A spontaneously quick interview with Bettervest founder, Patrick Mijnals

I was in Vallendar (near Koblenz) a couple of weeks ago. I went for a conference all about social entrepreneurship with a Belgian friend from class. We took a train all the way there from Freiburg and it felt good to travel up the Rhine again after quite a while away from the region. It is such a strange mixture of commerce, nature and history. There’s always cargo barges going up and down, and numerous castles dotted along the way. Those were set up by little lords that would tax passing boats for using the river.  All are set against a backdrop of steep, small hills and sometimes patchy areas of forest.

Vallendar itself is nothing remarkable apart from the fact that it contains a British red telephone box. That and the Otto Beisheim School of Management, a well-known private university in Germany that has a reputation for producing the CEOs, business leaders and managers that power the massive German economy forwards.

There were quite a few interesting presentations at the conference. One stand-out, in terms of product at least, was the ‘Peepoople’ company. These guys produce a kind of bag for people who don’t have toilets that they can use. It has some sort of bacteria inside that transforms the crap into fertiliser! Needless to say, it could contribute massively to making urban slums less dirty although the question of whether the poorest people on the planet can really afford these things is an important one. They’re only about one or two cents per bag, but for people with very little that can mean a lot. Still, aid agencies seem to be a good customer for them so far.

There were some other good presentations that I need not go into here. What I really wanted to talk about was a workshop I was lucky to take part in with the ‘Bettervest’ founder, Patrick Mijnals. Now, before I took part in the workshop I have to confess that I thought Bettervest was just a kind of Crowdfunding Carrotmob platform. However, a minor detail makes this concept much, much bigger in my opinion. The video below is only in German so for those that haven’t wasted several years of their lives trying to learn this language, please allow me to explain. In this case, there’s a little girl that wants to refurbish the heating system of her school to make it more energy efficient and thus help the environment. To do this she puts her advert or project on the Bettervest site. Then, people can give money to help the girl reach her target. A typical Crowdfunding platform so far. However, with Bettervest they can instead invest that money rather than give it away for nothing. How do they earn a return? Simple, the money saved through the energy efficiency goes back to the investors. Every year the school will save money on its energy bills and the money saved will be distributed amongst the investors. It’s like Carrotmob but one step further. With Carrotmob a business makes money. With Bettervest everyone makes money, it’s Carrotmob to the power of a 1000. Bettervest’s name is perhaps not so catchy in the English language, although I think that it works in German.

In the workshop we were supposed to write out a business canvas or something – we did this half-heartedly but the group was much more interested in talking to Patrick about his concept. Towards the end of the workshop I suddenly realised that it might make an interesting blog to ask Patrick a couple of questions about the enterprise. I had less than 5 minutes to ask some hastily thought of questions, so I’m sorry it’s short!

So, Patrick, how did you come up with the idea for Bettervest? 

Patrick Mijnals

Patrick:  I have been a trends and innovation consultant for a while now and also been into the Crowdfunding scene from early on in its development. A long time ago I read a book by Ernst von Weizsäcker (now President of the Club of Rome) called “Factor Four”. He argues that four times as much wealth can be extracted from the resources we currently use. So for a long time I had ideas that were influenced by this book and once I got more into the idea of Crowdfunding I was able to combine the two.

Your background is in psychology, what especially makes you think that your concept will be successful? Do you have any psychological insights to share?

Patrick: Yes, (points to logo on his leaflets), this here will hypnotize ever…..laughs, no there is sadly no secret; it’s just all about motivations. In this case we score in every way as people can promote sustainability but also serve their own interests. It’s as simple as that.

What has been your biggest mistake/hurdle?

Patrick: If anything it’s that we’ve probably been too precise, too cautious. It’s only from your mistakes that you learn, so if anything we are probably not making enough mistakes! Another big challenge for us is working together over a large distance. [Patrick is part of a team of five, each covering a different area, e.g. energy efficiency, finance, IT etc and they are often in different parts of the country]

And what have you enjoyed the most about running a start-up?

Patrick: Seeing people working together and growing. Also coming to events like this and seeing you guys tell us what a great idea it is and just talking about different possibilities is a lot of fun!

With that we had to get out of the workshop room and go into the main conference hall for the closing session. I came away feeling very excited about this business. For sure there are some potential problems. I thought that changing energy prices might be one of them (how on earth would you calculate this?) but Patrick explained that the return is calculated each year by multiplying the amount of saved energy (in kilowatt) with the current energy price. This would be a fair deal, since the project owner would have to pay the current energy price anyway, with or without the energy efficiency project. And the crowd will get its interest even when the prices rise.

Cold fusion is a potential threat too!* Nevertheless, I think the concept is a great one and if they execute it well then chances are this will be a well-known and successful platform in a few years time. It also makes a nice change that this is an original start-up coming from Germany, as most are just cut and paste jobs from the US!

The business isn’t yet off the ground and for now the website is just a beta version. Even so, it will be interesting to see how things go for them.

http://www.bettervest.de/start/

*Patrick wrote back on this to say “…I would love to see cold fusion It might be a problem for our business model, but the purpose of our social business is to solve the problem, not just to make money! In my opinion this is exactly the difference between conventional business and social business. I would be glad to see, that bettervest isn’t “needed” anymore and my team and I can dedicate ourselves to another social/sustainable challenge.”

Interesting reply and it certainly makes clear the distinction between the mentalities of traditional businesses and their newer social competitors! 

It’s not cool….yet

With all these thoughts about what it means to be green, it’s perhaps interesting to think about what it will mean to be green in 100 years from now. That’s because, 100 years from now, being ‘green’ will be cool. Being green will be hip. Everyone in fact, will be green. Or at least the cool people will, those other ones don’t matter. And I mean genuinely cool. Celebrities or yuppies that profess to be green today often aren’t all that green, and if they are really green, they’re often not that cool.

Take for example, George Clooney. He’s so green he drives TWO hybrid cars. Not to mention all that flying around the globe (a necessary burden for celebrities, you understand). He also had a pet pig, and to my mind at least, nothing else on this fine green earth could be cooler than having a pet pig. But pigs aren’t green, as they eat lots. If everyone had a pet pig it’d be really unsustainable, not to mention smelly. Thus Clooney is undoubtedly cool, but not so undoubtedly green.

Then on the other hand we have celebrities that seem genuinely green but are generally uncool. Remember Daryl Hannah? Of course you don’t, she’s uncool (but cast your mind back to the lady with an eye patch in Kill Bill)! That’s because she spent some time in jail last year protesting against the construction of the keystone XL pipeline. That was valuable time she could have spent travelling the globe to promote her latest film, Eldorado. Exactly, you’ve never heard of it. She also once spent 23 days atop a tree in support of urban farming. And if you’re reading this and thinking those things are cool it’s probably because you’re already a greenie, and guess what, you’re by default not cool (see below). Moral of the story, you can’t maintain your cool celebrity status whilst getting arrested. For further proof of this, google ‘Lindsay Lohan’.

But what about ordinary people being green, it’s the cool thing these days, right? Wrong! Being genuinely green means doing uncool things. It might mean washing less frequently. It might mean buying fewer things – no iPhone 5! No Samsung tablet! People that don’t own these things are uncool. Even worse, it might mean travelling less, and if one thing is cool today, it’s travelling. Doesn’t matter what you do once you’re there, you could go to Starbucks or do generic local activities that everyone does and then post pictures of the local cuisine on Facebook, with obligatory jealousy inducing captions, whatever it is, you are cooler for doing it abroad. But especially somewhere far, far away. That’s because getting to ‘know’ cultures from very away is hip. It’s exotic and makes you appear cultured. Imagine if you told a friend that you went on holiday to Belgium. Now imagine they tell you they went to Egypt. That friend is now cooler than you. Not just because Egypt is further away (from Europe) but because no matter where you’re from, Egypt is always cooler than Belgium. Even Libyans would rather go to Egypt than Belgium. Hell, even Egyptians would rather go to Egypt than Belgium. And they would all be the cooler for it.

I cheated with my example, but it was worth it to make fun of Belgium.

Worst of all, being green might mean being Vegetarian. Like gingers, it’s still perfectly acceptable in modern society to mock vegetarians like no other category of people. This one below is my favourite.

Despite repeated efforts by well-known vegetarians such as Paul McCartney and – I really can’t think of another and am too lazy to Google it – others , vegetarianism is still not accepted by mainstream society. Go home to mum and tell her that you’re going veggie and mum shall swiftly proceed to mock you. Mine would at least. Your friends will also look at you suspiciously, even with confusion, like small children [SPOILER ALERT!] being told for the first time that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. Men especially might question your sexuality, should you also be male. If you are female then they might make crude jokes.

Fit into one of these demographics? Feeling quite offended? Good, that was the point, but fear not! In 2113 being green will be cool. Indeed, just like tech geeks that were once viciously mocked without mercy but now rule the world*, greenies will also emerge from this storm of cruelty to claim their place on the throne of mainstream society. Green will finally, be cool. The change for this shift, in no small part thanks to the pioneers of yesteryear and today, will come about because just like the tech geeks saw the digital revolution coming and made it their own, the greens saw the, erm, green revolution coming. The greenies will be proven right about everything. It will be proven that animals are actually conscious of their surroundings and are living in terrible agony every day on meat and dairy farms, just as it will that you don’t actually have to wash all that much. The climate will have changed, perhaps by as much as 6 degrees, in which case there won’t be much exotic travelling because all the exotic places won’t be there anymore. Basically, greens will have been right all along, by which point green habits will be essential, so everyone will do it. And if everyone does it, then it will be cool. Celebrities like Daryl Hannah will have small shrines erected in their honour. Paul McCartney and all those other ones will be spoken of in revered tones. “They were right all along” the youth of the future will say, “why did no one listen to them?”. Celebrities won’t fly across the world to promote movies and songs; they will simply have a body double in each country (that’s left) to do that for them. It’ll be greener – and cooler. But the planet will be hotter, which is obviously not cool. But don’t worry about that, be cool and get back on Youtube.

* See this video of Bill Gates jumping over a chair. Back then it was just geeky Bill Gates being geeky Bill Gates. But today it’s, “BILL GATES JUMPING OVER A CHAIR, HOW COOL IS HE? ROFL!”

This article was originally posted on http://differentshadesofgreen.org/

Different Shades of Green, or Brown, rather…

This was originally posted on www.differentshadesofgreen.org

A lot of the content of this blog seeks to discuss how ‘Green’ the City of Freiburg is. How sustainable is the city? How much do the people really care about environmental problems? Is Freiburg on the right track to becoming a truly Green city, if it’s not already?

Having now spent a month in Cairo I can tell you that a lot of these discussions seem nothing short of absurd, no better encapsulated than by the ridiculous discussion about tree roots and bike paths. Just in case you missed it, this was a complaint raised by one disgruntled MEG student that the roots of trees adjacent to the bicycle lanes in Freiburg slowed down his desired speedy journeys around the town, as he had to slow down to over the bumps that the roots had created on the path.

For a start, the average Cairoean would probably consider it something of a luxury to be able to cycle in his or her city in the first place. There are a few brave souls that try this, most notably bread delivery boys with massive trays of freshly baked bread stacked on their heads and also the odd small child here and there. I did once see a European/North American riding amongst the traffic in downtown Cairo but I do not think that he was long for this world.

The problem is, is that Cairo’s traffic is notoriously bad. Cars fill up almost every street and there aren’t many places in the centre that are free from cars for longer than a minute or two. And it’s not that the cars are ever travelling at a particularly fast speed: there’s seldom much opportunity to travel at more than 30 kilometers per hour before another approaching car will block the way ahead or move in from the ‘lane’ next to yours to grab the prized car-free space just in front of you.

Driving in Cairo is like a war. This was how it was explained to me during my first week here and there’s without a doubt no better way to describe it. You have to fight for your space, to get ahead. It doesn’t matter how you do it, you just do it. Having said that it’s mostly a rather civil war. You can steal space, barge into other lanes, stop the car for 10 minutes whilst you argue with a passenger (this happens rather often) but once you just carry on moving and put your hand out of the window to make a conciliatory gesture then everything’s ok after that. “That obnoxious scoundrel just stole the space in front of me even though he skipped the queue behind me to jam into this lane but never mind, he made the sign of peace after doing so” seems to be the predominant attitude. There are fights of course, mostly between microbus drivers, driving all day like that would probably make you very angry too, but considering the outrageous levels of space-thievery and what a European mentality would consider downright rudeness, the system functions. It doesn’t function well, but it somehow chudders along, defying the state of chaos that seems destined to engulf it but never actually does.

It’s this constant game of dodgems (dodgems are a popular fairground ride, see below) which makes cycling almost impossible. Almost impossible without injury at leastHaving lots of cars on the road would, if anything, aid cycling because the cars are never able to generate enough speed thus making it a bit safer for you to cycle. When the cars continuously fight for free bits of concrete right in front of them though, is when it gets dangerous for the modest cyclist.

The alternative to the car or bus is the metro. This is certainly a large network that stretches from North to South of the city and from the centre to the West but in a place as huge as Cairo it’s not enough for most commuters, making some part of their journey by road all but inevitable. The amount of time lost in traffic is tremendous. Perhaps much worse, the pollution is terrible. Breathing in Cairo air is like being constantly reminded of your mortality. You can feel the death around you. Once, I was in the unfortunate position of having to run after my microbus and there was no traffic in the way to slow it down! This happens rarely, I can assure you. Anyway, after a decent effort that I’m sure Mo Farah would have been proud of I was forced to give up. The bus was long gone and my lungs felt like they were stuffed with feather dusters. Feather dusters that had just cleaned the average student’s apartment at that. As a consequence of having been born in London I have asthma but luckily it’s barely noticeable in my day to day life. After this bus chase though, I shamefully had to sit down and take my inhaler, like a fat kid that had stuffed his face with sweets but through the necessity of survival was finally forced to inhale. I felt old and unfit. Perhaps upon my return my fellow students will have noticed a remarkable ageing in me. Ha! No longer shall I look like a youthful, joyful idealist but instead like a grey, hollow-eyed Grampa, which is actually a much truer representation of my character.

Let’s get a broader perspective on this, away from my own anecdotal evidence. In 2007 there were 6 deaths from road traffic deaths per 100,000 people in Germany. In Egypt it was 41.6.[1]  The mortality rate for children due to respiratory diseases is 120.86 in Egypt per 100,000 people and 0.51 in Germany. [2] A direct comparison between Freiburg and Cairo would be even worse I expect, as Cairo is worse than average for Egypt and Freiburg better than average for Germany. Different shades of Green indeed.

None of what I’ve written here has really captured the awfulness that is Cairo’s traffic. Professional writers/talented people have no doubt attempted this somewhere on the web. What I wanted to make clear however, is just how luxurious it is to live in a city with good public transport and the possibility to cycle everywhere without fear of mutilation. How glorious it is indeed to breath in clean air, almost as pure as when nature herself first made it all those millions or billions of years ago. To not spend 2 hours stuck in traffic for what should really be a 45 minute journey is a reason for celebration. To discuss how Green Freiburg is in comparison to cities such as Cairo seems almost pointless.

But this isn’t a pointless discussion. Humanity’s evolution has often followed the path of progress. In Freiburg there is still much room for this. As that now famous quote from the Mayor of Bogota goes, “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation”. Freiburg does not yet match this vision, but it’s closer to it than many places. Let us be critical of Freiburg’s environmental failings and support the city in attaining this beautiful vision of sustainability and equality. Let’s not lose our sense of perspective however, and remain thankful for the blessings that we have.

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[1] http://apps.who.int/ghodata/

[2] http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/hea_res_dis_chi_dea_rat-respiratory-disease-child-death-rate

Beware The Trojan Horse.

The Climate Wars could be entering the ‘end-game’ here if a new strategy deployed by the ‘denier’ lobby is successful. Denier is a term often used here to denote an individual who denies the science behind climate change. That will all change now.

Professor Richard A. Muller, head of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project and physics professor at the University of Berkeley, has just written an article in the New York Times declaring his “conversion” to what has been mainstream science for a long, long time. Professor Muller has even gone one step further and declared that “Humans are almost entirely the cause” of global warming as opposed to IPCC reports which suggest that human industrial activity may only be one cause, in combination with natural cycles. (Check out the article here)

Excellent news, no? The war between sceptics and believers is over. All are agreed that climate change is caused by human activity. Natural sciences departments in universities across the world have rejoiced. UNEP offices will witness many a sunrise and dark moon as cleaners put them back in working order. Professor Michael Mann, vilified by the engine of denial and its boot-lickers, magnanimous in victory has congratulated Professor Muller for behaving like a “good scientist”. Blogs of poison can cease. Quite terrible name-calling is needed no more. Finding the solutions for a bright new world with a planetary temperature of no more than a two extra degrees can begin.

Sadly not. What we are witnessing instead is a very cunning shift in denier strategy. That game is up. No longer could they deny the science brought together by the IPCC and nor could they come up with a better theory as to why the planet was warming. They could not even keep on pretending that the planet was not indeed warming. They have, however, shifted the goal posts. Rather than deny that the basic science is accurate, they will now deny that climate change poses any threat to human well-being. This is nothing new but merely a shift in emphasis. Professor Muller’s article is the perfect Trojan Horse and could be the final tactic that makes sure this war is really over.

Muller’s article is uncontroversial except for the part where he predicts warming to increase to a level above IPCC predictions. That was worrying, but not as worrying as the paragraph where he essentially states that the threat of climate change is overblown, unsubstantiated or just plain false. He then goes on to list several examples to support his point. I’ll deal with those, courtesy of Skeptical Science, at the bottom of this page. For now though let’s focus on the New York Times article.

It’s written in a very clever way to achieve what the main objective of the denier lobby has always been – to delay meaningful action on climate change for as long as possible. Muller points out that the BEST methodology is indeed the best; better than the IPCC’s. He argues that his data is superior and therefore gives better results. It is important to link this to what I’ve written above. By framing the article in this way Muller seeks to position himself as the true scientist, the one with integrity who didn’t go leaping to conclusions just like those inferior scientists from the IPCC did. Now that Professor Muller and his team have truly, scientifically established that humans are warming the planet, he can now go on to find out what the negative effects from this warming will be. Do not trust what the IPCC has to say, for their methodology is weak and inferior. Wait for us to provide the real answers. It’s the waiting, as the sea ice caps melt and the deserts expand, that Muller wants. It’s the waiting which is what the oil industry needs, more and more time to extract that oil before those bothersome scientists obstruct their work.

If this is the case then it could signal a slight shift in the debate from one that argues over what was fairly established science, and thank God for that at least, to one that is certainly less established – predicting the future. We cannot know what the future is, but good science can help us to make good predictions. The war will now rage over what is good science in this department and what makes a good prediction. But before these new battles commence we have to beware this Trojan Horse sent to us by Professor Muller. It would be a disaster for progress if climate scientists were to come out en masse and congratulate Professor Muller, or not to challenge the inevitable news coverage, because it would give him legitimacy, therefore making it easier for the “sceptical” lobby to employ the argument I outlined above. Muller has been the closest thing to legitimate that the denial industry, filled with crackpots, has. For the scientific community to ignore what is blatantly a new way to further delay investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency and wholesale system change is to allow it to succeed.

And how does this all fit together? Oil money. It’s no secret that the Koch brothers have funded this project and it’s no secret that big oil has funded the denial machine, just as the tobacco industry did for lung cancer. People were shocked, and many environmentalists satisfied with the delicious irony, when the Koch-funded BEST project results came in and confirmed what was already known for a very long time. If big oil could fund a project that confirmed the scientific consensus then clearly we can now trust oil-funded research. Now it’s all very clear why this was done. It began the implementation of a long term strategy of delay. It is still not yet time to party – or it really will be game, set and match to the oil industry.

What Muller is probably wrong about in the article

Skeptical Science provides the rebuttal.

1) Polar bear populations are decreasing http://www.skepticalscience.com/polar-bears-global-warming.htm

2) The Himalayan Glaciers will not be gone by 2035, but most are retreating. An excellent deployment of the cherry picking tactic. http://www.skepticalscience.com/himalayan-glaciers-growing-intermediate.htm

3) Hurricanes. Even if they are decreasing in frequency in the US, it is certainly not possible to claim with much certainty that they are decreasing globally. http://www.skepticalscience.com/hurricanes-global-warming-intermediate.htm

4) The warming in the US is offset by cooling elsewhere in the world. It seems contradictory to ‘discover’ that global temperatures are increasing but then somehow imply that the warming witnessed in the US cannot be attributed to global climate change? Perhaps the BEST results are only for the US?

5) Medieval warm period. http://www.skepticalscience.com/medieval-warm-period-intermediate.htm

Carrotmob Freiburg 2.6.12

Freiburg’s 5th Carrotmob was a deliciously sunny affair, with excellent carrot cake, carrot soup and carrot quiche in abundance. The carrot cake sold out actually, much to the disappointent of some late ‘mobbers. ChezFine, an organic restaurant specializing in French cuisine, pledged to give 90% of the revenue made from the day towards making environmental improvements in the restaurant. A special ‘gunstig’ menu was prepared by the ChezFine team so that everyone could enjoy the food at what is normally a more upmarket establishment – internalizing those externalities has to cost more by definition.

Andrea and Miriam enjoying some first time ‘mobbing!

In total 623 euros, 50 eurocent was raised for improvements to be made at ChezFine. To get an idea of what that could achieve consider the assessment made by energy assessors from energie-sparen-freiburg.de. A new radiator at a cost of 400 euros could save an estimated 10,000 kWH (kilo-watt-hours) per year and an average saving of 2320 kilograms of Co2 per year. Amazingly this would save ChezFine an estimated 2100 euros per year in energy costs.

The total investment that could have been made at ChezFine according to the energy assessor was 4,886 euros, which would have resulted in monetary savings of 2931 euros per year, with an energy saving of 13,956 kWh and Co2 of 3617 grams per year. In just two years the restaurant would make back the money if they were to invest in all of the improvements! Obviously most of this would come from a new radiator. It’s amazing to think that a 400 euro investment could save so much. I’ll have to email the energy assessors to see if they can explain how this is so.

The report

It just goes to show what an excellent idea Carrotmob is. Local businesses can be supported, the environment aided and people made happy (that cake was amazing). Before we get too happy though we still need to confirm that the restaurant have used the money as they said they would. Will keep you posted. In the meantime enjoy these photos of a lovely Saturday in sunny Freiburg. Thanks to all those who came!

Enjoying the sun and music

A lot of international student love.

Carrots!

ChezFine. Or CHEzFINE.

 

For more information about Carrotmobs in Freiburg see on see http://www.carrotmob-freiburg.de/ and for the Carrotmob concept in general http://www.carrotmob.org.

Carrotmobs are go…

If you’ve never heard of a ‘Carrotmob’ before then you’ll belong with the rest of the 99.99999% of the human race that assume a Carrotmob is an intimidating gang of walking carrots (and for anyone else that grew up in the ’90s, no it’s not a cheap rip-off of this…)

Carrotmobs: no more sticks

No! Carrotmobs are much more exciting than a gang of lethal carrots of Italian origin could ever be. That’s because Carrotmobs are about being environmentally friendly. Now that I’ve got you barely contained with anticipation I’ll get to the point.

Carrotmobs are in essence the exact opposite of a boycott. So instead of not going to a store because you don’t like what they do, you go to a store because you like what they do. How they work is simple. A bunch of people, the organisers, will approach a series of stores with a simple offer: “if we get loads and loads of people to turn up to your store on this day how big a percentage of the profits would you commit towards making your store more environmentally friendly?”

The store that thinks this sounds like a good idea and makes the highest offer wins. The organisers tell their friends, “hey go buy stuff from here, we like them”, and then voila, the store uses some of the extra money to make their store more environmentally friendly. Perhaps they buy some insulation or special devices for fridges that reduce the energy consumption or improve their composting and so forth.

This is small scale stuff making small changes in local communities but the guys behind Carrotmob are ambitious. They envisage one day being in the position to influence big corporations like The Coca-Cola Company. Just picture it – an interlinked web of consumers the world over that can sway the decisions of corporations. Pepsi want to become more environmentally friendly? Great, we’ll buy Pepsi the world over and watch Coke regret not making the offer first.

Check this video out for a better explanation of what a carrotmob is. 

Why is this great? Because it’s positive, it’s fun and it’s effective. It rewards good behaviour (that carrot reference, remember?) and entrepreneurship. It views businesses as partners, not as adversaries. It’s an innovative form of environmentalism that is needed now more than ever before.

Would it be surprising to think that 50 years from now, it’s Carrotmobs and not boycotts that will be the dominant form of organised consumerism? Let’s hope so.

For more information see http://www.carrotmob.org

Why we disagree but where to go from here?

Our class had a very interesting set of lectures the week before last. Given by Heiko Roehl from the German Development Agency (the GIZ), we were introduced to a number of knowledge and organizational learning concepts. It touched upon a lot of the things that I have been thinking about recently, like the nature of truth, why it is that people – even intelligent ones – can disagree so vehemently about such a wide range of issues and how it is that we as individuals can come to make more of an effort towards understanding each other.

Something that really crystallized all of this rather well was a wee diagram explaining a concept called ‘Relevance Systems’. This theory or way of thinking about individual beliefs and knowledge can help us to understand why and how it is that we can come to have such radically different views of the world. This struck me powerfully because I have been trying for a while to get a better idea of why it is that people disagree about climate change. This helped me to understand the why a bit better, but I’m still not sure if it helps to form any solutions. Time will tell.

The Model

a) To start off with we have our set of beliefs. Our beliefs about reality are constructed from our experiences and the environment in which we grew up. Our parents might have instilled in us a belief in God or the belief that it is the right thing to help others. We might have grown up in a Western society where we are taught the primacy of the individual. Some may have grown up in societies that teach the primacy of the community.

b) This model also recognises that our brains filter information. It has to do this to stay functional. If we were to process every bit of information that our senses detect then it would be overloaded. This happens to people with autism – their brains don’t filter out information and so their social systems can be said to be impaired. They perceive the world in a radically different way to non-autistic people and so act in a very different way too.

We often ignore information that we don’t want to hear or don’t believe in, although this is mainly an unconscious process. Information that rejects our beliefs is, on the whole, rejected. Information that supports them is absorbed. I was taught to value empirical science when growing up and thus perceive the world as spherical because the information I have acquired, I saw on TV scientists explaining why the earth is a sphere, supports or does not contradict my beliefs. Another child, perhaps an unfortunate that had medieval re-enactment enthusiasts for parents, might perceive the world as flat. The information that he gets, from his eyes, tells him that it is so. He might sometimes see on TV the earth referred to as a sphere but rejects this knowledge. Scientists are just phony wizards, or so his parents keep telling him. We both ‘see’ the same information but our belief systems interact with this in different ways to produce different perceptions of the world from us.

c) Information is never absorbed independently though. We combine it with our judgement. Our judgement is also strongly influenced by our early experiences. Being raised in a family where cleanliness is very important then shapes your judgement – and you will judge cleanliness as a good thing. For example, when you go to a foreign country your impression of it may be formed by its cleanliness. For someone else it might be the quality of food that determines their judgement of the country.  Therefore it is our judgement, “I judge cleanliness as important” plus the information we receive, “I read in the newspaper that French people wash the least often” that constructs our knowledge, “France is a bad country”.

 

d) It is thus our beliefs, judgement and the information we filter that form our perceptions of the world. The lines flowing from the belief circle out towards the world represent this ‘relevance system’ that determines how we perceive reality. Never in its completeness and never without some truth.

Link to Climate Change

This was a highly simplified explanation partly so I could explain it but also so that the model is understood. It’s not a perfect model. Perhaps some people see more of reality than others because they are more intelligent or have access to more information. The beliefs we grow up with can all too often be rebelled against. But I hope the framework is there and makes sense, so let’s apply it to the climate change example.

I often read a report or blog decrying climate change as a left-wing conspiracy. As someone who believes in climate change my initial reaction is always, “did no one ever tell these people that the Left couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery?”. I then look to see if there any flaws in the report, or I look up the authors on the internet to see if they have any connection to the oil industry – which they often do. Failing this I then consult ‘climate friendly’ websites to check the arguments of the sceptical report/blog. Most of the time I end up convinced that climate change is happening and that the sceptical blog is just another paranoid old man that needs to get out more. Even writing about it you can see that I’m quite unwilling to even realistically treat the subject impartially here – although that’s also to make it slightly more readable.

It’s easy to see how this can happen the other way around – with a sceptic and climate change. They read the latest IPCC report, find some errors in it or find information that some of the authors are also members of Greenpeace and their beliefs remain unaltered. They absorb the information, this clashes with their beliefs and they judge the information faulty, perhaps by finding additional information to support this. End result: beliefs unchanged. Exactly as in my example.

You can this set of examples on this very blog, on the post below. Justin gives one argument and backs it up with a web link. I dismiss his link and then provide a link of my own. He then does the same and so on and so on, and we go in circles forever.

It’s quite easy to see this, fancy diagram or no. What’s now harder is how to change this situation. How can I and Justin come to some sort of understanding? Does one of us have to give up our beliefs in order to do this? That won’t happen easily – it would take a massive event or crises to do that. Perhaps tomorrow morning I see in The Daily Telegraph photos of Rajendra Pachauri[i] playfully wiggling his rump from under the duvet of his bed whilst Jim Hansen[ii] rubs money into his back, both cackling at the world’s stupidity for buying that rubbish about the earth warming.

In our class we were also taught that engaging in dialogue is important to understand how our systems of relevance overlap and thus where our disagreements stem from. This may sound like wishy-washy-hippy crap at first glance but I feel it’s something very important to consider – especially with regards to climate change. For so long ‘believers’ and ‘sceptics’ have been debating, for decades, and it’s getting no one anywhere as the debate gets uglier. Death threats against climate scientists, the hacking and distortion of personal emails – very vicious name calling by Greens. We’re at a dead end and perhaps dialogue is the first step towards a solution. We were introduced to a number of dialogue tools to resolve conflicts, which I may blog about some time in the future.

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[i] Rajendra Pachauri is the chairperson of the IPCC

[ii] James Hansen is head of the NASA institute for Space Studies

Many thanks to Julia Koch, Jonathan Niessen and Aurange Kreamsicle for helping me to articulate this a lot, lot better. It is still a work in progress.