The climate problem touches two raw nerves in everyone's life, often without them being aware of it, namely massiveness (scope) and external regulation. That is, almost all relevant aspects of one's existence are simultaneously coming under fire of (i.e., become the subject of) public registration, decision-making, and regulation. Hear Trump: 'This hoax destroys Freedom'. These two ghosts have largely shaped both the form of scientific solution proposals and the content of public decision-making on this issue.
This book illustrates, based on analyses of 24 climate change decision moments since 2018,
- on the one hand, how humanity has squeezed past the aforementioned hot potatoes (scope and regulation) by primarily dressing up the climate problem as a purely technical issue, and then endlessly figuring out, while negotiating, who and what should jump (invest) first and what smoothest, gentlest, and longest reduction timeline could still provide sufficient mitigation to narrowly avoid fatal climate collapse;
- on the other hand, how, at every decision point, those hot potatoes (scope and regulation) could have been concretely evaporated, i.e., how fully safe mitigation could have been achieved at any time without all aspects of the human world having to be burdened by authoritarian control.
This book is the final part of a trilogy (following 'Tackling Human Complexity' and 'Solid Societal Solutions to Stop Climate Change'), in which the author has been attempting since 2015 to embed and analyze the climate problem holistically in a broad socioeconomic context by using concepts from general systems theory and cybernetics to model the interplay of decision-making entities in societies.
