[Rantman] The Power to Change Systems - climate crisis and financial crisis.

[rPauli]

Both are systems.   Finding the best leverage point... he takes each 
point and discusses ways to influence both climate and financials.

Steve Easterbrook does software development for climate modeling.


http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/?p=2677
The Power to Change Systems
   Steve Easterbrook.

What unites both the climate crisis and the financial crisis? What is it 
that has driven scientists and environmentalists to risk arrest in 
protests across the world? What is it that's driven people from all 
walks of life to show up in their thousands to/occupy/their cities? In 
both cases, there's a growing sense that the system is fundamentally 
broken, and that our current political elites are unable (rather than 
just unwilling) to fix them. And in both cases, it's becoming 
increasingly apparent that our current political system is a 
major/cause/of the problems. Which therefore makes it even harder to 
discover solutions.

So how do we make progress? If we're going to take seriously the 
problems that have led people to take to the streets, then we have to 
understand the processes that are steadily driving us in the wrong 
direction when it comes to things we care about -- a clean environment, 
a stable climate, secure jobs, a stable economy. In other words, we have 
to understand the underlying systems, understand the dynamics within 
those systems, and we have to find the right /leverage points/that would 
allow us to change those dynamics to work the way we would like.

Failure to take a/systems view 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_thinking>/is evident throughout 
discussions of climate change, and now, more recently, throughout 
mainstream media discussions about the/Occupy/protests. Suggestions for 
what needs fixing tend to focus on superficial aspects of the systems 
that matter, mainly by tinkering with parameters (emissions 
targets,stabilization wedges 
<http://transitionculture.org/2011/10/06/giving-robert-socolow-a-wedgie-so-to-speak/>, 
the size of the debt, the bank interest rate, etc). If the system itself 
is broken, you can't fix it by adjusting its current parameters -- you 
have to look at the underlying dynamics and change the structure of the 
system that gave rise to the problem in the first place. Most people are 
focusing on the wrong/leverage points/. Even worse, in some cases, they 
are pushing in the wrong direction on some of the leverage points...

Perhaps the best analysis of this I've ever seen is*Donella Meadows' 
essay on leverage points* 
<http://www.sustainer.org/pubs/Leverage_Points.pdf>. [If you're not 
already familiar with it, I highly recommend reading it before tackling 
the rest of this post]. Meadows has written some wonderfully accessible 
material on systems thinking 
<http://books.google.com/books/about/Thinking_in_systems.html?id=JSgOSP1qklUC>, 
but only gives a very brief overview in this particular essay, because 
she's focussing here on how to identify leverage points that allow one 
to alter a system. She identifies twelve places to look, and orders 
them, roughly, from the least effective to the most effective.

To illustrate the point, I'll begin with a much simpler system than the 
ones we really want to fix. My example is the controllability of water 
temperature in a shower. The particular shower I have in mind is in a 
small hotel in Paris, and is a little antiquated, the result of 
old-fashioned plumbing. It takes time for the hot water to reach the 
shower head from the hot water tank, and there's enough of a delay 
between the taps that control the hot and cold water and the temperature 
response, that you're forever trying to adjust it to get a good 
temperature. It's too cold, so you turn up the hot tap. The temperature 
barely seems to change, so you crank it up a lot. After a few minutes 
the water heats up so much it's scalding. So you crank up the cold tap. 
Again, the temperature responds slowly until you realise it's now too 
cold. You turn down the cold tap, and soon find it's too hot again. And 
so on.

Does this remind you of the economy? Or, for that matter, the way the 
physical climate system works over the course of tens of thousands of 
years? More worryingly, it's the outcome I expect if we ever try 
togeo-engineer <http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/?p=406>our way out of 
extreme climate change. Right now, the human race is cranking up the hot 
tap. But the system responds very slowly. And by the time we've realized 
the heat has built up, we'll have overshot our comfort zones. We'll slam 
on the brakes and end up overcompensating. Because the system is just as 
hard to control (actually, a damn sight harder!) than that annoying 
shower in Paris

Let's look at how Meadows' twelve leverage points might help us analyze 
the Parisian shower. At #12, we have what is usually the least effective 
place to seek change:

#12 Changes in constants, parameters, numbers. Example:/Change the set 
point on the water tank thermostat/. In general, such adjustments make 
no difference to the controllability of the shower. [There is an 
interesting exception, when we're prepared to make/really 
big/adjustments. For example, if we crank the thermostat on the hot 
water tank all the way down to 'pleasantly warm' we'll never have to 
balance the hot and cold taps again, we can just use the "hot" tap. 
Usually, such really big adjustments are unlikely to be made, for other 
reasons].

#11. Change the sizes of buffers and stocks relative to their 
flows. Example: /Get a bigger hot water tank/. This will make the energy 
bills bigger, but still won't make the shower any more controllable.

....snip from:

http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/?p=2677

See also: http://www.sustainer.org/pubs/Leverage_Points.pdf



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