Climate Policy Revolution: What the Science of Complexity Reveals about Saving Our Planet

Kupers, a theoretical physicist and consultant on complexity, resilience, and energy transition in the Netherlands, notes the need for a system-wide resolution to climate change through policy using rapid rather than gradual change and integrating the science of complexity. He discusses concepts related to this science of interconnected systems, including networks and how different types of networks lead to different outcomes, equilibrium, and ideas of top-down vs. bottom-up change and how bottom-up dynamics make societal systems work. He then describes examples of policies to illustrate the perspective from the bottom up and how it might foster a revolution in climate change, detailing the examples of coal and nuclear energy; how norms that are favorable to the environment are formed and how they spread, as well as creating social norms; business resilience and efficiency; government support for innovation; and autonomous cars. Annotation ©2020 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
Dealing with climate change means accepting tough tradeoffs: giving up certain energy sources, products, and conveniences, all of which have economic impacts. Politicians balk, but there are solutions. Roland Kupers turns to the new science of complexity to show how we can untangle a knotty global economy and start making progress.
Humanity’s best hope for confronting the looming climate crisis rests with the new science of complexity.The sheer complexity of climate change stops most solutions in their tracks. How do we give up fossil fuels when energy is connected to everything, from great-power contests to the value of your pension? Global economic growth depends on consumption, but that also produces the garbage now choking the oceans. To give up cars, coal, or meat would upend industries and entire ways of life. Faced with seemingly impossible tradeoffs, politicians dither and economists offer solutions at the margins, all while we flirt with the sixth extinction.That’s why humanity’s last best hope is the young science of complex systems. Quitting coal, making autonomous cars ubiquitous, ending the middle-class addiction to consumption: all necessary to head off climate catastrophe, all deemed fantasies by pundits and policymakers, and all plausible in a complex systems view.Roland Kupers shows how we have already broken the interwoven path dependencies that make fundamental change so daunting. Consider the mid-2000s, when, against all predictions, the United States rapidly switched from a reliance on coal primarily to natural gas. The change required targeted regulations, a few lone investors, independent researchers, and generous technology subsidies. But in a stunningly short period of time, shale oil nudged out coal, and carbon dioxide emissions dropped by 10 percent. Kupers shows how to replicate such patterns in order to improve transit, reduce plastics consumption, and temper the environmental impact of middle-class diets. Whether dissecting China’s Ecological Civilization or the United States’ Green New Deal, Kupers describes what’s folly, what’s possible, and which solutions just might work.