but of the whole nation.” 

One of the main reasons that Godse gave for killing Gandhi was the latter’s refusal to conform to the principles of realpolitik. He wanted to remove his brakes on the Government of India so they could conduct statecraft on the basis of ruthless realpolitik.  He thought that there was plenty of latent support in the country for his line of thinking and that posterity would vindicate him. GD Khosla, former Chief Justice of Punjab, who heard Godse’s appeal and sent him to the gallows said in his book, The Murder of the Mahatma, that if the verdict had been left to the audience, Godse would have gone scot-free for his assassination of Gandhi. 

Thus four people - Ambedkar, Gandhi, Tilak and Godse, three of whom revered the Gita - concluded that the central message of the Gita supported the convictions that they already held. Godse’s reading of the Gita appears to gather more supporters in contemporary India just as he had predicted. Several episodes of the podcast The Seen and The Unseen discuss a theory that I agree with - Indian society is largely conservative and inward-looking. 

Akshaya Mukul's book Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India shows how a publishing house, established a century ago, went on to become influential in promoting an idea of Hindu India, and initiated Islamophobia and cow protection that continue to this day. The Gita Press is the largest publisher of Hindu religious texts. All regular Hindu religious texts - Gita, Ramayana, Mahabharata - were published by it. Since it started, the press has published almost 410 million copies of the Gita, nearly 70 million copies of the Ramcharitamanas and 94.8 million copies of monographs on "the ideal Hindu" woman and child. It is a convenient tool of the Hindu Right groups like Hindu Mahasabha, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Jana Sangh and odd organisations like Ram Rajya Parishad.

It has two magazines. Kalyan has a monthly circulation of more than two lakh and mostly sells in north and east Indian states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Rajasthan. It also has an English monthly called Kalyana-kalpataru, started in the early 1930s, that sells in south India and among the diaspora in the US and other countries. Gita Press has been at the forefront of the demand for a Hindu nation right from the beginning. After 1947, the Gita Press talked of not letting Muslims join the Indian Army and forming a Hindu militia. Cow protection has been a key theme of the Gita Press's existence. 

The purpose of another of its publications, Hindu Sanskriti Ank, that had contributors like the Shankaracharyas, Mahant Digvijaynath, MS Golwalkar, Swami Karpatri Maharaj and many others, was to establish the supremacy of the sanatan Hindu dharma. This was achieved through emphasis on the comprehensive nature of Hindu culture with its long tradition of education, philosophy, medicine, architecture, science, music, language and literature, besides its numerous religious texts and ritual practices. Many of these articles had political and communal overtones.

It used the message and tenets of sanatan Hindu dharma to homogenise Hindu religion and take the message of the RSS, Hindu Mahasabha and other such organisations to ordinary Hindu homes. The political message that it carries - a trend right from 1926 - helps in carrying out the propaganda in favour of its larger mission of Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan.

Whole Numbers and Half Truths by Rukmini S. reveals some sobering statistics. For decades, we are fed the myth that Indians are basically liberal and secular. But a number of polls have shown that Indians have a lower commitment to democratic principles than most major countries. Indian respondents have an even lower number with respect to regard for civil rights than Pakistani respondents. The percentage of Indian respondents who thought that a strong leader would be "very good" for India was higher than even Russia. (And my guess would be that the majority of the respondents would have been educated city dwellers.)

India ranks poorly regarding respondents who believe in media freedom, free operation of opposition parties, the holding of regular, honest elections with a choice of at least two political parties and the existence of a fair judiciary. In 2019, Indians were among the most satisfied in the world with how democracy in their country was working. A survey of 4 Indian states - Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Odisha - shows that 3/4 of respondents expressed a majoritarian form of nationalism. As levels of education rose in the survey, so did support for restrictions on free speech. 2/3 of Hindus said that it was important to be a Hindu to be "truly" Indian.

Politics and the Gita - III

Ambedkar had a very critical view of Gita, which he says provides a philosophic basis to the Varna system. Ambedkar believed that the Manusmriti, the Vedas and the Gita are all woven in the same pattern and same threads run through them. He denounces those who say that Manusmriti is problematic, but Gita is good. For him, all religious books of Hinduism – other than Upanishads – were written by the Brahmins who injected the same doctrine in all these books. Ambedkar writes that it is actually Gita in which the caste system is systematically ordained and explained. Ambedkar argues that: 

If Krishna were to appear as a lawyer acting for a client who is being tried for murder and pleaded the defence set out by him in the Bhagavad Gita, there is not the slightest doubt that he would be sent to the lunatic asylum.  

For Ambedkar, Gita is a discourse on the law. He deploys the metaphors of the courtroom, and Krishna as a defending lawyer. The Gita captures that moment when the necessity of war interrupts the ethical demands of brotherhood. In Political Thought in Action: The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India, the authors say that according to Ambedkar, the Gita defends war on two grounds. 

1. It says that because the world is perishable and “man is mortal”, he is “bound to die”. What difference does it make for the wise whether “man dies a natural death or whether he is done to death as a result of violence”? “Life is unreal”, he continues, “why shed tears because it has ceased to be?"
2. It says that it is a mistake to think that the body and the soul are one. The key difference is that the body is perishable while the soul is eternal and imperishable. When death occurs it is the body that dies. The soul never dies. As the soul is never killed, killing a person can never be a matter of any movement. War and killing need therefore give no ground to remorse or to shame. 

To Ambedkar, this would actually seem to be an “unheard of defence of murder”. The representation of life as deathless abstraction provides the philosophical justification for untouchability which is the reduction of life to “mere existence” and the mystification of the law as divine will. The Gita reduces the body to mere existence and is therefore  dispensable. It justifies suffering of the self as absolute obligation to God, and in more public moments, to the nation or swaraj.

It does not differentiate between suffering caused by an ethical stand and suffering caused under force. No distinction is made between an intimate bodily injury that is not practiced by the self but inflicted by fellow men and legitimised by the law. It is explained away as the sufferer’s fate.  

 For Ambedkar, the divine status accorded to Krishna and the Gita hides the historicity of its beginnings and prevents criticism. To him, Krishna is basically a fallible warrior. Throughout the Mahabharata, for instance, Krishna remains a subject of abuse because of his “low origins” and “loose morals”. He is the classic Machiavellian figure whose name attaches to “intrigue” and violation of “rules of war”.  Interested more in its spuriously modern authority than in its scriptural antiquity, he is relentless in his emphasis of the Gita’s uncertain authorship. It is not, according to him, “a single book written by a single author”.

What is, then, according to Ambedkar, the politics of the Gita? Not only is Krishna, by deliberate mutation, made a god amongst other gods, a godliness which is inconsistent with his status as a fallible man throughout the Mahabharata, he is also suddenly made a “representative” par excellence, within the event of the Gita, of all other forms of gods.  

He accuses the Gita of reinforcing Chaturvarnya, or the Law of Four Varnas. Krishna says that a person should not create doubts in others about Karma which of course includes the observance of the rules of Chaturvarnya. That is another way of saying that you must not agitate or excite people to rise in rebellion against the theory of Karma. It tells that every one should do the duty prescribed for his Varna and no other and warns those who worship him . . . that they will not obtain salvation by mere devotion but by devotion accompanied by observance of duty laid down for his Varna. In short, a Shudra however great he may be as a devotee, will not get salvation if he has not observed the duty of the Shudra — namely to live and die in the service of the higher classes.

This advice stabilises the caste system by invoking fate. For a shudra is born a shudra by his fate, and must aspire to salvation only as a shudra. This is how the potential of any revolutionary “counter-violence”, according to Ambedkar, is suppressed in the Gita. The system is further stabilised by creating an ethics of non-violence. Not only is the shudra barred from insurgency against fate in the name of devotion; those who provoke him are barred too with the threat of retribution. It is this suppression of counter-revolution which Ambedkar argues is the “soul” of the Gita that goes by the name of fate and the trope of “salvation”.

Ambedkar's anger is apparent in the words he uses in the interpretation of both Krishna and the Gita: “absurdity”, “stupidity”, “abhorrent”, “puerile”, “fool’s errand”, “childish”, and “lunatic asylum”. I can understand his anger. Some months after my stroke, I was at the receiving end of this "God's child" stuff a couple of times and I was not amused. I saw a cartoon which states, "Oh, I know that He works in mysterious ways. If I worked so mysteriously, I will get fired."

It is often noticed that god is said to be close to people with various disabilities and ailments. I once asked the nurse to do some channel surfing when I saw a program entitled "God's children". I need not have guessed the general theme of the program - it was about a genetic disease that made teenagers look like they are seventy (Progeria, the disease that the character played by Amitabh Bachchan in the movie Paa suffered from.) God's children indeed!

Politics and the Gita - II

The first strategy in Gandhi’s reading of the Gita was to treat the text as an allegory. The battle of Kurukshetra was not, in Gandhi’s view, “a battle which took place so many thousand years ago; it is one which is raging all the time, even today". He regarded the battle between the Kauravas and the Pandavas as an allegory for the battle “between the innumerable forces of good and evil which become personified in us as virtues and vices.” Even winning the war did not bring happiness, it brought only regret and remorse to all, proving that "mere material gains never brought peace within.” 

He holds that "Every one of us is a mixture of good and evil. . . The difference that there is between human beings is the difference of degree." In interpreting the battle in the Mahabharata, he says that, "Duryodhana and his supporters stand for the satanic impulses in us, and Arjuna and others stand for Godward impulses. The battle-field is our body. The poet-seer, who knows from experience the problems of life, has given a faithful account of the conflict which is eternally going on within us." (Navajivan, 11-10-1925) 

According to him, the notion of avatar is a result of human imagination. What humans imagine Krishna to be is more important than the historical Krishna. He thought that an avatar did not mean any descent of God into human form but the ascent of humans into divine status. Those who stood against the wickedness and immorality of the time were looked on as avatars and thus it was open to every human being to be an avatar. For him, therefore, the Gita becomes above all a book of ethics, emphasising selfless devotion in the cause of human brotherhood.     

In reading the Gita in this manner, Gandhi marks a sharp distinction between his approach to the text and that of his political predecessors, particularly the Extremists. During his time in the Yerwada Jail (1922-24), he read around 150 books including the entire Mahabharata along with all the available translations of Gita including Tilak’s.  Gandhi agreed with Tilak about the importance of doing the right action and following truth as per Gita. However, he disagreed with Tilak about how to do the right action. Gandhi drew the message of non-violence and ahimsa from Gita. 

Gita advocates three paths: Karma yoga, Bhakti Yoga, and Gyana Yoga; without preferring one over the other. In Tilak’s interpretation of Gita, Karma Yoga (action) rules supreme, and takes precedence over the Bhakti Yoga (devotion) and Gyana Yoga (knowledge). He justified action, even when it became violent like killing, as long as it is without personal interest or motive. 

Gandhi however interpreted that action without expectation of fruit (anasaktiyoga) was the essence of the entire work. The crux of this difference was illustrated in Gandhi's paper Young India where he said that Tilak considered everything fair in politics, an idea of politics that he did not accept. Tilak objected to the remark and said in a letter to Young India:

I write this to you to say that my view is not correctly represented therein. Politics is a game of worldly people, and not of sadhus, and instead of the maxim "Overcome anger by loving kindness, evil by good" as preached by Buddha, I prefer to rely on the maxim of Shri Krisna "In whatsoever way any come to Me, in the same way I grant them favour". That explains the whole difference and also the meaning of my phrase "responsive cooperation". Both methods are equally honest and righteous but the one is more suited to this world than the other. 

Gandhi answered:

I naturally feel the greatest diffidence about joining issue with the Lokamanya in matters involving questions of interpretation of religious work. But there are things in or about which instinct transcends even interpretation. For me there is no conflict between the two texts quoted by the Lokamanya. The Buddhist text lays down an eternal principle. The text from the Bhagavad Gita shows to me how the principle of conquering hate by love, untruth by truth, can and must be applied. 

If it be true that God metes out the same measure to us that we mete out to others, it follows that if we would escape condign punishment, we may not return anger but gentleness even against anger. And this is the law not for the unworldly but essentially for the worldly. With deference to the Lokamanya, I venture to say that it betrays mental laziness to think that the world is not for sadhus. The epitome of all religions is to promote purushartha, and purushartha is nothing but a desperate attempt to become sadhu, i.e., to become a gentleman in every sense of the term. 

Finally, when I wrote the sentence about "everything being fair in politics" according to the Lokamanya’s creed, I had in mind his oft-repeated quotation "evil unto evil". To me it enunciates bad law. And I shall not despair of the Lokamanya with all his acumen agreeably surprising India one day with a philosophical dissertation proving the falsity of the doctrine. In any case I pit the experience of a third of a century against the doctrine underlying "evil unto evil". The true law is "truth even unto evil".

Politics and the Gita - I

When India was under colonial rule, the official policy of the British government was to regard the social and religious spheres as "apolitical". Thus censorship and legal action were restricted to other spheres of life that were regarded as political. This meant that religious metaphors were often used to convey political messages to the masses, since they were safe from action by officials.  Even though the vast majority of people were illiterate, these messages were comprehensible to them but the rulers had no idea what was being said. The political ideas that were implied in these religious messages were spread through the press, popular images and talks. 

The Mahabharata, having many parables and fables, became a favourite medium for spreading political messages. The Gita forms the central drama of the Mahabharata. It takes the form of a dialogue between its hero, Arjuna, and his divine charioteer, Krishna. This conversation occurs in the no-man’s-land between opposing armies, where Arjuna has halted his chariot to wonder at the senselessness of a war that requires the killing of his relatives, friends and teachers. Krishna’s role in the dialogue that follows is to rouse Arjuna to action by preaching to him the doctrine of acting out of duty alone, without the desire for any particular result. 

The Gita was not widely read in India till it was re-discovered in the colonial period, thanks to the interest it had generated among different sections of European and American readership. Though other ancient texts, like the Arthashastra might vie with the Gita in terms of international celebrity as a text of political philosophy, only the latter became a source for Indians. Modern interpretations of the Gita have focussed on war and violence, rather than peace and stability. Tilak, Aurobindo, and many other so-called Extremists tended to justify their actions by quoting the Gita. 

In 1915, while he was in prison at Mandalay, Burma, Tilak wrote Shrimad Bhagvad Gita Rahasya, a Marathi language book.  In Political Thought in Action: The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India, the authors say that it is the analysis of Karmayoga which finds its source in the Bhagavad Gita. According to Tilak, the real message behind the Bhagavad Gita is Nishkam Karmayoga (selfless action), rather than Karma Sanyasa (renouncing of actions), which had become the popular message of Gita after Adi Shankara. He defended action, even violence, as long the action was selfless i.e. without personal interest or motive.

In his commentary, Tilak focused on the themes of sacrifice and detached action as the key. He opposed all interpretations that concluded that knowledge or devotion were the ideal paths to self-realisation and freedom. According to him, the pursuits of knowledge or devotion, while worthwhile in themselves, left the central dilemma of the Gita unresolved - whether or not to kill one's kinsmen. While he accepted the virtue of truth and non-violence, he marked out exceptions. "Forgiveness in all cases or war-likeness in all cases is not the proper thing", he said.

When Tilak mentions the anti-hero Duryodana, it is to point out his utter failure to sacrifice his self-interest which brought about the war. He criticised Hobbs, arguing that the latter's concept of sacrifice for the sake of another person’s interest was merely a "long-sighted variety of selfishness". Tilak's ideal person was a warrior who was identified by his ability to act without desire. But the detachment was not that of a celibate monk but of a person who was engaged with the world. He debunked renunciation which had long been idealised in the Indian tradition.

His ideal person did not call for a submission to the prevalent norms but fought for the suspension of these norms during exceptional events like famine or war. Like Arjuna, he is prepared to kill in order to restore the moral order.  Even before writing about the Gita, Tilak had said that "political questions are all Kshatriya [warrior] questions." Tilak's Gita was a call to recognise and declare colonial India a state of exception where what was practised in normal times had to be suspended.

Gandhi’s initial differences about the interpretation of the Gita was with Savarkar and other revolutionaries he had met in London at the start of the twentieth century. He was not willing to accept an interpretation of the Gita that argued for violence and warfare as part of a political strategy. Gita was his most treasured scripture but even to this text, he consciously gave his own interpretation. He contended that the Gita was not about the ethic of war but about the ethic of right action. He said: 

The author of the Mahabharata has not established the necessity of physical warfare; on the contrary he has proved its futility. 

One major problem that Gandhi constantly wrestled with was the worth and authority of scriptures. Although he valued the writings, he rejected any fundamentalist interpretations of it. He did not view the scriptures of any religion to be beyond moral scrutiny. He viewed them as human creations that had to be interrogated. If the text contradicted his lived experience, he rejected it. He thought that the scriptures must be interpreted according to the needs of society as it evolved. What in the scriptures did not accord with reason could not be accepted. Every claim made on behalf of revelation should be capable of being tested "on the anvil of truth with the hammer of compassion".  

The glomar response

What bizarre tale can tie together a sunken nuclear submarine, a mechanical claw, an eccentric billionaire, some manganese, and some Cold War intrigue? That can only be Project Azorian, you murmur. If you do, you have probably listened to a Radiolab podcast called Neither Confirm Nor Deny which is how I learnt about it. This story relates to one of the most massive covert operations ever handled by the CIA. It resulted in the existence of a phrase that has had journalists and lawyers scratching their head for 50 years.

In January of 1968, a U.S. Naval ship was captured after leaving Japan. This made the U. S. worried that the Soviets had their code books and they thought that they should try to get even. Two months later, a Soviet nuclear submarine suffered an internal explosion while on a routine patrol mission and sank in the Pacific Ocean, northwest of Hawaii. The Soviets undertook a massive, 2-month search, but never found the wreckage. However, the unusual Soviet naval activity prompted the U.S. to begin its own search for the sunken vessel, which they found in August 1968. To the US, the soviet sub, if recovered, would provide invaluable information for the intelligence community since it contained code books, missiles, and nuclear-tipped torpedoes.

The problem was that the submarine was three miles below the surface of the ocean, and the pressure at that depth was roughly 7,500 pounds per square inch. No one had recovered anything from such a depth. To get a sense of the scale of the task involved, the Titanic was about 1.5 km shallower. Malaysia Airlines flight 370 is presumed to be at around 800m less depth. Moreover, the recovery had to be done in secret, lest a very real war should break out should the Russians find out. But the temptation to obtain cryptographic equipment that would allow them to decipher Soviet naval codes was too great, so the CIA began a covert operation called Project Azorian.

They'd have to lift something like 6 million kgs. They got some engineers together in top secret to brainstorm ideas to reinvent the science of deep sea recovery. They finally decided to build a huge, eight-fingered claw and put it in a boat, bring it out on the high seas, and then lower the claw on a three-mile long piece of pipe string. They would position the claw over the submarine and yank it off the bottom of the ocean, pulling it back into the boat. Gates would open on the bottom of the boat and the claw and the submarine would come into a chamber.  

They got the money and the approval from the president. But they still needed a cover story. So they called up the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes and told him to pretend to have a sudden interest in manganese mining from the bottom of the ocean. So his people built a massive ship called The Hughes Glomar Explorer - It was built by a company called Global Marine. Global Marine - GloMar. Altogether, 6 years, and $800 million (more than $2 billion today) worth of unparalleled espionage by the Central Intelligence Agency was invested in the project.

In July of 1974, they got the boat to the right spot, and they lowered the claw. The claw descended three miles to the bottom of the ocean where the submarines was located. The claw had lights and cameras on it so they could see what was happening. The claw wrapped its massive claw hand around this sub and began to pull it back up. 14,000 feet, 12,000 feet ... But there is an age-old problem that often costs mice and men a lot of pain; a pain that the poet Burns so correctly identified - their best laid schemes tend to go astray. About 2.7km from the surface, there seemed to be a bump but everything looked normal on the television screens. 

But then it suddenly occurred to the operators that these television images had not been refreshed. And when they refreshed those images and got the real time picture of what was going on, it showed that most of the submarine - the part with the nukes, with the missiles, maybe with the codebooks, and all the stuff they wanted - had broken off, and years of work, millions of dollars just slowly sank to the bottom of the ocean. Meanwhile, a ragtag crew aboard a Soviet tugboat was only 150 feet away keeping a watch on the Americans. On August 6, 1974, with their lost submarine literally right under its nose, the Soviet boat decided it had seen enough of all this “deep ocean mining,” and left for home.

2/3 of their haul might have fallen away, but the men aboard Glomar knew they still had something on the line. What about the part that remained? What they found in that piece has never been disclosed. Not long after that disappointing loss, the story starts to break in the press. Journalists start calling up the CIA, and they have to figure out what to say and what not to say. This a was tricky task because of a diplomatic element and a legal element.  US didn't want the Soviets to know either what  had been found out or what hadn't been found out; hence the dilemma.

If the US said the truth - that they didn't recover any information on Soviet missiles - then that would tell the Soviets that they don't have to worry about the security regarding their warheads. But the US wanted them to worry. But if they said that the US did recover information on the missiles, but were not telling, then it would be lying which could not be done. Why?  Because of something called the Freedom of Information Act. FOIA. The law says that anybody, any American should be able to ask the government for documents and the government has to respond. 

But every CIA employee is legally bound to protect intelligence sources and methods. It's not an option, it's a law. So the CIA found itself in a soup - Under the FOIA law, the public has a right to know. On the other hand, the CIA has a legal obligation to not tell. The CIA has to say something, it has to be truthful when it says it, but it also cannot reveal anything. Enter a lawyer who devised a solution in half an hour. Here's what he came up with.

We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the information requested but hypothetically, if such data were to exist, the subject matter would be classified and could not be disclosed. 

Journalists fought it in court, and the fight went on for years, but eventually the government won. The judge agreed to their logic, that sometimes, revealing even the existence of documents endangers national security. Since that initial Glomar Response in 1975, more and more government agencies have begun to use it. And it is not the obvious ones related to national security issues. Thus, you now get such a "Glomar response" from the Department of Commerce, Department of the Treasury, Department of Energy, Center for Disease Control.  

The government may ultimately lose in all of these cases, but it will lose at a time when the public debate will have moved on to something else. The popular perception about the Glomar Response is that it's just a delaying tactic. By the time the truth finally comes out, people don't actually care anymore. It's ancient history. It embodies the tension between the public’s desire for transparency and the government’s need to keep secrets. 

The first tweet by the CIA showed that it had a sense of humour - "We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet." The tricky evasion has become the bane of watchdogs and journalists -- but its utility for those seeking to keep things beyond prying eyes has withstood the test of time, as evidenced by its proliferation, even among private companies and celebrities like Will Smith, Pixar characters, legislators.

The wickedest of all problems - X

Giving more information does not change people’s attitudes. The vast majority of scientific communications is still in the form of data and graphs. In order for there to be any meaningful action, it is not enough to convince the rational part of the brain with data and graphs but the emotional part of the brain must also be convinced. Giving technical answers to technical questions without making use of the myths and philosophies available in a tradition does not move most people. As communications guru Frank Luntz advised Republican candidates on messaging climate change, “A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.”

People obtain their information through the people they trust. Attitudes on climate change is now a shorthand for figuring out who is in our group and cares about us. This is where religion can play a crucial role. Previous social justice movements like anti-slavery campaigns,  civil rights, anti-apartheid, anti-debt, and anti-poverty campaigns, arose through church networks. Climate scientists with strong religious faith say that their religious belief and their scientific research are entirely compatible. They believe that God creates the laws and their role as a scientist is to discover them. 

2015 produced two very important publications on climate change: the first was Pope Francis’s encyclical letter Laudato Si, while the second was the Paris Agreement on climate change. One was written by a former teacher of literature and the other by a multitude of diplomats and delegates, Both are founded on an acceptance of the research produced by climate science. In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh compares the two documents. 

He writes that as a primarily religious document, it might be thought the pope’s Encyclical would be written in a vague and elaborate style and the Agreement would, by contrast, be crisp and to the point. But actually the opposite is true. The Encyclical is remarkable for the lucidity of its language and the simplicity of its construction; it is the Agreement, rather, that is very  artificial in its wording and complex in structure. It has eighteen densely printed pages with one large block of text consisting of only two sentences, one of which runs on for no less than fifteen pages! 

This part of the Agreement has thousands of words separated by innumerable colons, semicolons, and commas and only a pair of full stops. The Agreement has thirty-one ringing declarations with phrases like "Recalling decision 1/CP.17 on the establishment . . ." or "Further recalling relevant decisions . . ." It indulges in wishful thinking, repeatedly invoking the impossible: for example, the aspirational goal of limiting the rise in global mean temperatures to 1.5 degrees Centigrade — a target that is widely believed to be already beyond reach.

Laudato Si, on the other hand, addresses complex questions with clarity. It does not suggest that miraculous interventions may provide a solution for climate change. It does not hesitate to take issue with past positions of the Church, as, for example, in the matter of reconciling an ecological consciousness with the Christian doctrine of Man’s dominion over Nature. It is fiercely critical of “the idea of infinite or unlimited growth, which proves so attractive to economists, financiers and experts in technology.” It insists that it is because of the “technocratic paradigm” that “we fail to see the deepest roots of our present failures, which have to do with the direction, goals, meaning and social implications of technological growth.”

In the text of the Paris Agreement, by contrast, there is not the slightest acknowledgment that something has gone wrong with our dominant paradigms; it contains no clause or article that could be interpreted as a critique of the practices that are known to have created the situation that the Agreement seeks to address. The current paradigm of perpetual growth is enshrined at the core of the text. It merely acknowledges that “climate change is a common concern for humankind." It is as if the negotiations had been convened to deal with a minor annoyance. 

In contrast to the Agreement’s careful avoidance of disruptive terminology, Laudato Si challenges contemporary practices. Obscurity and technical jargon fills the official discourse on climate change and its style as well as its vocabulary conveys the impression of language being deployed as an instrument of concealment. Strangely, Laudato S’ seems to anticipate this possibility: in a passage that refers to the way that decisions are made in “international political and economic discussions,” it points to the role of 

“professionals, opinion makers, communications media and centres of power [who] being located in affluent urban areas, are far removed from the poor, with little direct contact with their problems. They live and reason from the comfortable position of a high level of development and a quality of life well beyond the reach of the majority of the world’s population.” 

In Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change, George Marshall says that religious groups have not incorporated the issue of climate change into their world-view unlike previous social movements like those against slavery or apartheid. But there are climate scientists with strong religious faith like Katherine Hayhoe who is the director of the Climate Science Centre at Texas Tech University and is also an evangelical Christian who is married to a pastor. She says:

The facts are not enough. When we look at the planet, when we look at creation, whatever it is telling us is an expression of what God has defined it to be. So instead of studying science, I feel like I'm studying what God was thinking when he set up our planet.

The language won't move people like me but there are a far greater number of people for whom what she says makes perfect sense. George Marshall says that both religion and climate science face the same cognitive difficulties. Both require people to believe something on the authority of the communicator; both manifest in events that are distant in time and place; they challenge our normal experience and assumptions about the world; and they require people to accept certain short-term costs in order to avoid uncertain long-term costs. The difference is that religion has these difficulties to a much greater degree. 

Marshall writes that the Reverend Sally Bingham, an Episcopalian preacher and renewables advocate told him, "We believe that Mary was a virgin, that Jesus rose from the dead, that we might go to heaven. So why is it that two thousand years later, we still believe this story? And how can we believe that and not believe what the world's most famous climate scientists are telling us?" He writes that maybe by resolutely keeping religion and science apart, environment scientists "have ignored the most effective, tried, and tested models for overcoming disbelief and denial".

The wickedest of all problems - IX

One major problem in dealing with climate change is the difficulty human brains have in thinking about the many scales of time involved. In The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that humans must combine two perspectives that involve vastly different time scales - one pertaining to "the planet” and the other to "the globe”. We need to look at humans today from both of these perspectives at once if you want to understand the planetary environmental problems humans face today, 

"The planet” is the Earth system – the earth as a planet in which biological and geological processes connect to create a “system”-like entity that has kept complex multi-cellular life going for more than half a billion years. "The globe” is what humans have created – it refers to the technological connectivity that binds this world together to make human flourishing possible on a very large scale. Global processes – the growth of European empires, global technologies, and a world market - have started impacting the domain of the planetary (the workings of the Earth system).

The scientific literature on climate change brings to our attention the role played by nonhuman creatures (microbes, fungi, planktons, plants) and entities (glaciers, forests, deep seas, oceanic currents, the Siberian permafrost, polar ice caps) in keeping the earth habitable for complex forms of life. We don’t have to forget human desires and priorities but have reached a position in history where we also must become more aware of how this planet “works,” what makes it a life-bearing planet and how life has, in turn, changed this planet.

The global COVID problem can be thought of as the “planetary” clashing with the “global”. Humans are the vector for spreading SARS-COV-2 because we live in congested cities, and are extremely mobile in search of profit and livelihood. That’s global history. But our bodies have also become evolutionary pathways for the virus, and that is an event in the history of biological life on the planet. This virus has been living in the guts of bats for millions of years. Its history belongs to deep, planetary history. 

Elizabeth Colbert calls the current rapid disappearance of species The Sixth Extinction. Far worse extinctions have happened in the past and the earth has recovered. But recovery and restabilisation occur at planetary, not human, time scales — that is, millions of years after the disturbing event. At this scale, we are powerless to harm; the planet will take care of itself. Our planet is not fragile at its own time scale but this time scale is irrelevant to humans in normal times.

The lifetime of fossil fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is a few centuries, plus 25 percent that lasts essentially forever. Around 56 per cent of all the CO2 that humans have liberated by burning fossil fuel is still aloft. The consequences we suffer at any one point in time are the result of past emissions. Because of this long CO2 lifetime, we cannot solve the climate problem by slowing down emissions by 20% or 50% or even 80%. Computer models calculate that even if we stopped increasing CO2 now, the temperature would likely still rise another 0.8 degrees, as previously released carbon continues to overheat the atmosphere.

Our economic model has no simple way to account for environmental costs. Agriculture does not take into account the costs of soil depletion. Fossil fuel burning does not take into account modification of the atmosphere. People do not pay for the CO2 they emit. Habitat destruction does not take into account the destruction of species. Fishermen do not pay for the fish they take from the sea; lumber, oil, coal, and mining companies do not pay for their resources, aside from the cost to buy the land. Economic costs are only those of extraction and delivery — Earth is free.

Some people say that we’re not going to solve the climate crisis until we get rid of capitalism. Maybe there’s something to the argument but it’s just not relevant. There’s no conceivable possibility of the kind of social change that they’re talking about within the timescale that’s necessary to solve this problem. Couple of decades means urgent. This doesn’t mean everybody’s going to die in 20 years. It means processes will be set in motion that won’t be reversible. After that, you can’t do anything to control it. 

In From Beirut to Jerusalem, Thomas Friedman writes that a veteran Israeli religious politician Yosef Burg used to tell a joke about two Israelis discussing philosophy. One says to the other, “Are you an optimist or a pessimist?” and the other answers, “I’m an optimist, of course. I am certain that today will be better than tomorrow.” I am a similar optimist. Surprisingly, religion might have some valuable lessons for secular thought and the two need not be regarded as opposites. (And I say this even though I am not religious at all.)

The wickedest of all problems - VIII

Since all of us are in some way the beneficiaries of cheap fossil fuel, tackling climate change is like trying to build a movement against yourself. People perceive – correctly – that their individual actions will not make a decisive difference in the atmospheric concentration of CO2. Scientists say the available time for meaningful action on climate change is about twenty years. Maybe in hundred years, you could change lifestyles enough to matter – but that much time is not available.  

‘How is it possible, when presented with overwhelming evidence, even the evidence of our own eyes, that we can deliberately ignore something — while being entirely aware that this is what we are doing?’ This is the question that George Marshall explores in his book Don't Even Think About It. He concludes that if the weather extremes continue to intensify, the experience of coping with loss and anxiety will make people push it aside as something that they would rather not think about.

Every article on climate change attracts angry comments in social media. Experiments have shown that the insertion of aggressive comments do nothing to change people’s views but makes them hold on more firmly to the view they already hold. Climate change also lacks any readily identifiable external enemy or motive, has dispersed responsibility and diffused impacts. Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, argues that our long psychological evolution has prepared us to respond strongly to four key triggers that he denotes with the acronym PAIN:

Personal: Our brains are most highly attuned to identifying friends, enemies, defectors, and human agency.

Abrupt: We are most sensitive to sudden relative changes and tend to ignore slow-moving threats.

Immoral: We respond to things that we find to be indecent, impious, repulsive, or disgusting.

Now: Our ability to look into the future 

Gilbert says, the problem with climate change is that it doesn’t trigger any of these. Of the four, he  emphasizes the lack of Abrupt and Now. If our emotional circuitry perceives an immediate threat it will flood us with hormones which ready us to hit or run. But this does not happen if we hear of potential dangers that might emerge in years or centuries to come. Persuading people that there’s an odourless, tasteless, invisible gas that’s gathering in the heavens and capturing the sun’s heat because of what man does in using fossil fuels doesn't trigger any of these emotional circuits.

Unless you live in the Maldives or Bangladesh, the threat seems far away. If the pace of global warming were accelerated to a few years instead of over centuries, people would pay more attention. Gilbert cautions us not to underestimate the importance of Immoral. While we recognise that climate change is bad, it does not make us feel noxious or disgraced. He adds, “If global warming were caused by eating puppies, millions of Americans would be massing in the streets.”

We have two distinct information processing systems. One is analytical, logical, and can make sense of abstract symbols, words, and numbers. The other is driven by emotions (especially fear and anxiety), images, intuition, and experience. The analytic system is slow and deliberative, rationally weighing the evidence and probabilities, the emotional system is automatic, impulsive, and quick to apply mental shortcuts so that it can quickly reach conclusions.

Actually the most comprehensive, complex science shows the reality of climate change. But it is addressed to the analytical part of the brain; to people who are not wired to realise the dangers. Climate change will come over a long time horizon that we can’t see, so it’s hard to convince people. Threats to the global systems that support human life are too macro or micro for us to notice directly. So when we are faced with news of these global threats, our attention circuits get bored.

Our perception of risk is dominated by our emotional brain. It favours proximity, draws on personal experience, and deals with images and stories that speak to existing values. The theories, graphs, projects, and data that scientists rely on speak almost entirely to the rational brain. That helps us to evaluate the evidence and, for most people, to recognise that there is a major problem. But it does not spur us to action.  

The psychologists Kahneman and Tversky found that people are consistently far more averse to losses than gains, are far more sensitive to short-term costs than long-term costs, and privilege certainty over uncertainty. Kahneman sees climate change as a near perfect lineup of these biases and is not very optimistic. He says that to mobilise people, this has to become an emotional issue. The second problem is that dealing with climate change requires that people accept certain short-term costs and reductions in their living standards to avoid higher but uncertain losses that are far in the future. He says: 

No amount of psychological awareness will overcome people’s reluctance to lower their standard of living. So that’s my bottom line: There is not much hope. I’m thoroughly pessimistic. I’m sorry.

The wickedest of all problems - VII

People are able to hold two contradictory ideas in their head comfortably. Thus for eg., you have the spectacle of Hillary Clinton saying that the climate crisis is “the chief threat of the 21st century,” while at the same time negotiating U.S. access to the  Arctic oil reserves. In Britain, energy and climate change are combined into one government department leading to simultaneous action to reduce emissions and to boost oil production. 

The U.S. state of California, and the Canadian province of British Columbia have all declared a long-term target of reducing emissions by 80 percent within forty years. So far, they have managed to achieve all of half a percent reduction per year. Norwegians pride themselves on being honest and conscientious global citizens and their government speaks often of being a world leader on climate change. But it is the eighth largest exporter of crude oil in the world, and its emissions grew five times faster than its already generous allowances under the Kyoto Protocol.

There is a tussle between individual rationality and institutional rationality. In their individual capacities, energy and oil company presidents agree that climate change was happening. They all say that as soon as governments regulate climate change, they would become “energy companies.” But in their official capacity, they will say that the competitive environment forced them to suppress the truth about climate change and ensure that those regulations do not happen. They are good at compartmentalising different areas of their lives and preventing any connections from jumping across those boundaries in their brains.

Those who accept the conclusions of climate scientists indulge in Greenwashing -  giving false, misleading or untrue action about the positive impact that an action has on the environment. There will be use of terms like sustainable, green or eco-friendly -- or just claiming to be "good for the planet" or "better for the environment" -- to make them appear to be greener. Shell says that  that they are good guys who produce energy, find positive environmental solutions, and help solve the climate crisis. 

The world’s governments have been talking about preventing climate change for more than two decades but in that time they have been fudging numbers and arguing over start dates, constantly trying to get extensions. The unfortunate result of all this mystification and procrastination is that global carbon dioxide emissions keep rising faster. As Naomi Klien said 'the only thing rising faster than our emissions is the output of words pledging to lower them.' The annual UN climate summit seems like a slanging match between early polluters and late polluters.  

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  (IPCC) produces reports outlining options for reducing the rate at which climate change is taking place. The text of these articles and their clauses had been fought over sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, word by word. They are politically acceptable statements  without any mechanisms for enforcement of these carefully worded injunctions. It depends on nations volunteering to do things. Countries can ignore the existence of their own promises without any fear of punishment. 

In Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math, BILL MCKIBBEN says that we have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books of oil companies as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We’d have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground which is unlikely to happen. Although this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil, it’s already economically aboveground – it’s figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it. If you told Exxon or Lukoil that, in order to avoid wrecking the climate, they couldn’t pump out their reserves, the value of their companies would plummet. 

In Don't Even Think About It, George Marshall writes about the Near Earth Objects Information Centre in Wales which tracks extraterrestrial objects that might collide with Earth. It does not receive much funding which is not surprising since it monitors a threat that is so distant, so uncertain, and to many people so unlikely, that very few people take it seriously. Yet, the ones who take it seriously are climate change deniers who warn constantly about the exaggerated risk of climate change. There are even weirder climate change deniers.

In 2012 David Icke, a new age guru, managed to fill the largest football stadium in the UK for an eleven-hour talk on the takeover of shape-shifting reptilians from the constellation Draco. Apparently these “Reptoids,” who now rule the world, have taken human form and include the late  Queen, Al Gore, and the entire Bush family. Icke describes climate change as a “monumental scam,” showing, once again, that people can believe just about anything if it lines up with their worldview. Peter Ward says in A new History of Life: 

The history of life provides an early warning system that tells us we must reduce human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, but it is human history that tells us that we probably will not heed the warnings and reverse the damage until a succession of climate induced mass human mortalities gives us no choice.

The wickedest of all problems - VI

Technology will always be a part of whatever solution we seek to our various environmental problems. It is claimed that innovations in fields such as synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology will transform every aspect of life. One advocate argues that it would be an “evasion of our ethical duties” to ignore the fact that our human activities have already changed the world to such an extent that we need to engineer a solution.

Technology is so intoxicating that sometimes even distinguished economists speak about it as though it can solve anything. “The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources,” remarked Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Solow. Julian Simon, who writes mostly on economic subjects, goes even further. “Technology exists now,” he wrote, “to produce in virtually inexhaustible quantities just about all the products made by nature—foodstuffs, oil, even pearls and diamonds….We have in our hands now —actually, in our libraries — the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7 billion years. (Seven billion years?!)

A joint report published in 2003 by the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Commerce, entitled Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, concludes, “The twenty-first century could end in world peace, universal prosperity, and evolution to a higher level of compassion and accomplishment.”  What kind of technologies are such optimists dreaming about? There will be animal protein bioengineered in factories rather than obtained from animals grazing in the fields. We can use genetic engineering to improve on the natural process of photosynthesis in plants. This would allow solar energy to be used on a massive scale without taking up too much land. 

According to theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, the most efficient crops in nature convert just 1 percent of the sunlight they receive into chemical energy. “We can imagine,” he writes, “that in the future, when we have mastered the art of genetically engineering plants, we may breed new crop plants that have leaves made of silicon, converting sunlight into chemical energy with ten times the efficiency of natural plants…. They would allow solar energy to be used on a massive scale without taking up too much land. They would look like natural plants except that their leaves would be black, the colour of silicon, instead of green, the colour of chlorophyll.” In The Great Derangement, Amitav Ghosh wrote: 

Although the Paris Agreement does not lay out the premises on which its targets are based, it is thought that they are founded on the belief that technological advances will soon make it possible to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and bury them deep underground. But these technologies are still in their infancy, and the most promising of them, known as “biomass energy carbon capture and storage,” would require the planting of bioenergy crops over an area larger than India to succeed at scale. To invest so much trust in what is yet only a remote possibility is little less than an act of faith, not unlike religious belief.

When talking about dealing with climate change,  politicians don’t talk of the system viewed as a whole taking into account the manufacture and transportation of every element of a finished good.  For example, take debates over “zero-emission” electric cars helping to fight climate impacts. They are not, in fact, “zero-emission” within a systems perspective. They draw their electricity from an energy grid which may be composed of polluting coal plants. And even if the power is generated in, say, solar farms, there’s the emissions of greenhouse gases in manufacturing the solar panels and the powering of their supply chain. 

For some people, the solution to avert climate catastrophe is Geoengineering. Some schemes focus on reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the earth, floating billions of tiny strips of tinfoil in orbit around the earth to reflect the sunlight, or injecting massive amounts of sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere. Other ideas include fertilising the oceans with iron slurry to increase the volume of marine life, which would consume excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The primary argument against these proposals is that they could never be effectively tested and, in addition, they risk causing even greater problems in their unintended consequences. If, for eg., you put aerosol particles into the air to cut back sunlight, it’s permanent. You can’t withdraw them. You withdraw them, you have a catastrophe. That means we’re instituting a permanent change in the whole ecology. That’s a tremendous burden to put on future generations. As Walt Whitman said, 'It is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.' But if the geo-engineering solutions are not going to do it, it doesn’t mean we should stop working on them. 

It is natural that people will aspire for better lives. But when we assume that technology can keep solving whatever problems may come up, there is trouble ahead.  One problem about this is simply one of timescale. We have a couple of decades to answer these questions. These developments, even if they’re feasible, even if they’re the right thing to do, are not going to happen in a relevant timescale. There is, also, a concern that if people believe there's an engineering solution to climate change, this would reduce the pressure to curtail use of fossil fuels and give license to continue with business as usual. 

The wickedest of all problems- V

Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere due to human activities not only affects the climate. When water and air come into contact there’s an exchange - gases from the atmosphere get absorbed by the ocean and gases dissolved in the ocean are released into the atmosphere. When carbon dioxide combines with water in the ocean it forms carbonic acid, which makes the ocean more acidic.  This is called ocean acidification which is sometimes referred to as global warming’s “equally evil twin.”

Ocean acidification is often expressed in terms of the pH of seawater.  pH is a measure of acidity or alkalinity. The pH scale runs from zero to fourteen. A pH below 7 is considered acidic, and a pH greater than 7 is considered alkaline, or basic. Average ocean water pH is currently 8.1.  For comparison, the pH of pure water is 7, and stomach acid is around 2. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, average ocean pH was about 8.2. The change might not seem like much but the pH scale is logarithmic, so a one point change on the scale means a tenfold change in concentration. 

The oceans have absorbed between a third and a half of the CO2 humans have released into the atmosphere since about 1850.  This has resulted in the acidity of the oceans increasing by 26% since about 1850, a rate of change roughly 10 times faster than any time in the last 55 million years. If greenhouse gas emissions continue as they are doing at present, the oceans will be 150 percent more acidic than they were at the start of the industrial revolution. While this helps to reduce the rate of atmospheric warming and climate change, it comes at a cost. 

The capacity of the ocean to absorb CO2 decreases as ocean acidification increases making it less effective in moderating climate change. It makes it difficult for marine calcifying organisms, such as coral and some plankton, to form shells and skeletons, and existing shells become vulnerable to dissolution. The extra hydrogen in low-pH seawater reacts with calcium carbonate, turning it into other compounds that animals can’t use to build their shells. Most surface waters will be continually corrosive within decades. The impacts of acidification will extend up the food chain to affect economic activities such as fisheries, aquaculture and tourism. 

Most species seem to be more vulnerable in their early life stages. Juvenile fish for example, may have trouble locating suitable habitat to live. Many marine fish and invertebrates spend their early lives as larvae. Larvae are very small, which makes them especially vulnerable to increased acidity. For example, sea urchin and oyster larvae will not develop properly when acidity is increased. In another example, fish larvae lose their ability to smell and avoid predators. The vulnerability of larvae means that while organisms may be able to reproduce, their offspring may not reach adulthood.  

Ocean acidification will change the makeup of microbial communities, it will alter the availability of key nutrients, like iron and nitrogen. For similar reasons, it will change the amount of light that passes through the water, and for somewhat different reasons, it will alter the way sound propagates. (In general, acidification is expected to make the seas noisier.) It seems likely to promote the growth of toxic algae. It will impact photosynthesis — many plant species will benefit from elevated CO2 levels — and it will alter the compounds formed by dissolved metals, in some cases in ways that could be poisonous.

While many species will apparently do fine, even thrive in an acidified ocean, lots of others will not. Emiliania huxleyi, for example, is a single-celled phytoplankton. It is common at certain times of year and it forms the base of many marine food chains. Limacina helicina is a species of pteropod, or “sea butterfly,” that resembles a winged snail. It lives in the Arctic and is an important food source for many much larger animals, including herring, salmon, and whales. Both of these species appear to be highly sensitive to acidification. 

As with many aspects of climate change, the speed of CO2 release is the problem. CO2 levels have changed in the geologic past, with several  episodes being severe, but none with such speed of CO2 release as currently taking place. A useful comparison can be made to alcohol. Just as it makes a big difference to your blood chemistry whether you take a month to go through a case of alcohol or an hour, it makes a big difference to marine chemistry whether carbon dioxide is added over the course of a million years or a hundred. 

If we were adding CO2 to the air more slowly, geophysical processes like the weathering of rock would come into play to counteract acidification. But things are moving too fast for such slow-acting forces to keep up. As Rachel Carson once observed,  “Time is the essential ingredient, but in the modern world there is no time.” By burning through coal and oil deposits, humans are putting carbon back into the air that has been buried underground for  hundreds of millions of years. 

The wickedest of all problems - IV

Environmental degradation and climate change have caused societies to collapse earlier also. Mesopotamians gradually brought ruin on themselves through the salinisation caused by their massive irrigation system.  The Maya, too, were brought down not just by drought but by overexploitation of their land. The Harappan civilisation is believed to have collapsed after a loss of the monsoon rains. Many believe that modern civilisation, with its scientific and technological capacity should be able to survive whatever crises ancient and simpler societies found insurmountable. 

Some point out that civilisational collapse is caused not just by environmental pressures alone but by how the society responds to these problems. One anthropologist, Joseph Tainter says, “If a society cannot deal with resource depletion, then the truly interesting questions revolve around the society, not the resource. What structural, political, ideological, or economic factors in a society prevented an appropriate response?” Tainter extensively studied different civilisations in history and published his conclusions in a work called The Collapse of Complex Societies. 

He describes a generic life cycle that applies, in his view, to every complex society including our own. He says that at their core, societies can be understood in terms of energy flows. If a society is fortunate to discover a new source of energy, it will naturally grow in size and complexity as it exploits that energy. This energy can be from a new technology or be the collective energy of conquered nations. As a civilisation gets more complex, it needs ever more energy to maintain its growth and will generally keep doing what it's done successfully in the past.

Tainter describes this as a society's investment in complexity. However, after the first easy pickings, the next steps in the society's growth become more difficult and costly, offering more miserly returns. At a certain point, the society's return on investment in complexity peaks, and it finds itself spending increasing amounts of resources for ever more meagre returns. In effect, as the society gets more complex, it finds itself having to run harder and harder just to stay in the same place.

This requires even more energy than before, causing a new round of problems that become ever more insurmountable. It becomes increasingly difficult for regular citizens to maintain the lifestyle they are used to, frequently leading to social unrest. With continuation of this trend,” Tainter concludes, “collapse becomes a matter of mathematical probability, as over time an insurmountable stress surge becomes increasingly likely”.

Leaders will keep kicking their problems down the road for later generations to deal with. In a complex system, cause and effect may be more distant in time and space than we realise. “The inflation that would inevitably follow,” writes Tainter, “would tax the future to pay for the present, but the future could not protest”. It would be difficult for someone living in the middle of it to predict how bad things were going to get. 

A modern version of this process has occurred in the overexploitation of fisheries, where stocks decline as a result of being overfished from one generation to the next, but people forget how things used to be and consider the situation to be normal, until the next decline. The term “shifting baseline syndrome” has been coined to describe how people get used to each new level. 

When Tainter turns his attention to our civilisation, he sees nothing to suggest that we can somehow escape the inexorable logic of his grand theory. The primary energy source of our civilisation is fossil fuels. We want to maintain our standard of living so we will keep choosing short-term solutions even though we know it will lead in the future to runaway climate change.  The only thing that can save us, he believes, is a new source of energy to fuel our continued rise in complexity.

When we look at how our society is currently deriving its energy, the facts seem to support Tainter's viewpoint. We are receiving diminishing returns as the oil companies mine the furthest reaches of the globe for fossil fuels. The oil industry's recent desperate rush into tar sands and “fracking” seems to confirm Tainter's thesis, as our global economy invests billions of dollars into technological solutions to extract ever more fossil fuels, even while their carbon emissions are threatening the future of our civilisation.

Can technology save us? Tainter thinks not. He points to what is known as the “Jevons paradox,” which shows that whenever technology makes the use of a resource more efficient, this only increases its use, as consumption goes up to exploit the new efficiencies. As Pogo famously said, “We have met the enemy and he is us”. Our rampant use of fossil fuels is at the very heart of the issue.

The wickedest of all problems - III

It’s easy to think of the Internet as a purely virtual world but the reality is very different: The advocates of the digital companies  say that their industry is environmentally friendly but their true costs are never revealed. The tech sector uses much more than databases and algorithms. It relies  on manufacturing, transportation, physical work, data centres and the undersea cables, personal devices and their raw components. These all come at a cost. It is only by factoring in these hidden costs that we can understand what the shift toward increasing automation will mean.

The tech sector heavily publicises its environmental policies, sustainability initiatives, and plans to address climate-related problems using AI as a problem-solving tool. But, Kate Crawford writes in Atlas of AI, '. . .  Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all license their AI platforms, engineering workforces, and infrastructures to fossil fuel companies to help them locate and extract fuel from the ground, which further drives the industry most responsible for anthropogenic climate change.'

Each object in the extended network of an AI system, from network routers to batteries to data centres, is built using elements that required billions of years to form inside the earth. These minerals then go through a rapid period of excavation, processing, mixing, smelting, and transport before being made into devices that are used and discarded. Electronic devices are often designed to last for only a few years. This obsolescence cycle fuels the purchase of more devices, and increases incentives for the use of unsustainable extraction practices. 

While most climate change activists are focused on limiting emissions from the automotive, aviation and energy sectors, it’s the communications industry that is on track to generate more carbon emissions than all of the aforementioned sectors.. Very few people realise this problem even exists. A BBC report says  that the carbon footprint of our gadgets, the internet and the systems supporting them account for about 3.7% of global greenhouse emissions.  Some researchers estimate that the tech sector will contribute 14 percent of global greenhouse emissions by 2040,

Every time we perform simple daily actions like browsing a website, sending and receiving email, using an app on our phones, saving a file to our cloud drives or searching Google, data gets transferred between our devices and the servers that the websites or software are hosted on. The more data that is sent and stored, the more electricity and energy is needed. Even though this is relatively small at the individual level, when this is multiplied by the billions of people globally that are now connected to the Internet, it adds up to a substantial amount (according to some estimates, a single email can produce up to 4 grams of CO2 emission). 

Cloud storage requires a significant amount of energy to power and cool servers.  Cloud data is stored in buildings — massive structures filled with thousands of hard drives - using a mind-boggling amount of energy. There are many data centres around the world, some taking up nearly 200 acres of land apiece. There are miles of fibre optic cables, studded with other fixtures of internet infrastructure that all require power. At the centre, your data is stored multiple times on hard disks, and the constant activity of all those disks creates a lot of heat, which necessitates energy-intensive air conditioners to protect the equipment from overheating.

A Carnegie Mellon University study concluded that the energy cost of data transfer and storage is about 7 kWh per gigabyte. Compared with your personal hard disk, which requires about 0.000005 kWh per gigabyte to save your data, this is a huge amount of energy. Saving and storing 100 gigabytes of data in the cloud per year would result in a carbon footprint of about 0.2 tons of CO2, A single data centre can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 terawatt hours (TWh) annually, data centres collectively devour more energy than some nation-states. 

The polluting qualities of data centres are far less visible than the billowing smokestacks of coal-fired power stations so they escape attention. Current statistics show that only half of the world’s population is connected to the internet and therefore contributing to this data deluge. Despite this, IDC noted that the number of data centres worldwide has grown from 500,000 in 2012 to more than 8 million today. The amount of energy used by data centres continues to double every four years, meaning they have the fastest-growing carbon footprint of any area within the IT sector.

The most common method for producing crypto-assets requires enormous amounts of electricity and generates large CO2 emissions. It is estimated that the two largest crypto-assets, Bitcoin and Ethereum, together use around twice as much electricity in one year as the whole of Sweden. Crypto-production's high energy consumption is due to its mining process, which is called proof of work. Anyone who wants to mine assets competes to solve an encryption puzzle, and the winner receives new crypto-assets as a reward. The only way to solve the puzzle is by repeatedly running computer programs that guess the right answer. When a large number of crypto-producers' computers work simultaneously, the demand for electricity soars.

Another environmental impact of cloud computing is the electronic waste produced by the industry. In 2018, 50 million metric tons of e-waste was generated globally as equipment is often replaced as soon as more efficient technology becomes available. Other environmental impacts of data storage include the coolant chemicals used in the server rooms, which are often hazardous, and the battery back-ups of the data centres. The components of these batteries are often mined unsustainably, and the disposal of both toxic batteries and the chemical coolants could have a devastating impact on the local environment if not properly managed.  Cloud storage facilities require a significant amount of water for cooling purposes. This water usage can put a strain on local water resources, especially in areas that are already experiencing water scarcity.

Going to a physical store rather than making purchases online is a more eco-friendly way of shopping. The main reason is because of how people shop online: Many buy items online frequently – but they only buy a few items per purchase. When they shop in a store, they aggregate these purchases in a single bulk purchase. Frequent online purchases produce more packaging waste, and online items tend to come from different distribution centres. Both factors result in higher greenhouse gas emissions per item.

The wickedest of all problems - II

Climate change is passed off as a matter of individual responsibility and consumer choice. The notion of the per capita carbon footprint is a good example. It is calculated by dividing a nation’s total carbon emissions by the sum of its population. This measure is used to attribute climate change to the usage of gas-guzzling cars, wasteful usage of domestic energy, meat-heavy diets, and so on. Such a framing excludes institutional emissions, like those related to the US military and to the projection of American power. 

In The Nutmeg’s Curse, Amitav Ghosh writes that the literature on climate change mysteriously ignores numbers regarding emission of  greenhouse gases by the military. This is because a decision was taken, at the behest of the US, that emissions related to military activities would be excluded from the negotiations for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Ever since then the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has continued “to treat national military emissions, specifically international aircraft and naval bunker fuels, differently than other emission types.”

In the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rate of consumption of fossil fuels was sixteen gallons per soldier per day. Amitav Ghosh says that today the Pentagon is the single largest consumer of energy in the United States — and probably in the world. The US military maintains vast fleets of vehicles, ships, and aircraft, and many of these consume huge amounts of fossil fuels. A non-nuclear aircraft carrier consumes 5,621 gallons of fuel per hour; in other words, these vessels burn up as much fuel in one day as a small town might use in a year. 

A single F-16 aircraft consumes 1700 gallons of fuel in one hour of ordinary operations. The US Air Force has around a thousand F-16s, and they are but a small part of the air fleet. Add to this battle tanks, armoured cars, Humvees, and so on which also require large amounts of fuel. Nor are these machines idle in peacetime; many of them are in constant use, not just for training and maintenance, but also because the US’s nine hundred domestic military installations need to be connected to its network of around a thousand bases in other countries.

In the 1990s the three branches of the US military consumed approximately 25 billion tons of fuel per year. This was more than a fifth of the country’s total consumption, and “more than the total commercial energy consumption of nearly two thirds of the world’s countries.” In 2017, the Pentagon’s total greenhouse gas emissions was greater than all CO2 emissions from US production of iron and steel. During the years of the Iraq War, the US military was consuming around 1.3 billion gallons of oil annually for its Middle Eastern operations alone. That was more than the annual consumption of Bangladesh, a country of 180 million people.

The operation of military equipment requires the use of many kinds of toxic chemicals like thinners, solvents, pesticides, and so on. As a result, the Department of Defence “generates 500,000 tons of toxic waste annually, more than the top five US chemical companies combined", and it is estimated that the armed forces of the major world powers produce the greatest amount of hazardous waste in the world. This does not include the emissions and waste products that are generated in the process of constructing weapons, warships, and warplanes. 

The armed forces of China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Turkey, and India are expanding very rapidly, and they are all spending huge amounts of money on energy-intensive systems. “Militarization,” it has been said, “is the single most ecologically destructive human endeavor.” Yet the subject is so little studied that, according to three leading scholars in the field, “research on the environmental impacts of militarism [is] non-existent in the social sciences.”

At the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, it was agreed that wealthy countries would channel $100 billion a year to poorer nations, to help them cope with the impacts of climate change. But the Green Climate Fund set up by the UN succeeded in raising only $10.43 billion and is now running out of money: it never came close to being funded at the level envisaged at the summit. In that same period the world’s annual military expenditure has risen from slightly above $1.5 trillion to almost $2 trillion.

What is ironical is that the US military knows the reality of climate change. Yet, the Pentagon does not acknowledge that its own fuel use is a major contributor to climate change.  The military’s climate-related plans are mainly oriented toward dealing with the conflicts that global warming will create or exacerbate: for instance, struggles over water; regional wars; terrorism; and mass movements of people caused by hurricanes and desertification, droughts and flooding. They assume that the effects of climate change as a “threat multiplier” will only continue to grow more severe, requiring more and more military interventions.

Every year governments around the world justify $1.7 trillion in military expenditure for protecting citizens against entirely uncertain and ill-defined threats. This is supported by many people who, in other regards, would strongly oppose government spending. They argue against climate change on the basis of uncertainty but use uncertainty as a justification for militarypreparedness. 

Mitt Romney, the first presidential candidate to openly deny climate change, justified increasing spending for the military because “we don’t know what the world is going to throw at us down the road. So we have to make decisions based upon uncertainty.” Former vice president Dick Cheney, another outspoken denier of climate change, said that “even if there is only a one percent chance of terrorists getting weapons of mass destruction, we must act as if it is a certainty.” 

The wickedest of all problems - I

Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities begins with the observation: 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way — in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.'

The description fits the period we are living in very well. There are a class of problems called 'wicked problems' which are difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements. Solutions to wicked problems are not true-or-false, but good or bad because there are ideological, cultural, political and economic constraints which keep changing over time.  These problems have a lot of ambiguity and the consequences are difficult to imagine. Most wicked problems are connected to other problems. Trying to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems. 

Climate change is such an issue and it is caused by our great need for energy. Society runs on energy and materials, but most people think it runs on money. As GDP increases globally, energy needs to increase in lockstep, i.e. for additional economic activity, we need more energy. Study after study predicts that carbon emissions will keep growing by roughly three percent a year. We face increasing effort and cost to extract minerals from lower grade ores. This will have a corresponding effect on benefits to societies while increasing carbon emissions. 

As Timothy Mitchell says in Carbon Democracy, modern mass politics was made possible by the development of ways of living that used energy on a new scale. Without the energy derived from oil, the current forms of political and economic life would not exist. People have developed ways of eating, travelling, housing themselves and consuming goods and services that require very large amounts of energy from oil and other fossil fuels. More than half the total fossil fuel consumed in the 150 years or so between the 1860s, when the modern petroleum industry began, and 2020 was burned in the four decades after 1980. 

In the early period of human civilization, human activity was limited by the muscular power of animals and the speed of regeneration of woodlands. When freed from these limits, the supply of energy began to grow at an exponential rather than a linear rate. You can think of fossil fuels as forms of energy in which great quantities of space and time have been compressed into a concentrated form. This means that organic matter equivalent to all of the plant and animal life produced over the entire earth for four hundred years was required to produce the fossil fuels we burn today in less than a year. 

A human labourer can perform about 0.6 kWh in one workday while one barrel of crude oil can perform about 1700 kWh of work. This means that a barrel of oil has the same work potential as a human working for over 9 years (taking 300 working days a year). This energy/labor relationship was the foundation of the industrial revolution. Most technological processes require hundreds to thousands of calories of fossil energy to replace each human calorie previously used to do the same tasks manually. And fossil energy is much cheaper than human energy. These fossil ‘armies’ are the foundation of the modern global economy. We didn’t pay for the creation of these armies of workers, only their liberation. 

According to modern economic theory if the price of one input gets too high, the market will develop an alternative. However, energy does not cooperate with this theory because different sources of energy exhibit critical differences in quality, density, storability, surplus, transportability, environmental impact, and other factors. For instance, there are many medium and high heat industrial processes (for textiles, chemicals, cement, steel etc.) using fossil fuels that have no current (or even under development) alternative using low-carbon technology.

One factor that would prevent any meaningful action on climate change is that it would result in changing the power relations between countries. The world’s most powerful countries are also oil states, Timothy Mitchell notes, that “without the energy they derive from oil their current forms of political and economic life would not exist.” Nor would they continue to occupy their present positions in the global ranking of power. The increase in the consumption of fossil fuels in China and India has already brought about an enormous change in their international influence.

Everybody talks of climate justice. This would require a fair apportioning of the world’s remaining “climate budget.” But if the emissions of some countries were to be curbed while the emissions of others were allowed to rise, then this would lead inevitably to a redistribution of global power. From the point of view of the American security establishment that wants maintenance of global dominance, this is precisely the scenario that is most greatly to be feared; from this perspective the continuance of the status quo is the most desirable of outcomes. This was clearly stated by George Kennan, one of the architects of the postwar strategic order (quoted in The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh):

We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relations which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives.

Uttar Pradesh Mritak Sangh

Picture a man named Lal Bihari, born in 1955, a farmer from Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh. He was told by a government officer in 1976 that he was dead. The land record said that the previous year, after the death of Lal Bihari, his one bigha (one-fifth of an acre) of land had devolved to his cousins. He was officially dead. The fact that he was a familiar figure standing before them made no difference: government records showed that  he was dead so he was dead. He had no proof that he was alive. Now how to get such a proof.

Lal Bihari renamed himself Lal Bihari Mritak (dead man), and went about proving himself alive. This would take him 17 years. One method was to organise his own funeral which would give him a receipt proving that he was alive.  Others were to apply for compensation for his ‘widow’, throw stones at a police station so that he is arrested and his existence recorded, kidnap his cousin, and finally, stand for election. He took on VP Singh from Allahabad in 1988 and Rajiv Gandhi from Amethi in 1989, but didn’t win.

By this time, he found that there were many others in the same plight as him, and founded the Uttar Pradesh Mritak Sangh, an association of legally dead people. At last count, they had 20,000 members, of whom four had managed to come back to life. One of them was Lal Bihari. From 1994 he was no longer Mritak. This tactic of declaring a person dead and grabbing his land seems to be a common practice. One person from  Azamgarh says, “My own son had killed me off. If it had not been for Lal Bihari, I would still be dead.”

Another person had left his village for some years and found that his brother had declared him dead. Following a dharna by the Mritak Sangh he was declared alive. He then lost on appeal, won on further appeal, but another officer pronounced him dead again. “I have died thrice. At present, I am dead but have a stay on it by the court,” he says. Another person and his four brothers were all shown dead in one village but alive in three other villages where they own land. 

You cannot make this up. Kafka was born in the wrong country and the wrong century. In present day India, he would have been a reporter writing about truth stranger than his fiction. There is a brief mention of the walking dead in the film Jolly LLB 2. Two movies that show the strange ways of the bureaucratic and legal systems in India are Chaitanya Tamhane's Court and Shyam Benegal's Well Done, Abba

Acting like Segrid

In my younger days, I was an avid reader of comics. Phantom, Mandrake, Flash Gordon, Tintin, Asterix, Archie, Richie Rich, Superman and other super-heroes . . . I would be excited about all sorts of facts in them - the 3rd Phantom was Juliet in Shakespeare's production of Romeo and Juliet at the Globe Theatre; Mandrake's arch enemy, The Cobra was actually Luciphor, Theron's oldest son and, thus, Mandrake's half-brother; Tintin's perennial antagonist. Roberto Rastapopoulos. . . .

My cousin had several comics bound into two thick volumes. Every summer and winter vacations (whenever I had not gone to Kerala), I would go to his house, bring the two volumes and read them frequently. I would repeat this practice during the next vacation and the next. . . I would have read them more often than any other book. 

Speaking of comics, I am reminded of a character in Mandrake comics. Mandrake had a girlfriend called Narda who is Princess of the European nation Cockaigne, ruled by her brother Segrid. Whenever Segrid felt ill, he would do his exercises more vigorously and show himself to be very active. He said that the reason he did this was because he had many enemies around who were constantly monitoring him for any sign of weakness and use it as an excuse to depose him. This made him act as if he had more physical vigour than what he actually felt so that they would be deterred from taking such an action.

Even though I don’t have any enemies around, I sometimes resort to the Segrid manoeuvre. Sometimes, I will feel a bit under the weather and will feel like lying down quietly without the TV being switched on. This will make everyone think that I have some major health issue. Jaya will check my temperature and B.P. I may be asked whether a doctor should be called. In order to avoid all this hullabaloo, I will keep quiet about bodily discomforts that I think are minor. I would switch on the TV or sit in front of the computer as usual but I would actually not be doing anything so nobody will suspect anything out of the ordinary. 

Even other apes seem to indulge in this kind of play act. In The Bonobo and the Atheist, Edward Sloan Wilson writes about a large, male bonobo that had recently died. He was a leader with a pleasant disposition, never overly aggressive yet supremely self-confident during his heyday. His  postmortem showed that he had several cancerous growths in addition to a hugely enlarged liver. Even though his condition must have been building for years, he had acted normally until his end. He must have felt miserable for months, but any sign of vulnerability would have meant loss of status. Chimps seem to realize this. 

Wilson also mentions a limping male chimp in the wild who was seen to isolate himself for weeks to nurse his injuries. But he would show up now and then in the midst of his community to give a charging display full of vigour and strength, after which he’d withdraw again. That way his status would be safe and no one would get any ideas of challenging him.

This brings to mind a 'Segrid manoeuvre' that I had to do in my teens. I was hit in my private parts while battling and was moving with a pronounced limp because of pain. (We usually played cricket with a hard ball so the blow was quite painful.) After play, I limped back home. As soon as I came near my house, I tried my best to walk normally. I was afraid that if my parents saw me limping, they would not allow me to play the next day. I knew that the pain would disappear by the next day and playing would not be a problem. 

When I reached my house, my mother told me to go to a market around a kilometre away and buy some vegetables. I was in a fix - I usually agreed to such a request so if I showed any reluctance this time, she might ask some uncomfortable questions; on the other hand, walking that distance was not going to be fun. I decided to go to the market and began limping down the stairs - my house was on the third floor and there was no lift. 

When I emerged out of the apartment, I started walking normally. When I was out of sight of my house, I began limping again. I limped to the market, bought the vegetables, and limped back. When I was within sight of my house, I started walking normally. I reached my house, gave the vegetables to my mother, grabbed my books and sat on a chair from which I did not move for a couple of hours. By that time, my pain had reduced so the rest of the evening passed off uneventfully.