Realistic hope in a fragmenting world (3): Energy system alignments

This is article 3 of 5 in Realistic Hope in a Fragmenting World. Here is article 2.

In a previous illuminem article, I explored the “technical” foundations on which a sense of Realistic Hope for transforming the energy system could be built.  There are three main building blocks:

• We understand the 5 main “technical” features of necessary energy transitions and they are all feasible using known technologies and approaches

• Instead of the often misleading and discouraging received wisdom, we can credibly re-perceive transitions as a series of fast-moving, modest cost, high opportunity, demand-enabled, tipping points (albeit of uncertain timing), and act accordingly to realise attractive business and policy opportunities

• We can adopt a full business-chain perspective to identify attractive possibilities enabled by aligning incentives from end-user products through to upstream commodity provision, where the main decarbonisation investments are required: making use of emerging information age capabilities, with prioritisation facilitated as just 8 full business-chains account for over 50% of emissions.

As outlined, we are not facing insuperable technical or economic challenges, which already gives us some grounds for realistic hope.  Instead, however, we face the challenge of coordinating or aligning the actions of multiple individual players for both common and individual benefit.  This is a socio-political matter, deeply intertwined with the nature of human nature, for good or ill.  In this article, I am going to try to consider some of the key difficulties in this arena, to highlight some more reasons for realistic hope, and to suggest some steps that can help us move forwards.

The socio-political arena is almost always contested.  We are seeing this dramatically in today’s armed conflicts and in the increasing political polarisation within several of the most powerful societies on the planet.  Individuals have immediate needs and interests, and grapple with others if the necessary resources to meet these are scarce.  These individual drives become projected into groups that form to achieve individual benefits more effectively, and this develops boundaries between “insiders” and “outsiders”, with groups wrestling with each other.  The interests binding groups together become not only material but also intangible, such as beliefs about how the world should be ordered and what is right or wrong.  Friction and hostility become endemic.

And yet, societies have obviously emerged and prospered that do manage to contain the frictions between competing groups and individuals, allowing sufficient collaboration, shared effort and knowledge to enable collective enterprises to build a decent quality of life for most citizens.  Of course, some societies have also grown and then degraded or failed, or been destroyed by other societies.  Nevertheless, it is surely clear that in huge parts of the world, the material quality of life for most people is substantially better than it was a couple of hundred years ago – just consider the enormous increases in life expectancy.  Technological developments such as those which surfaced in the industrial revolution emerged into societies with sufficient cohesion for them to be deployed collectively for both individual enrichment and common good.  

For such societies to be productive, sufficient people must be motivated to engage in collective action.  Many societies in the past have addressed this through coercion, with individuals or small groups using military power – violence or the threat of violence – to ensure the compliance of other groups with their interests.  As noted by ancient historian Thucydides “The strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must”.  We see strong echoes of this in authoritarian societies today, and in the current conflicts in the Middle East.   

Yet other forms of productive society have also emerged, managing scarce common resources for individual and collective benefit (at least for periods of time), without a completely oppressive central authority or top-down imposition and enforcement of prescriptive rules.  For example, within a general framework of accepted commercial rules, markets have evolved to coordinate many forms of economic activity.  In recent times, Nobel prize-winner Elinor Ostrom also studied how some communities have evolved the effective management of limited common resources.  The key principles she identified can be summarised as: 

1. Generate strong group identity and understanding of purpose 

2. Arrange proportional equivalence between benefits and costs

3. Institute collective choice arrangements

4. Monitor, with graduated sanctions and fair conflict-resolution mechanisms

5. Respect self-organisation with polycentric governance for extended commons

These principles can be recognised within the societal governance framework established almost 250 years ago by the state which has grown from modest beginnings to now being the largest economic and military power in the world – the United States.  The U.S. Constitution along with the first 10 Amendments that form the Bill of Rights, have proved a pragmatic and resilient platform for channelling self-interest into productive consensus. While currently under threat from the Executive arm of government challenging the fundamental separation of powers embedded within it, the Constitution has so far empowered the nation to navigate a path that avoided monarch-like dictatorship, mob-rule or consensus-seeking paralysis.  The remarkable framers of the US Constitution had five additional critical reference points in mind as they developed and debated their framework:

1. Everyone is selfish

2. Government is the steam valve of society

3. Political process is more important than outcome

4. The strength of consensus is directly related to the breadth of representation and the depth of deliberation

5. Every interest is a “special” one.

The first of these guidelines recognised that effective societal rules need to cope with realities in human nature.  As James Madison wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary”.  As we consider realistic hopes for the development of coordination and alignment in transforming the energy system, and society more broadly in different ways, this is a key factor to bear in mind.  

The significance of “societal rules” being accepting by the bulk of people, either as norms or laws, also needs to be recognised.  As implied in the lists above, there needs to be a degree of flexibility in these rules and the capacity for sufficient consensus to modify them, yet effective guidance requires that the rules retain sufficient stability and force.  

We see what happens when these norms erode.  In international relations, for example, there is much attention currently being given to an ongoing breakdown in the so-called “rules-based international order” – the system of legal and economic rules and institutions that evolved after World War II to avoid further conflict and promote human rights.  The long-standing consensus supporting this approach has deteriorated as appreciation of its significance has declined and individual parties are increasingly pursuing narrow interests and asserting a “might is right” mindset.  The cultural norms underpinning the value and significance of respecting international “rules” have weakened and are now insufficient for enforcement through social/diplomatic pressure in the absence of other coercive mechanisms.  

Indeed, cultures that generally accept the importance of rules or laws are essential for sustaining realistic hopes that involve coordination or alignment among multiple parties.  These cultures do not evolve overnight.  They are often born out of crisis, but they are sustained through the socialisation of new generations as they emerge and take their place in society.  Rebellion against the status quo seems a rite of passage for young people, challenging social rules.  However, if, between the ages of about 15 to 25, they become immersed in a broader conception of their self-interests and the value of collective social action in delivering common goods and services for everybody, then they are more likely to become invested in productive activity with others and divert rebellious energy towards reform and improvement rather than destruction.  This seems particularly important for young men.  

While effective socialisation can help bring alive a healthy respect for others and for essential rules and institutions for the bulk of people in a society, people are still people and there will always be certain individuals with extreme personalities holding anti-social positions.  Research into the 5 main personality traits identified by specialists suggests that these traits are fairly fixed over lifetimes, but with some malleability in very early life and also in that 15-25 age-range when the frontal lobes of young people are maturing.  This suggests that societal investment into the circumstances, development and socialisation of young people in that early period of their lives could, indeed, bear great dividends later.  However, it also highlights that some things may never change.  I recall research indicating that, on average, people will “cheat” about 15% of the time if they don’t believe they will be caught, and even that about a couple of percent of people are lifelong destructive sociopaths or psychopaths.  Effective societal mechanisms need to be robust to such challenges.    

This also brings up the challenge of governing regimes that practice “rule by law” rather than “rule of law”.  With the latter, government acts under an agreed framework of laws that are applied uniformly and independently, whereas in the former case it uses the mechanisms of law to enforce its own political interests.  For example, by reputation, more or less every individual or organisation in Russia is in violation of some law or regulation or another, and it is mainly a political decision who to pursue and prosecute.  In this way, the semblance of a law-based society can be maintained while a firm hold on power and patronage is kept by the ruling elite.   

Considering the broader governing of societies, much of the modern world has been shaped through the expansion and application of scientific and technological know-how within the growing number of societies that adopted some version of democratic norms.  This seems consistent with the point made above on the strength of consensus, and hence alignment, being directly related to the breadth of representation and the depth of deliberation.  Yet, figures as thoughtful as my former boss are now increasingly convinced that democracies are becoming ungovernable and failing to maintain or generate critical collective benefits.  Established democratic states are becoming deadlocked by political polarisation, or captured by populists without genuine experience or competence in governing or even concern for the common good, or dominated by short-term issues and political – even news – cycles.  At the same time, some authoritarian states, like China, are currently proving much more effective in imposing directives and policies shaping the longer-horizon prosperity of the country.  

This is a topic for more extensive deliberation in a future article, but here I’ll just note that effective democracy has always been far more than just embodying the principle of “one person, one vote” as popularly assumed, but the evolution of an interlocking series of institutions and practices in which all parts of society have an influence.  However, modern challenges – like climate change and mass immigration – and modern technologies – like social media – necessitate further evolution of democratic practices if they are to regain their power to facilitate collective benefits.  While challenging, I believe we can develop realistic hopes for such developments, as will be explored in future articles.

For now, however, I’ll just pull together the various points we’ve already considered into a summary of realistic hopes for boosting alignments that can accelerate energy transitions, and what steps we could take to help realise these:

1. We know the building blocks for necessary energy transitions and some are already accelerating as the necessary economic and social conditions are in place.  We can spread awareness of these existing demonstrations of commercial value and build business and policy support for further expansions.

2. We increasingly understand the business-chain alignments that could enable and motivate investment in the difficult-to-transition sectors of the economy, and are developing data management capabilities that could be applied to facilitate this.  We can spread this awareness and also support regulatory standard-setting and business forerunners in these arenas to get the commercial engine running.

3. We understand that this is a multi-decade journey that could be accelerated in  societies with cultures supportive of cross-organisational and cross-boundary alignments and attention to common goods that translate into individual benefits.  We know that such prosperous societies have emerged in the past and there are ways to encourage this.  We can support such norms ourselves politically and within the organisations where we are active, and endorse leaders who embrace these norms.

4. We understand that sustained progress over the longer horizon will depend on the degree to which upcoming generations are socialised into progressive, innovative cultures, with contingent respect for norms and rules and an understanding of energy and environmental systems.  There are various ways to promote this as we understand something of how generational cohorts are shaped.  We can invest in reducing the pressures and fears of poverty experienced by many young people which narrows their conception of self-interests, invest in access to secondary and tertiary education that brings systems thinking and the value of common goods to life, and promote positive role models in social media (which is presently a major socialising influence).

5. We understand that fertile socio-political ground for addressing energy transitions and building effective alignments is the same ground that would be helpful in addressing several of the multiple, linked environmental, economic and social crises we are facing.  This involves addressing the problems exhibited in democratic structures through evolving new practices in informed democratic engagement, and also learning from successes in developing a pipeline of competent leadership cadres in long-lived businesses or other organisations.  This includes certain hybrid or relatively authoritarian governing structures such as in Singapore and China, as will be addressed in further articles.

It is impossible to say in advance whether or not we will be capable of avoiding the worst consequences of delayed progress with energy transitions, or whether or not we will develop in time the business and socio-political alignments that could underpin progress.  With the window of opportunity shrinking every year that passes, we have to be brutally honest that this is looking less likely.  However, I hope that in these articles I am laying out at least some credible grounds for believing there is still realistic hope, and suggesting some steps towards realising this.  

Collectively, progress is in our own hands.

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