Too much of a hurry

Hanging around, just watching the slush go by.

If you sit on the bottom of the deep ocean, on those vast dark abyssal plains which cover so much of our planet, you can witness the pelagic snow – that steady fall of dead organisms and their shells, through columns of kilometres of water, into the slushy unconsolidated muddy ooze on the bottom of the sea. It is slow, so very slow. Slooooooooooooow.  It makes watching paint dry look like an express train. Measurement on the ocean floors suggests accumulation of just a millimetre of this stuff takes a decade. To get a centimetre takes then a century, and a metre of this oozy slush takes ten thousand years. Before this gunk turns to rock, it compacts roughly half its volume, give or take, so a metre of rock takes twenty thousand years.

Time. Sitting on the bottom of the ocean for 20000 years waiting for 2 metres of slush to accumulate one measly bug at a time. Get your tickets now before they sell out…

20 thousand years for a metre or rock. In the middle of some field work studies in Greece, one day this just hit me. Sitting down on a hillside having my lunch, looking around me to the horizons, pretty much in every direction, I saw kilometre upon kilometre of carbonates piled on top of each other in the mountainous backbone of the Hellenides. Not all of them derived from the pelagic slush of which we speak, admittedly, but a good proportion. You look at those kilometres of rock and consider not only how slowly they accumulated in the sea, but also how they came to be atop a mountain range, when the collision between plates typically happens at just millimetres per year. 

That’s the thing about geology, sometimes the time stuff just wallops you in the gut. 

Mankind. Insects on a rocket with a caffeine rush.

By contrast, the things of mankind are so fleeting in comparison. What is fifty years? Half a centimetre of oceanic sludge. 2000 years? Since the first Christmas, a wellington boot sized depth of oceanic sludge (gumboot in antipodeo-speak). 

So why are we so consistently insistent on the solution of big problems in a few months? As a species we have a disposition to vastly underestimating the amount of time things take.  Cue mother nature rolling her eyes heavenward. We also seem to harbour the illusion that by some authority somewhere writing down a list of objectives, to be completed by such and such a day, they just kind of happen. 

It is not a good habit. As humanity grows in power, and it does, increasingly the problems it faces are planet-wide ones. These may not be ones that can be fixed as soon as we decide to try. The recognition of a need for change is a very, very, far cry from the successful implementation of it.

Slow down, you move too fast (...feelin' woozy)

We see as an example the fuel tax riots in France. Recognition of a need to phase out combustive fuels because of environmental concerns resulted in measures introduced virtually overnight, and understandably protests erupted.  The recognition of the problem is not wrong, and the need to move as quickly as possible true as well – but people and their livelihoods are still part of the equation and not one to be ignored. A thought: perhaps taking a decade to successfully and incrementally introduce major tax changes is better than falling at the first hurdle while trying to introduce them instantly.  

We can’t have our pie and eat it after all.  If we want to protect the planet’s environment (insomuch as we can) there will be a universal cost to that, yet it is not fair either to suddenly present everyone with an unexpected bill. It is allowable to take some time to let people get used to it gradually, if that is what it will take to implement things successfully.  It means that there will not be instant gratification for politicians before the next election, but it is time we moved on from requiring that in policy.

Brexit, everyone’s favourite topic this Christmas (groan), is another example. Whatever we think of it, the timescales that are being set are quite silly really. Personally, for the record, for all its many, many faults, I believe UK is better off within the EU than out of it. Putting those views aside though, if Britain is to leave, to try and see agreement as a two-year project was always unreasonable.  This current failure to reach agreement was about as predictable as the wrong kind of leaves on the track in a UK autumn. The network of relationships forged between so many organisations in industry, policy, defence, border security, finance, scientific research, education, health, over forty, fifty years – that isn’t going to be unwound and replaced easily in 24 months.  It is a fifty-year project at least.  Somehow though, our democratic processes feel obliged to promise successes in single electoral terms. Why do we make these rods for our backs so frequently? Thinking problems can be solved so quickly when, well, they just can’t. It stresses everyone out and auto-condemns to starting a long-term project with failure.

Yes, Minister

This attitude seems to replicated by our democracies throughout the civil services – in police, education, health, justice, prisons, energy, defence. Problems are recognised and politicians in cahoots with their favoured advisors write a document of rules and wish-lists which they think will somehow make the problem go away quickly. Public expectations are raised, new managements parachuted in to implement the new policies, and all the while resources are stealthily cut because the lovely new models from consultancy GivUzYorDoshQuik show they can be without harm.  Sigh. Meanwhile the organisations themselves are placed in an impossible position between a public on a huge politically fed amphetamine-like set of high-expectations, and politicians who think their bright ideas on a bit of paper have solved the problem already.  Worse than that, the managements they have brought in have very little incentive to tell them anything other than it’s all going swimmingly, as they do their best to hide the shambles and extricate the maximum number of bonuses possible before the next election and the next lot of parachutes.

We all live in a jello submarine

If sustainability is the buzzword of our generation, this kind of behaviour just isn’t sustainable in our modern, western democracies. Something will crunch sooner or later. The whole fabric of this short-termism is a construct that will dissolve jello-like in the face of the hot-water Earth currently finds itself in. In some way western democracies need to drag themselves out of this rut where all policy directives revolve around results within a single electoral term. Most big problems the modern world deals with just don’t operate like that. It is a real weakness of our democracies.  Don’t get me wrong, as others have long and correctly repeated many times before me, democracy is full of foibles, but it is far preferable to any of the alternatives.

Big Brother is leaving us in the dust

In the same breath, it would be silly not to recognise the advantages some intelligent but authoritarian regimes have obtained in implementing long term policies – the most obvious and talked about being China. There is of course no guarantee of the longevity of oppressive authoritarian regimes anywhere, - when they fall they can fall suddenly and catastrophically - but they do typically feel empowered to plan on a long-term basis, confident (rightly or wrongly) that these policies won’t be overturned at the next election, and that the nasty nuisance of public opinion won’t stop their implementation. Occasionally of course public opinion does drive change, even in regimes without meaningful elections, but this is the exception rather than the norm. You have to be blind during the thick smogs of Beijing not to see the need for environmental care as some kind of priority. The question we face in OECD democracies though, is how to achieve a similar long-term perspective and policy implementation approach. 

I don’t know.  I’m thinking that surely it can be done, but it’s going to take some doing.  Abandoning the reasoned, informed, decision-making of expert advisors to government in favour of issue-specific public referenda – may I suggest, is probably not the answer.  Once burnt twice shy. It is perhaps one of the major challenges facing the developed “free” world collective of democracies. Steering our countries through a pin-ball machine of election shenanigans to achieve a healthy long-term policy strategy that is capable of addressing core long-term issues.

To be fair, most governments get it, that need for a long-term policy. The problem is there is no agreement on what it should be, so that one government change often leads to near total reversals – witness the events in the USA over the past decade. I don’t know what the answer is, but we need to think about one. Ring fencing certain policies doesn’t seem like the right answer, as more information is always coming to light, and flexibility to change tack is also required, amidst an overall “steady as she goes” strategy. It calls for a level of maturity and communication amongst rival groups of policy makers – including politicians and civil servants, that is hard to achieve. That rivalry is part of the welcome vigour of debate in a democracy, but there comes a time when debate has to move into action – and in that regard when dealing with long term issues, the system seems to be verging on broken.

The climate juggernaut

Energy policies in the face of climate change are another prime example. I have written elsewhere detailing my personal thoughts on this. For my part, I suspect new generation nuclear with renewables and geothermal will eventually go a long way towards replacing our current reliance on hydrocarbon combustion for energy. It would be nice if renewables with storage could go it alone, but that possibility seems a bit remote, and the added insurance of a nuclear backup makes sense – at least until things become clearer. This transition away from fossil fuels will however take time – and by that, I mean perhaps a century – maybe even more. In the transition period the worst offending fuels can be replaced by the least offending – namely gas. Whatever happens there will still be an ongoing need for non-combustive uses of hydrocarbons in petrochemical and other industries. 

The changes necessary to lower greenhouse gas emitting processes, in both energy and agriculture, need to happen as fast as we can manage them. If you haven’t noticed it yet, the world, and many of its investors already have appetite for this. Whatever the rights and wrongs of various arguments, like it or not, it seems the world has already made a psychological decision to reduce combustion - and the new-investment dollars accordingly are now flowing that way.  Who knows how long it will stay that way, but that’s the way it is right now.

While there is not quite total consensus that these changes do need to be implemented as fast as we can manage it, there is something approaching it – but if we try to do it too suddenly without recognising the human element – i.e. the individuals involved and affected – then change will be doomed to failure from the start. Witness President Macron now wondering what to do after the fuel tax riots. 

The greenhouse gas emission problem we face has been at least two centuries in the making and is not going to be solved in two years. That means there is likely to be an environmental crash of sorts before the improvements come – so some of the planning has to be about damage limitation and related protection measures. The world is a juggernaut heading at speed for a large boulder on the highway. There is a need to brake as fast as we can of course, but no matter how much we scream at the driver to stop, there is only so much the juggernaut brakes can do. We can’t stop it instantly. Brake as fast as we can yes, but it’s more productive to think about some brace position than to demand the impossible stop ever more loudly and frantically.

Implementation not prevarication

This is not some excuse from an energy industry geologist to perpetuate the status quo – it’s a recognition that the livelihoods and welfare of real people globally are involved in this equation, and that any attempts at instant solutions which ignore this element and fail to bring people along with them, will collapse at the starting block. We can’t hang about either, because it is a critical situation in which the longer we take, the greater damage is likely to be - but if policies are imposed in such a way that populist protests overturn them instantly, then nothing is gained. We need to factor in time for people, economies, to adjust.  Is there a cost in terms of the delay that involves? Yes, probably, but perhaps not as great as we think, and to ensure that some measures are adopted, it is probably a price worth paying.

Care is not a lack of urgency

There are many things that are rightly urgent, but a compulsion to fix them instantly isn’t always going to deliver the best fix. The recognition that something will take time to successfully implement, is not a denial of its urgency. It is an acceptance that when things go awry on a planet with 4.6 billion years of history, a species like ours might have to wait sometimes, and to think.  It might be possible to instantly adopt drastic measures that appear to address the problem and create severe hardship for a vocal few, but if those measures then result in policy paralysis through popular protest, then nothing has been achieved. It seems more hopeful to work in a longer-term mode, whereby populations have adequate warning of measures deemed necessary, and time to adjust. 

The Earth.

There may be changes coming that are now irreversible. Groups of scientists correctly or otherwise, now frequently mention various global average temperature increases that they consider dangerous. We are aware of the potential for, if not the certainty of, positive feedback loops. I.e. the worse it gets, the more adverse processes are triggered, and the worse it’s going to get. That should convince us of a need for urgency if there is any risk (proven or unproven) that recent ongoing climate change is anthropogenic. 

However, the old adage, keep calm, don’t panic, is a good one. The world is old. It has been through a crisis or two before and is remarkably forgiving.  In that context it is better to take some time and think things through properly and give people and economies time to adjust to any changes deemed necessary. Not an unlimited amount, but a decade or two, so generations are not dealt instant adversely transformational surprises. If that delay means we have to take measures to deal with environmental problems occurring during a transition period over the next century, then let’s plan for it and prepare for that too. It might mean some things come later than we would prefer, but if the alternative is political paralysis and no change, then better late than never.