Redesign

TIME TO GLOBAL STRATEGY DEADLINE: 7 DAYS

With a week left before WICO’s deadline for completing its global strategy for dealing with the imminent extinction threat, the organization is going quiet again, “Focusing completely on our task,” as Secretary General Decatur put it in a brief statement today. Given what I learned about the results of their testing, it is reasonable to assume that a major redesign followed by rapid retest is in progress.

Various public and private organization are trying to anticipate how the publicly released information might impact the final product. A major thread through their efforts is the question of whether core assumptions provided to national strategy developers have changed, which could prompt pushback from policy makers and their constituents who have been using the published strategies as a guide to planning future action.

Predictably those who are worried the most about adverse outcomes consider themselves likely to be partially in what Ambassador Lazlo called the “collapse stage.” We already know what fraction of the world’s population has that issue. Rich nations like the United States are attempting to identify what the most radical aspects of the strategy might be, including larger than expected movements of people within and between nations, and major demolition and environmental cleanup activities.

Notably, prominent companies in energy and other resource-extraction industries have announced that they will resist any significant changes to the roles they agreed to in the nation-level negotiations.

Reality Check

Major redesign is not uncommon when test results throw into question key assumptions and structural decisions made in the design process. This is such a case, and it is also not uncommon to resist pushing back a schedule when it happens because of commitments already made to stakeholders and customers of the “product.”

Industry Leaders Warn of Existential Threat

TIME TO STRATEGY DEADLINE: 17 DAYS

Today leaders of the world’s largest transportation companies held a public forum at a hotel near WICO headquarters in London to protest the imminent extinction response as an existential threat to their industries and the world.

Expansaerospace CEO Mark Luke summarized their concerns in opening remarks to over 400 attendees and nearly a million online observers: “The goals and strategies being considered by the world’s governments would decimate our collective ability to move people, products, and resources as needed to maintain even a semblance of global civilization. Humanity might not go extinct, but the world we create won’t be worth living in.” Revealing his opinion of the entire effort, he added that “the last time global GDP was at the target provided by the whackos at WICO was sixty years ago, when there were two billion fewer people than what they say we’ll have at the end of this experiment thirty years from now. If isolation is as bad as they told us yesterday, or worse, then what they want us to do will make it unavoidable.”

Among the attendees was a group of energy industry representatives who co-opted the meeting after the first hour. Renewable energy icon Ronald Wingate announced a partnership between his conglomerate Expansivtek, the two largest oil companies, and the top three biotech companies to promote a research and development project called Evolution over Devolution. “ED will create technological solutions that provide all the needs of a growing population at a standard of living that builds on the work of past generations instead of spitting on it.” Wingate defended the late timing of the announcement: “We have been incubating this project for five years, and it’s just a lucky coincidence that it is ready now to help our friends and customers in transportation and other sectors of the economy that would be hurt by doom-and-gloom extremists who have hijacked the debate over our future.”

In a statement following the forum, WICO Secretary General Decatur sharply disagreed with the dominant characterizations of the crisis and strategies based on WICO’s recommendations, and rebuked the notion of Wingate’s ED as a viable alternative. “I must remind everyone, once again, that time is of the essence,” he warned. “We are collectively hurtling through a minefield toward a cliff, and we don’t have the luxury of trying to build an airplane as we go instead of putting on the brakes and attempting to defuse the mines.” 

Reality Check

Luke’s description of projected GDP and population match simulation of the baseline strategy. His concern about resulting isolation are exaggerated but something to think about, given that the scale and complexity of transportation would be much less – like virtually everything else in a sustainable future that relies on natural systems.

WICO’s call for detailed strategies is acknowledgement that without preparation the present economic order (on its world and ours) would likely react to strong economic contraction like a deep depression with a lot in common with the early stages of collapse. 

The portrayal of the energy industry’s reaction to reducing consumption is based on observed (and previously experienced) reactions to similar proposals.