Waking the Frog: Solutions for Our Climate Change Paralysis, by Tom Rand
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Waking the Frog: Solutions for Our Climate Change Paralysis, by Tom Rand
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An accessible discussion of ways to achieve a sustainable future. Venture capitalist, entrepreneur, engineer, and philosopher Tom Rand explains why climate disruption might just be our very own pot of hot water. Are we the frog paralyzed in our inaction? In a highly readable account, Rand looks to contemporary psychology, economics, business, and finance to explain our stasis in the face of one of the most fundamental problems of our time. Rand's account doesn't just point fingers at the bad guys, but goes deeper - to our motivations, institutional lethargy, and deeply buried assumptions about market economics. Waking the Frog is as much about solutions as it is an account of our present paralysis. Our ingenuity, technology, capital, and policy can work together to turn down the heat and at the same time enable the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century.
Waking the Frog: Solutions for Our Climate Change Paralysis, by Tom Rand - Amazon Sales Rank: #9043562 in Books
- Published on: 2015-05-18
- Released on: 2015-05-18
- Format: Large Print
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 10.00" h x .79" w x 7.75" l, 1.42 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 348 pages
Waking the Frog: Solutions for Our Climate Change Paralysis, by Tom Rand Review "Provocative ... [Rand's] intellectual argument is compelling, and he raises questions well-worth considering." -- "Columbus Dispatch"
About the Author Tom Rand is managing partner of the privately backed MaRS Cleantech Fund, and senior advisor to the MaRS Discovery District. Tom was a successful entrepreneur in the global telecommunications sector, and now focuses his efforts on carbon mitigation as a venture capitalist, author, and speaker. His first book, Kick the Fossil Fuel Habit, was shortlisted for the White Pine non-fiction award in 2012. He lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. IntroductionFrogs, Hot Water, and UsEvery school kid has heard a version of the gruesome story of the frog, the pot of water, and the stove. Put a frog in a pot of water, place the pot on a stove, and turn on the element. As the water heats up, the frog sits there until the water gradually boils the poor creature alive. The story goes that cold-blooded frogs are not designed to respond to that sort of temperature change. It’s too slow to trigger panic or movement, but it is fast enough to trap him. There must be some moment when that froggy’s nervous system lights up with the knowledge that something really bad is happening, but by then its blood has warmed to the point that its muscles are useless. So it sits, paralyzed. The story is not literally true—it’s a metaphor, but a strong one.Are we that frog? The question seems hyperbolic, alarmist. I am certainly being deliberately provocative. But is it so crazy to ask? Each time a presidential candidate proudly disavows climate science or an energy company announces yet another massive fifty-year capital investment in fossil-fuel development, our paralysis feels real. Each time extreme weather breaks new records, from raging fires in Australia to heat waves and droughts in the U.S., our pot gets hotter. Even the pine beetle, scourge of Canada’s forests and timber industry, is aided and abetted by a warming climate. Yet it’s happening so slowly we look the other way. All signs point to continued paralysis in the very teeth of a storm of increasing intensity.Waking the Frog is about how we turn down the heat. We still have a small window of opportunity to act, but until we recognize our paralysis and ask hard questions about why we’re paralyzed, we’ll continue to stew. This book seeks root causes, not surface appearance. It may seem negative at times. That’s because we have to take a good, hard look in the mirror. The first step to change is acknowledging who you really are.Our paralysis is obvious. Given the state of play in the political and business sections of our daily newspapers, blogs, and television newscasts, it’s clear we’re not going to meaningfully grapple with carbon emissions any time soon. While we dither, argue, and delay, carbon counts rise well past the danger zone. We maintain investment levels in high-carbon infrastructure that last for decades. The economic, political, and sheer physical momentum of the carbon machine is enormous—and getting bigger. Efforts we make are largely symbolic. The degree of certainty in the scientific community about climate disruption has little effect on this dynamic.And things are getting alarmingly hot. It looks less crazy each day to lose sleep over the heat-death of much of the planet and the collapse of our economy. Even the highly conservative International Energy Agency (IEA) recently confirmed we’re on track for a 6°C (11ºF) global average temperature rise this century. That’s a very hot pot! There’s little room for error in our food system. The droughts that 6°C (11ºF) of warming bring will quickly dry up international grain markets. Our bountiful oceans are heating up fast enough to kill off plankton, a foundational link in the oceanic food chain. A hotter atmosphere means lots of energy for extreme weather events. The list goes on. There’s little chance we can adapt to such an abrupt and dramatic change—certainly not at anywhere near current population levels—however ingenious we may be.The upshot is that while we have been waiting . . . and talking . . . and dithering, climate change has evolved from a somewhat abstract threat to a real and present danger. We’re in hot water. Right now, we look a lot like that poor frog.The good news is that we can solve the climate problem if we so decide. The capital we need sits in our pension funds and money markets, the policy tools to unlock it are well understood (if politically problematic), and existing clean technology and emerging innovations are fully capable of powering our civilization. Aggressive action is nowhere near as expensive as opponents would have it. We can turn down the heat. We don’t have to be that frog.You’ll find here some of the usual suspects: vested interests defending the status quo; money distorting policy and politics; the complexity of climate science; the ease with which critics can sow doubt; powerful free-market ideologues, like the Koch brothers, who fund anti-scientific nonsense; the fact that climate change happens over the long term but we think and act over the short term. It’s a classic tragedy of the commons: the problem is global but action is local. Meanwhile, fossil fuels are cheap, abundant, and extremely useful, while clean energy is (for the short term anyway) more expensive and less convenient. All these circumstances contribute to inaction, but they are not enough to fully explain it.I’m more interested in how it all hangs together—the rules of the game, not just the bad actors. The global economy is shaped, broadly speaking, by democratic, free-market capitalism. My concern is that there seems to be something wrong with the structure of the economic machine we’ve built: democracy, free markets, and capital interact in ways that exacerbate paralysis on a global challenge like climate change. Mere malfeasance, laziness, or vested interests are not enough. Something deeper is at play. I hope to expose structural constraints—the equivalent of whatever it is in the frog’s DNA that lets it sit idle as the water heats up.Democracy dictates that the public endorse the direction we take. It’s only through our collective permission that priorities are shaped, policy takes form, and laws come into being. Yes, capitalism’s monetary lifeblood allows for all kinds of political distortions, but it’s the court of public opinion that politicians ultimately buy and sell. We the people, for better or worse, must decide what action to take on climate change. But we are not demanding action. Why not?Psychology and cognitive science have a lot to say about that. It turns out denying or ignoring a problem is perfectly natural—it’s our default reaction. It takes cognitive effort to see a problem for what it is, despite the overwhelming evidence and expert opinion before us. Denial of climate disruption, which I’ll refer to as climate denial, can be subtler than outright scepticism about the reality of climate change. A softer form admits a hotter pot, but it tempts us to ignore how serious a fix we are in. Denial is a siren song, indeed, but it’s one we can learn not to heed.By capitalism I mean the uniquely bare-knuckled U.S. style of free market capitalism that drives the emerging global economy, in which international capital flows tend to dominate domestic political agendas—including in Canada. Today’s global economy is the most powerful and creative social tool in history. The capital that sloshes around global markets, seeking to maximize risk-adjusted returns, marks a greater measure of wealth than humans have ever commanded. Redirecting investment away from the highly profitable fossil fuel sector and into low-carbon infrastructure requires massive intervention in the market.I see no evidence that free markets can address climate change. The proven reserves of the global energy giants—which sit on their balance sheets as assets to be sold—are already four times more than what we can safely burn. The market is telling us, loudly and clearly, that unless the rules are changed, climate change will win. Market freedoms trump intelligent action on carbon time and time again. Yet the free market is itself a myth—an academic fiction built on the mathematics of a bygone era. A modern, dynamic view of the economy, one that acknowledges its complexity and unmatched creative potential yet provides effective tools to tame it to our needs, is a more useful model for the twenty-first century.Our metaphorical hot water is not a political issue but a practical problem to be solved. Both right and left are in the same pot, after all! A compromise recognizes the role a revitalized market economy might play: neoconservatives admit it must be tamed, and the left acknowledges its unmatched creative power. If both sides leave their dogma at the door, we can come together on the basics of a solution. Only a price on carbon can simultaneously harness and unleash the most powerful tool we have at our disposal: the market.Striking deeper at the heart of traditional conservatism is a paradox: business as usual will not preserve the status quo. At the core of conservative thinking—and I refer now to the small-c conservative in all of us—is the idea that we tinker radically with our social, economic, and political structures at our peril. Incremental change is preferred, and conservative thinking has always been the steadying hand at the tiller. But we now face the hard reality that incremental changes to our energy economy will take us over a cliff and onto the rocks below. We all must somehow endorse radical change to preserve our way of life. That paradox is difficult to resolve, and many people choose to wilfully deny our best science as a way out.Economics plays a central role in this story. In the guise of cold, sober cost-benefit analysis (who disagrees we need that?), woefully inadequate economic models are used to pass judgment on the net costs of climate action. These models use a fatally flawed interpretation of climate science, dumbing it down so much they are nearly useless. They arbitrarily impose estimates of the economic damage our warming pot will bring (a “damage function”), with no decent empirical or theoretical basis whatsoever. Despite a history of predictive failure, they churn out precise numbers meant to capture climate consequences that are decades distant. This unjustified precision betrays a dangerously false confidence, but they confirm what we want to hear: relax, it’s not so bad.A traditional cost-benefit analysis is great for modeling the net benefits of single projects in isolation, such as building a bridge or refurbishing a building, but it’s unsuitable for the global, systemic changes coming our way. A hotter pot changes everything, including all those variables a model likes to hold constant (like growth rates). We use these models out of habit and for the falsely comforting story they tell. There are better alternatives. Economics can revitalize itself. New thinkers are more collaborative, more appreciative of the complex nature of the economy and the need for a multi-disciplinary approach that includes moral questions that cannot be reduced to traditional accounting.But life feels grand at the dawn of the twenty-first century! Our collective affluence sits on a mountain of cheap and plentiful fossil fuels. Who in their right mind really wants the fossil fuel party to end? But end it must, and the scale of the job ahead is massive enough to invite paralysis. Staring at that huge mountain you’re expected to climb before sundown can make you want to sit down, remove your hiking shoes, light a campfire, and open a bottle of wine.An honest assessment of carbon reduction is fatiguing. It’s not irrational to despair. But despair is a choice and not one we need to make. Previous generations bore down on some pretty serious problems. Our descendants should expect no less of us. Corny as it sounds, you climb a mountain by taking one step at a time. The trick is to start.Yet many of us don’t feel as if the risks of droughts, fires, and floods are ours to bear, not directly. So why start? Our collective affluence allows us to ignore the storms gathering on the horizon. It surely won’t hit us, after all—that stuff happens to poor people on TV! Perhaps Hurricane Sandy has changed that. Time will tell. Climate change is a risk we all share, not just because Wall Street can flood, Texas and the Prairies can dry out, or our oceans are shared, but because grain markets are global and no country with modern weapons is willing to starve without a fight. There is no gated community climate change can’t infiltrate.But our affluence hides another risk, the one we must take if we’re to quickly rebuild the largest piece of infrastructure humans have ever created. Energy flows permeate every corner of our economy. Fossil fuels power our civilization. Our professional classes have, for good reason, self-selected to be highly conservative when it comes to changing core infrastructure. Our legal and corporate structures reinforce that conservatism. Those with their hands on the levers of power—CEOs, financiers, captains of industry, politicians—are paid very well to continue to do what they do. They are, explicitly and implicitly, rewarded to keep the ship on course. If you made a lot of money yesterday and it looks like you’ll make a lot more today, why on earth would you stick your neck out, risk your professional reputation, and change direction? Why should a newcomer who advocates radical ideas like a massive restructuring of global energy flows be accepted to handle those levers of power? But the ship must be turned. We need a different sort of leadership now.These forces do not act in isolation. Feedback makes the whole larger than that sum of its parts. Some are easy to identify. Vested interests take advantage of denial’s siren song. Peddling seeds of doubt with pseudo-experts works so well because those seeds land on fertile psychological soil. A public that thinks the science is in doubt doesn’t demand, or even endorse, meaningful policy or radical change. The result is political inaction and an entrenched status quo.The status quo’s appeal is amplified when the market allows those who have accumulated sufficient capital to use their huge swaths of media as a kind of megaphone. When Fox News gets away with calling climate change a “scam” on nightly newscasts and weather announcers—trained mainly to look at the camera and smile—are trotted out as “experts” to counter the weight of unequivocal statements of alarm by more than a dozen international equivalents of the National Academies of Science, the public is no longer served by the private ownership of media. Yet that is precisely what the market allows, to say nothing of the role of money in Washington or the current anti-science oil-patch salesmanship in Ottawa.If this seems too severe, recall that the U.S. has presidential candidates who must repudiate climate science if they are to have a chance at getting past the primaries. And while Texas dries out in the most severe drought since record-keeping began—which is precisely what climate scientists have predicted—Texas governor Rick Perry prays publicly for both rain and an end to the Environmental Protection Agency. That’s like praying for your car to get fixed and for the mechanic to get sick all at the same time. Closer to home, our own federal minister of the environment, former broadcast journalist Peter Kent, often seems to be nothing more than a pitchman for oil pipelines. Harper’s recent omnibus budget bills, which gutted anything with even a faint whiff of environmental stewardship, were more than mere clearing of red tape. The result is the climate gridlock we see.But we are very unlike that poor frog, of course. We are conscious and capable of choosing our future. We are clever and plan and act over large periods of time and space. We put a man on the moon, for goodness’ sake! We split the atom and have observed events in space so distant they represent the dawn of the universe. We routinely drill kilometers into the earth for oil in the extreme conditions of the open ocean. We certainly can turn down the heat; it’s a matter of collective will and determination.Throughout Waking the Frog I make it abundantly clear that our paralysis is one of choice. The required capital, technology, industrial base, and policy tools all exist. New innovations in energy storage and production emerge constantly, as do innovative financial tools and means of public engagement. So the relevant question is not “can we turn down the heat?” but “will we turn it down fast enough to avoid economic collapse?” I believe this is the most fundamental economic and political challenge of the twenty-first century. I hope we can, of course, but hope is a poor cousin to deep understanding of the causes of our paralysis. We must first take the world as it is before we can hope to change it.The great existential philosophers of the twentieth century appreciated the degree of freedom we have to make change and the depth to which that change may go. It is consciousness that most uniquely defines us and is our source of meaning and possible future. Only the human animal, with our capacity for self-reflection and explicit sense of free will, can engage in the act of remaking him or herself. In so doing, we forge new meaning and choose anew how our future might unfold. Only when we take responsibility for our freedom will we be able to chart a course through the dangerous waters ahead. It all starts with the individual choice that lies at the heart of our democratic capitalist system.Democratic free-market capitalism is the most powerful political and economic system in human history. It has such a pull over time and geography that American political scientist Francis Fukuyama saw it as the necessary endpoint of human history. Fukuyama believed all countries would embrace it, and he saw us as quite literally at the End of History. But he was wrong. It is yet to be determined whether those powerful forces will be tamed and brought to bear against what is fast becoming our endgame: the war against carbon. The real test of the free market was not Soviet Russia nor is it Communist China. It’s climate disruption.
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Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Fabulous book. Focused my thinking on the real roots ... By Zeds Fabulous book. Focused my thinking on the real roots of the problem. Made me feel confident about what role I can play as we move quickly towards solutions.
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful. He critiques a libertarian view of free markets as unable to accept the change needed while realizing that market-based solution By David Thatcher Tom Rand's work is a strong case for the kind of intervention needed to steer our country and our world away from climate catastrophe. He avoids being too technical as he argues for carbon pricing and the development alternative baseline power sources. The book is accessible and his solutions are practical and doable given that we have the will to work towards reducing global warming.He critiques a libertarian view of free markets as unable to accept the change needed while realizing that market-based solutions are some of the best ways to achieve a low carbon future.My major technical criticism of the book would be the complete lack of mention of EROI/EROEI. If getting away from carbon means that our combined EROI from all energy sources drops into the toilet (20 or less), that's not the kind of energy source that's going to power anything close to the economy we've got now. Only breeder reactors and coal plants with CCS fit the bill of environmentally friendly AND high EROI. And Fukushima just killed nuclear for another generation, so... we're back to coal.This leads to my major policy criticism, that major initiatives called for my global warming experts ignore the fact that the majority of the world, and a significant portion of US citizenry, are already suffering economically and can't handle carbon being priced in at this point. Our current economy recovery is questionable, and it seems like the ones who are most calling for this kind of change sit in a socioeconomic stratum of our society that have economic room to give. Unlike many people I know. Heck, unlike me! And then you throw in the push for low EROI energy sources and it becomes the perfect storm for those struggling economically.To be fair, Tom mentioned that there are potential social justice implications, but he declined to discuss them. Maybe he thought he would only have upper-middle class readers?
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