Just Thinking (2/3/23) — Numbers, Poetry
Our culture is way too enamored of numbers. Stick a number into a statement, almost any statement, and people are more inclined to believe it. Claim the number was generated by a computer model, and its credibility rises even more — even if the numbers in question were conjured up by the model based on inputs that were little more than wild guesses. We all know the “garbage in, garbage out” maxim, but we routinely ignore it.
I just finished a different Medium post containing observations on the energy transition. One observation was on International Energy Agency (IEA) projections for “pathways” to get carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions down to Net-Zero by 2050. The IEA’s preferred path involves continued reliance on oil and gas, using carbon capture and storage (CCS) to avoid sending CO2 out into the atmosphere by injecting it back into the Earth. But it also lays out an alternative: Build more solar, wind and batteries and rely on a fully electric economy.
The first is better for the oil industry. The second is probably better for the Earth. Neither asks us to consider whether we should reorder our priorities and simply use less energy to make, sell and buy less stuff.
The IEA calculates that the CCS route is cheaper, $2 trillion cheaper if you’re looking at investment costs and $260 billion cheaper if you’re looking at what energy consumers pay. The difference between those two numbers is estimated fuel costs. The oil, gas and coal to which CCS is applied cost a lot, while sun and wind for the renewables option cost nothing.
Just a Guess
If you search hard enough in the IEA document, you can doubtless find out what price they’re assuming for oil, gas and coal over the 29-year span of the modeling exercise. It is merely an assumption. Fuel prices rose by multiples of their starting point over the course of 2022 alone and subsequently fell a good part of the way back again. That’s just one year. A year in which there was a war involving a major fossil fuel exporter (Russia), it’s true. But think how many wars or environmental disasters you might — or might not — have over the next three decades.
Fossil fuel prices over the period could be half what the IEA assumes, or they could be two or three times higher. Either would upend the comparison. The numbers are all basically made up. They’re educated guesses by smart people, but they’re still guesses. The bias of the forecasters — which the forecasters may not even recognize — can easily skew the outcome by orders of magnitude. Yet we take them at much too close to face value.
It’s fine to have some cost estimates thrown into a basket of factors used in decision making, especially long-term decision making. It’s crazy to rely dominantly on such estimates — whether that’s for corporate, government or household decisions. It doesn’t even require a war or climate disaster to throw them completely off. The cost-benefit analyses that are now routinely included in regulatory policy, for example, would differ hugely on a 20 year project depending on whether you assumed interest rates at end-2022 levels or at the much lower levels that applied in 2021.
This uncertainty of numeric inputs should lower the faith people have in such regulatory inputs, even if you ignore the oddity involved in assigning a money value to deaths resulting from pollution, or the probability that no account at all is taken of damage to animal and plant habitats or of visual impacts.
This bias in favor of numbers is not limited to big projects or business decisions. Individuals are just as enamored of numbers as corporations and governments. I should know. I’m as susceptible as any. But I do try to remember that it can be a weakness.
I live near the sea, and rapid rainfall that goes into storm drains leading directly to the ocean has little positive effect on groundwater levels or even the dryness of gardens down at the depth of most plant roots. Yet if there’s a storm, people will check their weather app or rain gauge long before they consider whether the rain fell at a rate that allowed it to sink in, or whether it simply ran off into the sea.
Poetical Thinking
Martin Heidegger had a name for such number-induced blindness: Technological thinking. Heidegger’s writing is difficult to summarize, to put it mildly. The best one can do is give a taste of it and perhaps list a couple of important conclusions. But it has great insights, so I’ll try.
In one of his later works, The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger questions not machines or technology per se, but the way people think in an era in which the “energy concealed in nature” is routinely unlocked (mined or drilled, for example), transformed and stored up for later distribution and use by humans. Nature becomes “standing-reserve.” A vital aspect of standing reserve is that it becomes calculable — you can quantify and assign a number to it. “Modern science’s way of representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces,” he writes.
What’s more, humans are as trapped in this “way of representing” — in their susceptibility both to doing the counting and to being counted — as the rest of nature. This “technological way of thinking” is almost inescapable in the modern world, Heidegger suggests, although he goes on in this work and others to suggest that art –both visual arts and poetry — can help us loosen the grip of such thinking.
His favorite poet, Friedrich Holderlin, guides Heidegger to a conclusion that seems vital to me in this time of extreme danger for the Earth and all humanity:
But where danger is, grows
the saving power also.
Looking danger in the face, honestly and artistically, can help us see outside the “enframing” of technological thinking. Or to oversimplify but not entirely misunderstand, to see “outside the box,” where we may find the true and also the beautiful. Whether it adds up or not.
