COP 28 and the Smoke Under the Door

Dec 8

Recorded December 6 2023

Description

In this week’s Frankly, we join Nate in a fascinating thought experiment imagining participants in this week’s COP 28 in Dubai are liberated from the usual social sorting mechanisms which constrain real, forthright, challenging conversation around solving our most dire issues. What questions might participants ask at COP28 if there were no fear of losing social status and how might this liberation change the conversation around global heating? As social primates, there is a stainless steel ceiling on how much we can say in large groups of other humans -especially high status ones. Like the famous “smoke under the door” experiment of the 1970s, as the events of our world get more complex and more threatening, our first reality filter is observing the response of contemporaries. If they are unconcerned, we too tend to be. Unlike the one-room controlled college experiment, we now live in a smoke filled world, and the stakes couldn't be higher. If you were sitting in Dubai at the convening of COP 28, what question would you ask given the state of the world right now??

Show Notes

00:06 - United Arab Emirates

00:08 - COP 28

00:32 - CO2 in the Atmosphere

01:06 - Study “Smoke Under the Door”

02:06 - Social sorting mechanisms to solve physical world problems

03:34 - Global carbon emissions

03:46 - Burning Man

03:55 - World using 19TW of power continuously

04:03 - Solar PV capacity

04:23 - Lifetime of solar equipment

05:28 - Paris Accord in 2015