Einstein's Amygdala Part Four: "None of this is on the Front Page"

From our care-giving, nurturing, fear-projecting feelings - as kids have for baby rabbits.

To Rule-making - as regulators do, to make us feel like it won't happen again.

To Manipulating - Insiders using the rule-making to hobble competitors.

The people with money know how to rub our amygdalas, and we purr like cats. What we value could be the cat, could be the baby bunnies, might be the childrens' reaction to kitties and bunnies. What we need to do is realize how much is at risk in the looming great extinction.

As Twitter climate philosopher & cat-shoulder-perching specialist Ben See @ClimateBen puts it

Remember:

1. The oceans are being killed.

2. Forests will soon be gone.

3. Fertile soil is disappearing.

4. Megafauna risk extermination.

5. Insects are vanishing.

6. Climate chaos is inevitable.

7. Extinction is now.

8. Plastic is in our blood.

None of this is front page news.

Ben See's point is that what SHOULD BE front page news is NOT being covered on the front page.

What does make it to the front page is seldom-enough related to environmental protection. When we do get the attention of reader amygdalas, the story is often "gotcha'. Pollution regulation and enforcement is priotized to real estate value, and increasingly used to shore up stockholder value. (I re-read upon Keynes vs Friedman over the weekend, suffice to say both mens' concentric circles of caring gravitate towards living humans rather than those yet to be born)

In Einstein's Amygdala Part 3, the ways for-profit businesses manipulate Regulations to the detriment of competitors was portrayed as a way to massage the fear instincts which our brains have developed over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. As noted in Part 1, the list of things that might kill us was exponentially longer a mere 500 years ago, but our brains remain as hair-triggered as when we were running away from tigers, lions and bears.

Today in Part 4, I'm looking at how the finite potential we have to focus our attention is being squandered by the masturbating NGOs like Basel Action Network, those who produce ads and policies and laws and rules and outrage off of #POVERTYPORN and #POLLUTIONPORN that has ZERO association with the causes they attribute the Earth's real problems to. THIS IS A COMPLETE AND UTTER WASTE OF A FINITE AMOUNT OF ENVIRONMENTALISTS TIME AND ENERGY. AS MUCH AS I AM FOCUSED WITH ALL MY SOUL UPON MAKING THE PLANET LOVABLE FOR ALL OF OUR GRANDKIDS, I'M GUT PUNCHED BY THE CALLOUS, GREEDY WAY THAT SNAKE OIL SALESMEN ARE TRIGGERING OUR CARING AMYGDALAS WITH ZERO SCIENTIFIC BASIS OR EVEN SCANTEST OF EVIDENCE.

Once again, eye-candy poverty porn non-profit Basel Action Network has a press release this morning (but I'm putting that "below the fold")

The thesis of this blog is that journalism resources are finite. Rather than simply witness, as Ben See does, that the sustainability crisis is not on the "front page", my focus is on the candy salesmen posing (Plato's Republic) as Democracy's Doctors, serving all the wrong alarm bells until our higher power amygdala, the true proportion and prioritized risk, is muddled in cognitive disonnance and empty calorie outrages. Primum non nocere. If press is finite, don't pollute the press with false alarms.

"Hurricane Joe Benson" was a hashtag which starkly showed how the BASEL ACTION NETWORK made money off of a ridiculous, easily disproven claim that black entrepreneurs were paying money for used electronics which was then being shipped overseas - and if the NGO's claims were correct, spending tens of millions of dollars to ship worthless waste - to distribute it to children to be burned with tires at "the largest ewaste dump on earth, where most of YOUR ewaste was managed". They used pictures of very modest amounts of urban junk, imported decades ago, reused and repaired sustainably for years, to impugn the reputation and ruin the lives and livelihoods of the most honest African jobs on the planet. THEY REPEATEDLY MADE THE FALSE CLAIM LONG AFTER ACKNOWLEDGING IT WAS BASED ON DISPROVEN ALLEGATIONS. 

Today, the NGO is on a campaign to regulate secondary raw materials - recyclables - and enlisting sea container companies on target lists to ban the trade in recycled scrap.

The NGO "applauds the decision" of the sea container company to "protect the marine and terrestial environment by pledging not to transport plastic waste [sic]..."

"It is clear they understand the ... harmful effects of plastic pollution on ocean ecosystems firsthand", says Jan Dell of First Beach Cleanup.

I'm an environmentalist, and it outrages me that there is plastic waste in the ocean - but it outrages me even more that environmentalists are calling recyclers ocean-dumpers based on their nationality and skin color, without presenting a scintilla of evidence, and when all the research shows ocean and beach plastic to be generated NOT BY THE RECYCLERS, but by people who DON'T recycle.

The NGOs join Big Shred, Big Money, Big OEMs in treating us like children afraid that cats will kill all the baby bunnies.  Even children would understand the relative risk of the cat and bunny to the extinction level threats posed by VIRGIN RAW MATERIAL EXTRACTION, mining and foresting and ocean oil drilling to produce zero-percent-recycled goods, which are 99%* of what they are picking up on the beach and photographing in the ocean.

(*I made that number up. But based on actual recycled content and where recycled content is sold worldwide, I estimate it's closer than any number in the BAN.org press releases)

So in Parts 1-3 we looked at the evolution of our social panic buttons, and how money is being spent to push them, manipulating us to care about things that have no relationship to environmental protection, but use up or limited resources for outrage.

In Part 3, we left the Morgan Stanley Hard Drive case-, the subject of the cost basis of risk was a $60 million dollar "settlement", reported in January, between Wealth Asset Management banker Morgan Stanley and clients whose data was found on a device outside the company. We noted that a judge did not rule on this, it's a private settlement by Morgan Stanley with clients who claim that their data was "breached" by winding up with a third party. Not that any injury was suffered. Not a dime was found stolen.

so, so, so easily settled.

It seems like if the clients found their data on the Dark Web, or had a breach detected by Experian, etc., that it would be a major part of the case, and of the press reports. But this is just a matter of Morgan Stanley voluntarily disclosing that the clients data had not been shredded.

Who gains?

Well, whose money does Morgan Stanley manage? Billionaires. Owners of...

Apple

Meta (Facebook)

Verizon

Alphabet (Google, Android)

Richie Rich LLC

Gazillionaire Tech Trust Funds

The outcome, however, for most recyclers, is predictable. The Morgan Stanley case is already being used to sell "increased cost compliance" for HIPAA - which I've noted for many years was more about destroying "secondhand software" than protecting healthcare data on hard drives.

Both "sides" benefit from elevation of risk as a larger slice of what to fear about e-waste... that a significant portion of data theft, like the insignificant portions of ocean plastic waste and insignificant portions of e-waste scrapyards, stems from YOUR decision to discard YOUR stuff correctly, rather than pay attention to the actual impacts of phishing, mining, first-used plastic in emerging markets, etc.  Offsets hold promise, but it's been a challenge to get those covered by the press as a solution.

If the Einstein Amygdala can be correctly proportioned 

to actuary-centric environmental risk,

 I believe there is hope

Time and again, we have a large environmental problem with sustainability of the earth, a huge obilgation to our great-great-great-tobeborn-grandchildren. But that global concern isn't in the amygdala, for most of us anyway. I can say that I wake in fear over the extinction, but it's more sadness and crying and loss than it is fear.  Evolution has put fear into a trigger in my brain, which can be stimulated by messages and social media.

My critique of the environmental movement, after 40+ years of devotion (at times selfless, at times opportunistic) is that we are making motions, like regulation and certification and long-form journalism and documentaries, that revolve around emotions of fight and flight.

We are facing existential consequences, not just for ourselves personally, but long term for all the children and animals and plants yet to be conceived or born.

We must apply Einstein's cerebral cortex. We must be as intelligent as we can possibly be, to engineer a solution based on root causes, even when those root causes are popular. 

Some root causes of extinction are "populist popular"... like closing an eye to conversion of rain forests to palm oil, so 7 billion people can eventually cook with it less expensively.  No one has yet thought to blame "big palm oil" for forcing us to buy margarine. If we distributed trillions of dollars now sequestered by the uber-wealthy to all the lower income families on the planet, it's a pretty easy hypothesis that people would cook more, waste more, and get fatter. Again, we have an amygdala which evolved to evade wolves and lions, it's not really good when the most likely deaths are "affluence related" (defined as affluence compared to say 400 years ago).

Other root causes are capitalist 1% led. Planned obsolescence, using social pressure to market elective upgrades, doing things with only the value of stock shares in mind. The USA General Mining Act of 1872, a tool of both the US vs Apache Indian territory and a massive raw material extraction subsidy, is protected by a Congress with self interest. 

Bernie Sanders doesn't seek a seat on the Interior Department. Trillions of federal revenue are lost by the sale of federal leases at a price that won't pay for cleanup. But Bernie knows it would cause the cost of goods sold to consumers to rise, and that the proletariat won't understand the value of amending raw material extraction will enure to the benefit of people who don't yet exist... future generations.

And this cannot be blamed on "the white man".  If a white man is the very first to cut in line, cheat future generations, it remains a fact that everyone else in line, Asian or African or South American, takes the same shortcut. 

The mother rabbit in Part 1 is reacting to millennia of evolution, and calculates that the fear of returning to the nest found by a cat is more important than the instinct to nurture the babies.

Humans, corporations and consumers alike, are short sighted. 

This blog has long criticized the "We have to do something", or "even if Robin is right, that this command and control or increased certification of recycling is futile, at least we tried" mindset. The earliest pharmaceutical sales of liquid mercury greatly eased constipated travelers - at least the prescription "did something" for the constipation. At least the profitable sellers tried.

The stock market marches on extracting from the earth, selling gadgets to the billions of consumers, and makes gadgets more affordable to more and more users by making them at greater and greater scale. Prodded by jealousy and shame, most people upgrade. People are manipulated through what Dr. Robert Cialdini coined as the seven causes of persuation to spend more, save less.  

Most of the used gadgets delivered to Good Point still work. Most of the clothing dropped off at Goodwill or Salvation Army is still wearable. But secondhand goods - and secondhand use of copyright and patents - are termed "market cannibalization" by the stock market crackheads. 

Fear that your used device will be extracted of your data.

Fear that your used device will be burned by scary black children.

Fear that your in-use device will make you seem out of fashion.

Fear that your used device will be misused.

Fear that your used device will be managed by a "non-certified", "informal" company

Fear that independent used device repair shops will track your daughters.

Fear that freon in your used refrigerator will harm the ozone layer.

Fear that your used solar panel will, one day, be discarded in foreign dumps.

Fear that your used car seat will be subject to "recall", endangering a Mexican baby.

Fear that .... fear that... fear that....

Fear this:

Fear intellectuals and great thinkers, the Einsteins of the Environmental Future, will be themselves afraid to speak their minds and question both the Greedy Right and the Sanctimonious Left. Fear that out of payoffs (Midgely) or cancel-culture (Puckett) that people who really care about, who really imagine how to best engineer society to play well with other species and environments, will be silenced. Fear the OEMs who develop "EULA Agreements" to pre-emtpively cancel secondhand software, Fear the Big Shred who impugn Geeks of Color, Fear Do-Gooders who stick GPS devices specifically to impugn bloggers. 

Fear your fear. Bravely try to use our cerebral cortexes. Don't run from our childrens futures like panicked rabbits. Fight for the intellectual honesty of the environmental protection like a mother grizzly bear... or better yet, like Big Blue or Kasparov or Magnus Carlsen playing chess.

Fearing your fear means not being intimidated, not being afraid to rise to the challenge of the greatest possible karma. Lean your life and show you can be happy without succumbing to