REPLY Limits to Growth Plan B (SD6991)

[SDMAIL Jack Harich]

Posted by  Jack Harich <register at thwink.org>


> Posted by Stephen Wehrenberg
>
> Has anyone modeled Lester Brown's solutions to the LTG problem?  I 
> moderated a seminar session earlier this week with Lester as the 
> speaker, and his solution set as described in "Plan B 3.0" seems 
> fairly comprehensive, wrestling with population and consumption as 
> root causes and with the tax structure in the short term to reduce 
> carbon emissions.  [See http://www.earth-policy.org/ ]
>   

Steve,

I’ve not modeled Lester Brown’s solution to the LTG problem. Given the 
vast nature of Plan B, I doubt anyone has, except on a highly simplified 
or partial basis. But I don’t think a comprehensive model of a 
comprehensive solution like Plan B is what’s going to make or break 
solving the sustainability problem. It’s not the critical factor. More 
important, I believe, are the key assumptions that efforts like Plan B 
rest upon.

The key assumptions behind Plan B are never stated. One has to ferret 
them out. This is especially difficult because the Plan B 2.0 and 3.0 
books never give a short summary of the proposed solution. Instead, it 
sprawls over the books. In contrast, for example, Al Gore’s "Global 
Marshall Plan" in "Earth in the Balance" is summarized in 12 bullet 
points on pages 346 and 347. There’s also Maurice Strong’s "Where on 
Earth Are We Going?" which has a 12 point plan summarized on pages 373 
to 390.

On page xii of "Plan B 3.0" we see the closest I can find to a summary 
of the plan: "There are four overriding goals in Plan B 3.0: stabilizing 
climate, stabilizing population, eradicating poverty, and restoring the 
earth’s ecosystems." But this doesn’t summarize the plan. It summarizes 
its goals. What’s the plan? All I can find is the chapter headings in 
part two, titled "The Response – Plan B." The chapters are:

- Eradicating Poverty, Stabilizing Population

- Restoring the Earth

- Feeding Eight Billion People Well

- Designing Cities for People

- Raising Energy Efficiency

- Turning to Renewable Energy

This seems to be the high level plan. The implicit assumption here is 
promoting policies to directly do this will solve the problem. Is this 
true? I have great admiration for Lester Brown’s efforts over the years. 
He’s done as much as anyone to bring the sustainability problem to the 
world’s attention. But this assumption is false. Here’s why:

Plenty of "plans" like this have been proposed for decades. I’ve already 
mentioned two: Maurice Strong’s list of key points (2000) and Al Gore’s 
"Global Marshall Plan" (1992). But we can go back much further. Look at 
"Rio: Reshaping the International Order – A Report to the Club of Rome", 
1976. The cover states this is "The long awaited, all inclusive working 
plan that can let us win our global race for survival." Pages 223 to 229 
organize the plan into three packages, which are then summarized in 
lists of components.

Plans like these focus on reducing the PAT factors in the IPAT equation: 
Impact = Population x Affluence (consumption per person) x Technology 
(impact per unit of consumption). At the strategic level the plans are 
all about the same. They would work, IF they were adopted. But none have 
been. This points to a deeper key assumption I will attempt to 
verbalize: promotion of these plans, plus their intrinsic appeal, is 
sufficient to cause them to be implemented. Because these plans have not 
been implemented, this assumption is obviously false.

This is a radically different way to look at the problem. It’s one I 
hope you will understand, and I hope my feeble attempts to explain this 
viewpoint are adequate.

This viewpoint is embodied in the System Improvement Process, described 
at: http://www.thwink/sustain/glossary/SystemImprovementProcess.htm. 
This is a process designed from scratch to solve difficult social system 
problems. Notice how it decomposes one big problem into three smaller 
subproblems:

A. How to overcome change resistance

B. How to achieve proper coupling

C. How to avoid excessive model drift

Conventional approaches to solving the sustainability problem see only 
subproblem B: proper coupling. Let’s define this term. Proper coupling 
occurs when the behavior of one system affects the behavior of other 
systems properly, using the appropriate feedback loops, so the systems 
work together in harmony in accordance with design objectives. For 
example, presently the human system is improperly coupled to the greater 
system it lives within, the environment.

 From the standpoint of a process like the System Improvement Process, 
solutions like Plan B only address the proper coupling problem. The 
reason proper coupling solutions like this have not been adopted is in 
the global environmental sustainability problem, systemic change 
resistance is very high. (Notice how this is my own key assumption.) 
Certain dominant social agents are strongly and successfully resisting 
change. They have far more influence on the political system than mere 
books with proposed solutions. The result is exactly what we’ve seen: 
the system continues in the unsustainable mode identified so well by the 
World2 and World3 models, with overshoot and collapse just ahead, unless 
a solution is adopted soon and aggressively implemented.

You mention that " ‘Plan B 3.0’ seems fairly comprehensive, wrestling 
with population and consumption as root causes and with the tax 
structure in the short term to reduce carbon emissions."

Therein lies another key assumption, that these are the root causes. But 
what if we were following a formal problem solving process, one that 
said to ask WHY population and consumption are too high? One can’t 
simply say well, people are having too many children and consuming too 
much. We got to change those habits. That does not answer the why question.

Let’s shift gears into another paradigm, which let’s us see that a 
totally different why question has long gone unasked. After over 30 
years of proposing plans that are consistently rejected by the system, 
isn’t it time for environmentalists to ask WHY perfectly good plans are 
failing to be adopted? Why is the system resisting them so strongly?

This line of attack would, I suspect, lead to the same conclusion my own 
analysis has found: that systemic change resistance is high. Then of 
course you can ask WHY is change resistance so high? That will lead to 
the root causes of change resistance, which is the true cause of why 
proper coupling solutions like Plan B have not been adopted. My 
hypothesis for these root causes is expressed in the Dueling Loops 
model, at: http://www.thwink/sustain/articles/005/DuelingLoops_Paper.htm

But please keep in mind this is only an example of how to apply the 
process. It should not be interpreted as THE analysis or THE solution to 
the change resistance subproblem. It’s only a sample first iteration (a 
tentative diagnosis) that has not been verified by experimentation and 
measurement. Nor has it been matured by iteration.

Lester Brown is a brilliant man, so much so that on page xii of "Plan B 
3.0" he intuitively recognizes that change resistance is indeed the crux 
of the problem. He says: "We have the technologies to restructure the 
world energy economy and stabilize climate. The challenge now is to 
build the political will to do so. Saving civilization is not a 
spectator sport. Each of us has a leading role to play." Al Gore said 
the same thing in "An Inconvenient Truth," with "America has the power 
but lacks the political will" to solve the climate change problem.

In this thread Dr. Mukherjee comes to the same conclusion: "On the other 
hand - political and financial considerations mostly drive the policies 
that are undertaken. In my view, the problem is not necessarily lack of 
data and insights, but the will to do something. Starting with LTG, and 
following up now to Lester Brown and company, and Jim Hanson in Climate 
Change, etc. the problem is not lack of insights but the desire to do 
something, even implementing cost-less energy efficiency measures (the 
kind of stuff Rocky Mountain Institute has been talking about forever). 
In my view, the insights were there (resources are limited, the party 
cannot go forever, greenhouse effect is real etc.), but the political 
desire is not there, many times because of corporate financial interests."

There seems to be a growing consensus here.

"Political will" means a political system "wants" to adopt a certain 
solution. As embodied in the System Improvement Process, my theory is 
that a system "wants" to change to new policies when change resistance 
is low. This is all pretty obvious, so there’s no rocket science here. 
But what I’ve done (and others have done this in other fields) is to 
incorporate this into a formal process.

Currently most people working on the sustainability problem are using an 
intuitive process that can be called Classic Activism. (See the 
Thwink.org glossary. This is another key assumption.) This works on 
problems with low change resistance, like local pollution and 
conservation parks. It sometimes works on problems with medium change 
resistance, like the stratospheric ozone layer problem. But it nearly 
always fails (or takes too long) on problems where change resistance is 
high, like climate change and many other aspects of the global 
environmental sustainability problem. From a system dynamics 
perspective, when high change resistance is present the system is not in 
a "changeable mode", and thus will not respond favorably to an attempted 
change.

Better is an analytical approach, using a formal analytical process that 
fits the problem well enough to solve it. This is so fundamental a key 
assumption that a process that fits the problem is what separates 
scientific knowledge from all other types of knowledge. This is the 
Scientific Method. Until it appeared and was widely adopted, science was 
not science. It was speculation and tradition based. These days, the 
Scientific Method process is what drives all of science, including 
research efforts to solve big, messy, difficult problems.

Again, this is so fundamental that in "The Toyota Way: Fourteen 
Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer", 2004, 
what do we see in the table of contents? Section two is titled "The 
right process will produce the right results." That section covers 7 out 
of the 14 principles. Concerning the importance of root causes, section 
four is titled "Continuously solving root problems drives organizational 
learning." This section covers 3 principles.

As an example of how the right process produces the right results, The 
Nature Conservancy created the Conservation by Design process. Steve 
McCormick, former president and CEO, wrote that "Conservation by Design 
has come to be our touchstone for action. It tells us where to work, 
what biodiversity to conserve, what strategies we should use, and how 
effective we have been." The process is so superior that the Chinese 
government and all 50 state wildlife management agencies in the US have 
incorporated it into their own processes.

Hope you’re still with me. This is not easy to explain. Let me try to 
wrap this up.

Until problem solvers like Lester Brown formally recognize that an 
intuitive problem solving process like Classic Activism has not and will 
not work on the sustainability problem, they will remain stumped. They 
will continue to see only frustratingly slow acceptance of their 
suggested solutions, no matter how well worded, detailed, published and 
disseminated they may be. The only reason such solutions are receiving 
more attention lately is that the early symptoms of environmental 
collapse are starting to knock on the door. It’s not that the solutions 
are getting any better.

Once they realize their present problem solving process is too weak to 
solve the problem because it doesn’t fit the problem, the Lester Browns 
of the world will look around for one that does. They will find one or 
develop their own, or a combination.

Then, once they are following a process that fits the problem, the 
process will probably lead them to realize that in the case of the 
sustainability problem, change resistance is the crux.

And then perhaps, once they realize that, the problem will change from 
insolvable to solvable.

> Posted by  Stephen Wehrenberg
> If we know the solutions, as you imply and a proposition with which I 
> agree, why are these solutions not implemented?  That's a problem 
> worth solving, IMHO.  
I agree. Now we are starting to ask The Right Question. See:
http://www.thwink.org/sustain/glossary/RightQuestion.htm

The page defines The Right Question as "The question with the highest 
probability of making the biggest difference at that particular point in 
solving a problem."

The page ends by asserting: "Problem solving is the art of asking the 
right questions and finding their answers. Therefore, the most important 
tool a problem solver can have is a tool that maximizes the probability 
of asking the right questions and finding their answers. That tool is 
process. If you don't have one, get one. If you can't find one, invent 
one. And if you already have one, continuously improve it, and it will 
soon be performing wonders that are beyond anyone's fondest dreams."

It turns out that "Why are these solutions not [being] implemented?" is 
a potent, reusable question, so much so that it's what step 2A of the 
System Improvement Process is all about. There the question is rephrased 
as "Why is change resistance so high?" This is based on the principle 
that in complex social systems, failure to adopt workable solutions is 
due to high systemic change resistance.

I couldn't agree more that "That's a problem worth solving."

Hope this helps,

Jack
Posted by  Jack Harich <register at thwink.org>
posting date  Sun, 04 May 2008 09:52:32 -0400