“Time will tell whether I’ve got this wrong. I can only say that I’ve thought about it deeply and hard and long and I’ve listened, I promise, to the other side and I believe absolutely that there is something dangerous about this movement and it must be challenged.” - J.K. Rowling
Despite our best efforts, we’re not very good at focusing on multiple things. Our inability to do so makes deciding where to place our limited attention crucially important. Focusing on the “right” thing means narrowing in on the biggest priority and recognizing that peripheral items might be glanced over, if noticed at all.
Perception vs reality | Our ability to focus on multiple things
Take road safety. Even when a driver is highly alert and focused on the road, they can miss unexpected objects in their periphery - a phenomenon known all too well by cyclists. To raise awareness around this issue, Transportation for London (TFL) used a short video to demonstrate how easy it is to miss something that we’re not actively looking for.
In the video, you’re prompted to count the number of times a team passes a basketball back and forth. Sounds easy enough, except there’s a second team constantly obscuring the view of the team you care about.
After about 20 seconds, the chaotic passing stops and the narrator reveals how many passes were made… and then asks a very odd question:
Did you see the moonwalking bear?
WTF 🤨. Moonwalking bear?!? Surely enough, while all of the passes were happening there was someone in a bear costume dancing in the middle of the screen. How did you miss it?
As it relates to vision, our tendency to miss moonwalking bears is often referred to as inattentional blindness. Turns out, the more you focus, the worse your awareness becomes. Here’s how a feature from the American Psychology Association describes it (emphasis added):
"I came away from our studies convinced that there's no conscious perception without attention," [Arien Mack, PhD, of the New School for Social Research] says. She adds that the findings also led her to suspect that the brain undertakes considerable perceptual processing outside of conscious awareness before attention is engaged and that objects or events that are personally meaningful are most likely to capture people's attention.”
We believe an extreme case of inattentional blindness is happening with the net zero movement. Only this time, we’re missing much worse than moonwalking bears.
As a society, we’ve elevated net zero carbon emissions to the status of priority numero uno. Just take it from Uncle Joe:
How often do you hear about carbon emissions? We’d guess a-lot-amount-of-times. If that’s the focus, we’re not exactly knocking it out of the park:
At the same time, we’ve attached an enormous amount of meaning to net zero. It’s understandable. If the planet was truly at stake, shouldn't it be our entire focus? Wouldn’t ecoterrorism be justified? Here’s how the head of Global Communications for the U.N. frames it (emphasis added)
“There is no doubt the world must act now to avoid catastrophic ecological collapse. But climate action is being undermined by bad actors seeking to deflect, distract, and deny efforts to save the planet.”
The science is crystal clear: the world must cut global emissions by 45 percent this decade to keep the 1.5°C limit agreed in Paris within grasp. We need everyone on board if we’re going to make it.
“Our focus must equally be on raising awareness. My team and I at the United Nations have been working with social impact agency Purpose on ways to fight back against disinformation, encourage conscious sharing, and flood feeds with reliable, accurate information in shareable nuggets.”
Despite often coming from a genuine desire to fix a perceived big problem, our net zero focus is making us blind to the value of energy - especially since we’ve made it our number one moral goal. While we’re busy blaming big oil for running up the carbon scoreboard, we’re blind to a completely different game being played:
We’re blind to reductions in global poverty.
We’re blind to reductions in climate-related disaster deaths.
By focusing on net zero, we have implicitly chosen not to focus on what matters most - human life. The net zero movement doesn’t care about human life, even if most individuals within it do. It’s an uncomfortable reality.
Even worse than causing us to miss trends of the past, our net zero focus leads to poor decision-making in the present. Because our priority is carbon emissions, every new action must be viewed through a carbon-tinted lens. The question is how does it impact carbon emissions, not how does it impact human life. This mindset explains why the U.S. Treasury Department proposed a 30% tax on the cost of powering crypto mining facilities. Can you see the focus (emphasis added)?
“The increase in energy consumption attributable to the growth of digital asset mining has negative environmental effects and can have environmental justice implications as well as increase energy prices for those that share an electricity grid with digital asset miners...”
Follow the logic train 🚂. If increasing energy consumption is bad, why should we allow 3 billion people to have access to modern energy sources for cooking and heating their homes? Or why should we let 770 million people have access to electricity for the first time? It’s revealing how little the net zero mafia discusses poverty and energy access.
To push back against this movement, some have argued that it’ll cost too much, similar to a recent argument made by the WSJ Editorial Board (emphasis added):
“Governments are coming to regret net-zero carbon-emissions pledges, as their cost and impracticality come into view, but politicians still hate to admit it.”
Saying “we told you it was impractical” is not the correct response. It was a terrible goal in the first place. If we don’t change our focus, we’re doomed to repeat the same mistakes.
When it comes to energy and climate, our focus needs to be human flourishing. In his book Fossil Future, Alex Epstein provides the best description of how this should guide our thinking:
“The fundamental principle of the human flourishing framework is that advancing human flourishing should be our primary moral goal and therefore our standard of evaluation.
Advancing human flourishing is a long-term and wide-ranging goal. It doesn't just mean thinking about the next year; it means thinking generations ahead. And it doesn't mean indifference to a safe, healthy, beautiful environment; it means placing high value on those.
On the goal of advancing human flourishing, the anti-human goal of eliminating human impact is immoral. While we want to eliminate certain anti-human impacts, our overall attitude toward impacting the rest of nature is positive, because massive impact, done intelligently and productively, is essential to our survival and flourishing.”
While the quote at the beginning of this piece isn’t related to energy and climate, it encapsulates our sentiment towards the net zero movement. Caring about carbon emissions is fine, placing it at the center of the altar is not. It’s time to start focusing on the moonwalking bear. It’s time to start focusing on human flourishing.
“♡Like” if you saw the moonwalking bear 🐻