The brutality in the life and death of rebellious Luke in the 1967 film “Cool Hand Luke” was far less than known to exist in the South if he were Black and where “noth’n can be a real cool hand.” Black history writers must have made the connection as prison segregation ended with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. However, a reference linking Black History and “Cool Hand Luke” occurred in a New York Magazine Feb 25, 1991 TV listing where Black History 1990 was on at 9 AM, and the film was at noon on that Monday. The dire potential of chaos by Lazard (introduced below) is accompanied in the arc of metaphores possible in the film. The sense of strange connection reveals a dangerous cognitive gap in its rawness.
RLC
Luke concluded that he was doomed and acted according to that view. Similarly, those “in the house” that proved a global warming problem in 1896 represent a similar communication failure. However, the terrifying issue is acting according to that outlook. Over the next century, the fire in the engine of cheap energy could accept the facts as accurate yet still treat them as intolerable. The Earth can become that unjust prison experienced by Luke or, as Lazard forewarns.
Historically these actions begin as a group of advocates small enough to fit in one house. On the other hand, the global structure of these actions in the digital energy regime begins in thousands of “houses” simultaneously. The world will continue to change “the only way it ever has,” as Margaret Mead notes, but today change for good or bad is possible exponentially in the world.
The Lazard proposition presents a set of facts that describe an entirely new set of fires in the engines of commerce with an equally frightening set of systemic waves of unintended economic and environmental consequences. So, again, I urge you to listen carefully to Olivia Lazard before proceeding. Promoting critical, reflective, and creative thought imagines actions and demands a record of how they are known as good or bad worldwide.
Defined narrowly, Democracy is “the vote,” and that is all people require if they are safe. It becomes essential if they are fearful. For two centuries, the trust behavior in a Democracy functioned well with cheap energy and labor with little thought of consequences, unintended or not. The brutality on the new energy front will be similar, but not without a very different structure for evaluating change. The failure to communicate or recognize choices that must be made produces the lack of foresight that got Luke shot, and the inability to act preventatively as Lazard encourages.
Blind Spots as Control Leaders
The idea of the Lazard Proposition is to expose blind spots with an aggressive information campaign on global issues. Each of these “spots” carries unique local experiences connecting GHGs with Climate Change. Confirmed in math and science, the laboratory for proof is now Planet Earth, but like an unjust prison from which one cannot escape, the campaign will not argue causality. Instead, each event floats in the high cost of failing to communicate the importance of one as a member of them all.
The transition to blind spots as control leaders encounter the problem of conflict. First, however, Lazard points to the need for violence reduction measures spread across thousands of political jurisdictions. The minerals listed on the Green Minerals Conflict map below offer a clean-energy future. However, getting them will require massive mineral extraction to get the equivalent of that ball in the mine (left). The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts intense mining due to increased demand. For example, the electric car requires six times more mineral inputs today than a conventional vehicle.
According to The World Bank, a 500 percent increase in mining will occur by 2050 for minerals such as graphite and cobalt. Unfortunately, the impact and effect of these new mining activities have multiple blind spots, all associated with the urgency of demand, leading to violence.
Mineral extraction processes have a regulatory place within a Democracy similar to oil and gas extraction and processing. The framework for this builds on the quality of transparency in government needed to correct past errors. In business and government, the common denominator is to reduce the occurrence of violence. Two methods are in play at all times to do that. The first is building a manageable capacity for collective knowledge in the common interest; the second is the raw military power to acquire land as a power of the state with the wealth to buy expertise.
Locally, Eminent domain serves a combination of public/private economic development ideals. Hundreds of trillions of transactions occur from routine urban improvements to the expansion of Russia into Ukraine. Each one produces “dots” along multiple pathways. On the other hand, the placement of these dots recently became a dangerous force. In addition, and only lately has it been possible to record these dots as exhibits in sets of enduring serial data, proving trends as regressions to the mean and, in some cases, probabilistic timelines.
The Daily Crisis
The following deals with global climate health using two components. The first is the power of machine learning systems, called Artificial Intelligence (AI), and the second is the human capacity to manage. The critical question about AI was when Kevin Kelly asked, “What does technology want? It was then that AI was separated from its human counterparts. Imagining all aspects of AI entities and observation systems is due to a robust and durable memory that links laptops to quantum panels. The AI design replicates in ways similar to Richard Dawkins’ description in The Selfish Gene. How the miasma of personal experience becomes part of our consciousness aids in automatic responses, most of which are genetic and shared by everyone and every living thing.
Given this bifurcation of information processing, the second component would be composed of leaders capable of standing on facts with enough charisma to produce trust and say, “Mining here is OK, there it is not.” The power of enforcement is the blind spot. Here we will find many social groups attempting a system change. The practice presents multiple implications for governance in a Democracy as its leaders confront a series of relentless crises.
Using blind spots as control leaders will define a genuinely systemic, peaceful, and nonviolent foundation for building bridges to a safe future. Not doing so produces intolerable indifference to human suffering. The example all can imagine is how national policy responds in today’s communication economy. Imagine the difference in the policy response if events such as the demonstrations in Ferguson, MO, occurred in fourteen cities during the same week in defiance of local authorities outfitted with surplus military equipment and a large vaguely regulated group of “militias” joining in the proceedings. The policy shifts from a local issue to a national unease in the global shadows of civil war and outright aggression.
What to Do, What to Do
First, create a trusted regime of science. Second, use that trust to build a public-good system with a global decarbonization agenda as a matter of healthy human survival and mitigate inevitable conflicts by location during planetary breakdown events. Third, to do this, it will be necessary to change business economics radically, and fourth, with these in play, promote specific innovations supporting three actions during the reversal of the oil/gas extraction industry:
- a steady decarbonization system to assure global environmental integrity with some
- big advances in ecological diplomacy and unique new law with a variety of
- corruption elimination services with powers dedicated to protecting habitat.
Your sense of hopelessness in Lazard’s recommendations is real.
Total prevention of geopolitical competition is possible with a new foundation of human security in the era of globalization. Exposure to blind spots in responding to this obligation can reveal the pathways that prevent climate-disrupted futures as cascading events. Identifying these ” blind spots” are those that remain aimed at the darkness of failure and lack of transparency.
Yes, it does seem impossible. However, supporting the individual as a member of a change agent group can have powerful consequences in the ongoing globalization process. What is needed is a “so say we all” moment. The means to that end may begin with a few language specialists and the focus of our next post — The Creative Democracy