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Notes -
(First post, hope I’m doing this right.)
The Link Between Environmental Exploitation and Collapse
This was something that randomly popped into my head a couple weeks ago at work, and I can’t seem to find a solution for it. As a species, we’ve evolved and reliably patterned our behavior to exploit opportunities when they become available. We are not naturally wired to operate for deliberative, careful, and long-term planning. Our genetic makeup works very well for small, hunter-gatherer societies to optimize for our local catch and bring it back home to the tribe. That doesn’t scale and work very well with modern technology, where we’ve now become good at exploiting resources which allow us to destroy things quicker than we can reform them. Despite being equipped with logical reasoning, why do we fail so much at being able to use our capabilities?
Every time I think of this conundrum, it always reminds me of the gamblers fallacy, which is essentially our inability to accurately estimate probabilities. The short of it is: gamblers often think some random events are related to each other when in reality they aren’t. If you’re out fishing for instance, a fisherman may think several bad days increases his odds of a lucky catch today; and these misperceptions are often reinforced when he sees a colleague coming back with a full load of fish. This leads him into thinking the balance has to swing back in his favor at some point and the only source of the problem has to do with how hard he tries. Maybe he ends up redoubling his efforts, buys more expensive equipment, or falsely believes luck will repay him for his past losses.
Human minds are incredibly hard to change. If over exploitation is one of the historical forces that leads to collapse, then fighting its roots may be impossible if it involves trying to stop people from engaging in irrational behavior.
Possible Solutions and Their Problems
Privatization
Libertarians often think privatization is a solution that can mediate some of these problems via efficient allocation of resources. If a herdsman owns the land on which his sheep pasture, then he’d have to be stupid if he didn’t understand that if he added more sheep to his flock he’d end up ruining himself. So privatizing things removes the network of interacting herdsmen, by turning them into single operators who do their jobs without broad external interaction. Maybe for some things this works but it has massive problems.
First, privatization isn’t always possible. You can’t fence the atmosphere or the oceans, if we’re talking about climate change. But even so, even where privatization is possible it always carries a cost along with it. In the west we take it for granted that the government protects the property rights of its citizenry. But this isn’t true in many other parts of the world where ordinary people are subject to dispossession depending on who covets their land/property.
But even with best good will and control over the system, people may just be unable to manage a system that has too many non-linear feedbacks and delayed reactions. And that’s a tendency that casts a wide shadow over all ideologies that propose a solution to this.
Quotas
The first problem with quotas is that the method only works if there’s a general consensus in place that establishes the framework of restrictions. Secondly, people also aren’t usually interested in quotas imposed on specific industrial sectors, and battles often rage between interested parties that degenerates into shouting matches and protests between lobbies and well intentioned politicians.
The Montreal treaty that imposed a limit on CFC gases in the late 80’s was successful in reducing emissions worldwide, but that led to a spike in illegal manufacturing and smuggling of forbidden gases. It didn’t prove to be a significant problem though, only because good substitutes of CFC gases were already available at that time and so resolving that problem proved to be rather painless.
Back in the 90’s, the fishing industry in the Aral lake in the Soviet Union was destroyed, due to it being dried out to use its water for irrigation purposes. That wasn’t the only example of ecological crises either. The mining cities in northern Siberia are notoriously known for some of the worst cases of industrial pollution on the planet. So even communism can’t save the commons then.
What ultimately is the solution?
Realistically, I think the only solutions that work at scale are technological advancements that obsolete the need to exploit the commons.
There's literally never been an instance where people "just" decide to collectively stop defecting, rather the payoff matrix gets changed by technological advances and it becomes irrational to defect.
Limiting CFC's went so well in large part because it ended up being pretty easy to transition from CFC's to HFC's, and peak fossil fuel is approaching not because of the environmentalist or degrowth lobbies but because the costs of renewables are falling precipitously. On the other hand, trying to prevent antibiotic resistance has pretty much gone nowhere because antibiotics are so hard to replace - I have much more faith that we'll get better ways to kill bacteria before any progress is made trying to coordinate usage at a global scale.
We need better incentives. Climate change is hard to deal with because the consequences are far out in the future, and rich countries are going to suffer relatively little in comparison to poor ones.
The hole in the ozone layer is often cited as a case where countries around the globe were swift to act and institute stricter laws on CFC's. As you said, this is partly because alternatives either existed or were rapidly developed. But the threat was also much more immediate.
A better example is perhaps the nuclear taboo. The US and Soviet union decreasing their nuclear stockpiles. Multiple countries choosing to rely on existing nuclear powers instead of developing missiles on their own. This is incentivized by the risk of invasion from larger powers and by the high upkeep cost of the missiles. But this does not explain why countries that already have nukes, don't use them more often. Russia could throw nukes against Ukraine, and it seems detrimental for other powers to retaliate with nukes in this case. Yet the taboo is so strong that this escalation is nearly unthinkable. The fear that the world might end is enough to keep every nation in the world from defecting, and has been sufficient for the past several decades.
Part of the problem though that I keep coming back to has to do with modeling solutions. We all model reality whether it’s by simple or more complicated means: equations, statistical inference, physical laws, human intuition, etc., but these are only as good as the faulty human beings can make them. Models are virtual representations of real world phenomena. We run models in the virtual space of our minds all the time.
When you select a model though, you have to choose one that has all the relevant parameters. But one thing they always teach you as you learn this is that the more parameters you add, you increase the scope of uncertainty exponentially. The worst of these problems happen when there are so many degrees of freedom in your equations you can find an excellent fit for the data using the wrong model. Von Neumann taught us this in the 20th century:
“With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.”
The classic way of attempting to mitigate this is sensitivity analysis (studying how the output of the model is related to changes in the input parameters). The other problem works in reverse of this example and that’s when people think that “simple” means “inaccurate.” It’s why politicians and decision makers are irrationally skeptical of you if you can predict where a trend is going with only a few parameters. But even if you have an accurate model? You have to know how to use it.
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