Herewith, the beginning of an essay by a co-founder of the Post Carbon Institute. The asterisk is for where the title came from. Other articles are accessible by clicking on Post Carbon Institute below. (GAZA and UKRAINE entries for this date, Dec. 20, 2023, are HERE and HERE.)— MCM
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By Richard Heinberg | Post Carbon Institute
We all like simple problems, because they exercise our mental and physical abilities. A life of pure leisure is boring. So, people who have to endure too much leisure often go out of their way to tackle trivial problems to keep themselves busy; currently popular ones include Sudoku puzzles and video games. Alternatively, they can approach problems voyeuristically by, for example, binge-watching TV police procedurals, in which a murder is committed and a brilliant detective ferrets out the stealthy killer, all in 60 minutes.
However, nobody likes “wicked problems”—a term introduced in 1973 by design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber to underscore the complexities of planning and policy. While mathematics and chess offer more-or-less “tame” problems with solutions that everyone agrees on, wicked problems lack clarity and are subject to real-world constraints that prevent risk-free resolution.
Rittel and Webber noted that wicked problems have ten important characteristics:
1. They can’t be formulated definitively.
2. They don’t have a “stopping rule,” or an inherent logic that signals when they are solved.
3. Their solutions are not true or false, only good or bad.
4. There is no way to test their solutions.
5. They cannot be studied through trial and error. Their solutions are irreversible so, as Rittel and Webber put it, “every trial counts.”
6. There is no end to the number of solutions or approaches to a wicked problem.
7. Each wicked problem is unique.
8. Wicked problems can always be described as symptoms of other problems.
9. The way a wicked problem is described determines its possible solutions.
10. Planners who work on wicked problems “are liable for the consequences of the solutions they generate; the effects can matter a great deal to the people who are touched by those actions.” In other words, there are consequences both for those who take up the challenge of solving a wicked problem, and for those impacted by its solutions.
Climate change is a wicked problem: it checks all ten boxes. Crucially, there is no way to solve it without sacrificing something that society currently holds dear, and without thereby generating more problems. For example, shrinking the economy would reduce carbon emissions, but it would throw a lot of people out of work (in effect, we did trial runs during the financial crash of 2008 and the COVID pandemic of 2020; both times, carbon emissions plunged, yet everyone was eager to “get back to normal”). Building vast amounts of low-carbon energy-producing and energy-using infrastructure would also reduce emissions, but that would require tens of trillions of dollars of investment as well as enormous quantities of depleting, non-renewable minerals—the mining of which would generate pollution and destroy wildlife habitat.
There’s no easy answer to global warming, and the wickedness heading our way doesn’t stop with climate change.
Only one extinction-level crisis at a time, please
All societies have to face several problems at any given time. After all, life—even in a hunter-gatherer band—is complicated. But it is decidedly unusual for any society to confront multiple crises that are each capable of killing nearly everybody. Nevertheless, that is humanity’s current dilemma, and it is why pundits have minted the new buzzword, “polycrisis.”
In addition to climate change, our global existential risks include: resource depletion, the disappearance of wild nature, persistent toxic chemicals capable of disrupting reproduction in humans and other complex organisms, and weapons of mass destruction such as nuclear bombs and missiles (a more lengthy discussion of these risks is available here). The list is growing: in recent years we’ve added the possibility that artificial intelligence (AI) could get so much smarter than people that it concludes that humans and other species are inefficient and expendable.
Then there are wicked problems that are not extinction-level, but that make it much harder to deal with problems that are indeed make-or-break. In this category, two items rise to the top of the heap: soaring economic inequality, which leads to political polarization and infighting; and the buildup of enormous amounts of unrepayable household, business, and government debt, which makes economies act like giant pyramid schemes and introduces the likelihood of global deflationary financial collapse. In order to manage the risk of climate change, we need social solidarity and economic stability. Worsening inequality and ballooning debt bubbles couldn’t come at a worse time.
Facing several wicked problems at once is challenging because . . . READ MORE . . .
