http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2009/03/yet_another_bunch_of_people_ki.php#comments

The target of this project is to decrease the temperature of the atmosphere and produce the electricity in the same time.

I am looking for investors, sponsors, grants for it.

Any comments and suggestions will be highly appreciated

I’ll try to give what I’ve gathered on the subject, but this is second-hand so I may be way off. You might find one of the books/models to be useful:
http://www.amazon.com/Spiral-Dynamics-Leadership-Developmental-Management/dp/1557869405

As I understand it, they estimate that it takes a minimum of 5 to 10 years for a person to move through a worldview stage, but many may stay there for life. So a person might change, if you are willing to wait long enough. In the meantime though, even if one person moves out of one stage, another person may be entering that stage (having moved up from the previous stage), so there’s always going to be some percentage of the population who are at each stage. And that percentage will go out and vote for political parties, so their influence will always be there.

The existence of a number of broad worldviews is not a bad thing, as actually each worldview arose to address some problem or issue, certain life conditions which the already existing worldviews were not able to deal with. The green worldview arose in the 70s, perhaps at a time when we were starting to realise some of the downsides to industrialisation. Each new stage is meant to be an improvement but it also brings new problems. So we don’t really want to get rid of any worldview–even if we could–rather, we’d like a healthy well functioning version of each worldview, rather than unhealthy problematic versions.

That leaves us with the problem of how to deal with the unhealthy versions. At least one serious environmental philosopher has written about how environmentalism is verging towards fascism. That would be a very unhealthy version. And a shame given that we all benefit from clean water and clean air.

A model like Spiral Dynamics can be useful because it tries to identify the very core concerns of each world view. In other words, these are the things that a person will not compromise on. If you contradict a core concern, then you are just seen as flat wrong. But once you know the core concerns, you can use them. You can make a proposal in such a way that, you take care to always address the core concern, whilst being free to change everything else as needed to actually fix a problem. There is no reason why environmentalism should become fascistic. That’s perhaps just an unfortunate culture clash as the green worldview tries to manipulate the other worldviews.

Exactly how one would modify a proposal depends on which worldview we are dealing with. Reading Spiral Dynamics (or any of a number of other models) helps one to spot in people which worldview you are dealing with. Once you know that, you can take care to say the right things to resonate with that person’s core concerns, and frame everything in ways that that person will find of value. This can sound like manipulation, but it is better than just fighting entrenched positions, and it at least acknowledges that that person has a right to be who they are, and that we respect their worldview; we’re not trying to change them.

One of the authors/experts of Spiral Dynamics, Don Beck, has recently been working in the Middle East. Don Beck identified that the core value for many of the Palestinians is their sense of honor. That sense of honor demands that they must fight to get back land taken by Israelis. At the very least they should die trying. Honor is their core code. Don Beck has been leading an effort to reframe their sense of honor towards honor for the sake of their children, that their children should become educated, industrious entrepreneurs. Beck isn’t trying to change their core code, he is trying to shift how it is expressed, and realign it with the problems that their society is facing. The society needs development, and successful business that will improve the nation’s standard of living.

So I try to remember that quality of thinking, when we’re looking at environmentalism and its core values. We probably need to start by just identifying the core values—-community often comes up, which is perhaps why “consensus” is so convincing to the pro-AGW crowd but kinda irrelevant to people from other worldviews, including myself—-and once we know those core concerns, we can talk to them in a way that they can listen to us because we’re addressing what matters most to them.

So I guess that’s the puzzle. How do we produce a better healthier environmental movement than the current one, so that the new generation of kids which grows into this stage, will adopt the healthy version rather than the kinda fascistic and destructive version which we currently have?

Technological fixes are often frowned upon by environmentalists. Perhaps their core concerns are that technology “goes wrong”, (like nuclear) and that what we need are low tech soft “sustainable” approaches. Nonetheless these people have no problem using a computer. They often rally against big corporations. Nevertheless I gather a modern chip fab costs over a billion dollars, and the likes of Intel are worth multiple billions. So there is obviously some way to frame high technology in a way that looks “light” and “soft” enough. Arthur C Clarke wrote about a future where everyone lived in four towers which reached geostationary orbit, and the rest of the planet was left to revert to pure Nature. Even though there is tremendous technology involved with that, and yet is has some appeal for Nature worshippers. But see I don’t know what’s possible with technology in the real world today, but to gain the environmental movement’s support it needs to have an image of sensitivity, clean running, and non-greedy.

Stefan

Absolutely brilliant! I think that you have hit the nail on the head of the dichtomy of the entire AGW/non AGW movement.

My problem with AGW as a political movement goes straight to your worldview description. The scientists that posit AGW (no matter if it is correct or not), seem to for the most part share a world view that “naturally” leads to a certain set of solutions, many of which are derived from a worldview that from my perspective (worldview) originates in the early-70’s environmental movement worldview. Albert Gore has specifically stated that the book “Limits to Growth” both informed and set his world view. This is patently obvious when you read his book “Earth in the Balance” which is really just his restatement of the theme introduced by Meadows in LTG.

My worldview dates from the mid 1960’s when as a small child became enraptured with the positive worldview that comes from science fiction (Star Trek and the Apollo program). I have since dedicated my life to making that positive worldview a reality. In my education (physicist with an engineering physics degree) and in my professional career I have worked in this arena and see a completely different solution set that results in a prosperous world derived from the acquisition of the material resources of the solar system for the benefit of the people of the Earth. I have even written a book on the subject where I took on the “Limits to Growth” worldview and did a comparison/contrast with the the space economic development worldview.

It is quite amazing to me how dismissive the Limits to Growth (LTG) worldview people are of the space economic development worldview without any exploration of what the ultimate result of their worldview would mean to the people of the Earth, or what the space alternative would truly mean toward building a more prosperous humanity.

This leads to a question for you. You state that a worldview cannot be changed but how fixed are you in that statement? What does it take, how much evidence is required, and what can be done to bring a different worldview, one that is far more positive than the doom and gloom of the LTG worldview, into play as a viable alternative?