Philosophy on digikar's microblog

A World without Climate Change is one that promotes Freedom

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 09:53:54 +0200

What would a life without climate change look like? In this world,

Carbon emissions would be down to the pre-industrial levels,
White reflective Arctic and Greenland ice cover would be intact,
AMOC would persist,
Forest covers would be up to their preindustrial level. The land used for farming would be much less.

As side effects,

Seasons would be predictable,
Loss of crops would be less due to unpredicted weather events,
People would need to endure less heat and less cold and less rain and less storms,
Healthcare system would be less affected by cumulative effects of climate change on health,
Less pressure on societal systems would render insurance easier.

But what would day to day life look like? Without fossil fuels, private yachts, flights, and even large scale ocean and atmospheric modes of commute are difficult to imagine. Even the manufacture of semiconductors depends on fossil fuels. Perhaps, many industries that have been historically dependent on fossil fuels including the printing press might have stagnated.

The question “What would the world look like without X?” can be interpreted in two ways. One, we can go back in time and intervene and then try to imagine what life would have been like. Two, one can imagine an intervention at the current moment and try to imagine what life would be like. The latter feels extremely disruptive until we already have a world with renewable energy powering every aspect of our lives. So to speak, this world where fossil fuels suddenly return to their grave and there is no energy to fuel our day to day activities is unimaginable. But even in the first case, where we go back in time and intervene, it is still unimaginable what life would be like without an equally-early discovery of renewable energy to power the printing, semiconductor and transport industry. In other words, this world too is unthinkable.

Imagining negation is tricky. One does not negate wills and desires and possibilities. The mind does not seem to like negations. Instead, one creates positive ones that serve as alternatives to the ones we do not want. Thus, to imagine what would a world without climate change look like, we should perhaps ask, what is the kind of world we want to look at.

Now, we have already broadened our thinking horizons a bit by travelling back 4-5 centuries in trying to imagine the alternative world where printing press did not take off due to a lack of energy. We can continue further and look into the far past to envision the possibilities for the far future. Is it useful to look this far? Aren’t things always transient and in a constant flux of change? Apparantly, that is not always the case! Rather, it seems that, for many things, there is a period of time in which things are more “flexible”, so to speak. But after a period of time, things become “rigid”. To give a few examples -

Around sixth century BC in China, there were several dozen distinct schools of philosophical and cultural experimentation. But later on, only four schools remained. Of these, only one thrived until the start of the 20th century and still continues to influence East Asian cultures.
Despite twenty (or fifteen) centuries, many cultures remain deeply entrenched in Abrahamic religions. Bible was the most sold book in 2025. And that’s ignoring the even higher number of copies that are simply distributed without being bought. Indeed, from AD 40 to AD 350, Christianity grew by about 43 percent per decade, from a population of about 1,000 to 34,000,000. A similar story holds for Islam and Quran.
Consider the English language itself as another example
Or the use of Javascript in browsers
The prominence of vegeterianism in India was apparantly not before two or three millenia (It’s difficult to find sources for these that are not just verbal anecdotes or chatgpt/claude generated conversations.)
Constitutions of countries, including long lived ones such as the United States

MacAskill, in his What we owe the future, calls this “lock-in”.. Initially, some state of affairs is rather flexible or mutable or easily changeable. But as time passes, these become harder and harder to change. The causal pathways by which this happens seems underdiscussed. (Hint: It’s often not merit that determines what becomes popular or what persists through time.)

With reference to the world we are looking for, the recommendation is this: We must strive against a lock-in of state of affairs that are harmful for the long run. At least until we find the most optimal state of affairs, and perhaps even after we do, we must allow a plurality of approaches. Let time do its weeding. Try to avoid weeding out ideas prematurely. The hard to digest implication of this is the tolerance of intolerance. I myself have a hard time accepting it. But even if you reject tolerating intolerance, the central idea remains: allow plurality and diversity, since they keep a civilization flexible.

Thus, an alternative to the current world with climate change is a world that values freedom.

Enter Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom.

If the goal of life is to live and thrive, the best way to achieve that is by giving each individual the freedom to experiment and influence others in their own ways. Now, this is a claim at the population level. It makes no claim for individual choices: whether one should choose a life that “keeps their options open” or another that lets them “walk or run in peace with their chosen option even if it closes other options” is not something I have an answer to. The mere claim is we should work towards a society that allows individuals to choose differently at least in principle across different lives. Of course, we only have one life and we only live once, but that we can imagine a different life. If the society you live in permits that, that is a good society. In contrast, if merely imagining a different life seems impossible, that is not the kind of society you (or at least I) want to lock humanity in.

Caveat, I haven’t read Development as Freedom yet. So far, I touched some chapters of What we owe the future - particularly, 1, 2, 4. My own thoughts on the book are that it has some insights, but it seems to get carried away. Particularly, I disagree that a life choice that enhances humanity’s survival by 0.0001% as being better than another life choice that enhances the life of a million or even a few thousand. Because, by enhancing the life of a thousand others, especially in significant ways and endowing them with freedom, you raise the chances that someone (perhaps many) amongst these would go on to make choices that ultimately enhance humanity’s survival by not 0.0001% but by 10% even! And there are other critics.

For the more technical minded there, you cannot make optimal worldly interventions basing them on probability distributions formed out of observational data. For, the act of intervention changes the distribution and you will need to resample again! A potential alternative is to build a causal model of the world, but that seems an open topic for research!

Why Climate Action needs to focus on Corporate Production and not just Individual Consumption?

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 18:01:24 +0100

What can I do to reduce climate change?

If you are a resident of the 21st century, still under 60, rich enough that you do not need to worry about the cost of your next meal, and have any sense of obligation towards the society at large, that question might have crossed your mind. Perhaps, it even keeps you awake at night. Climate anxiety is a thing. (I wrote about it before – here’s something that may help.)

Perhaps, you have even been successful in converting your worries into concrete actions. You consume less meat, avoid flights, buy products that say that are environment-friendly, or even better, avoid buying anything unnecessary at all. Perhaps you converted your house into solar. You try to cut down your carbon footprint as much as possible. And even motivate others to do the same. You hope that some day, majority of humanity will follow suit and opt for an environment friendly lifestyle. And, perhaps then, the climate crisis will be averted, right? Right?

Right?

R.I.G.H.T.?!

In 2005, fossil fuel company BP hired the large advertising campaign Ogilvy to popularize the idea of a carbon footprint for individuals. The campaign instructed people to calculate their personal footprints and provided ways for people to “go on a low-carbon diet”.

- source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint#History

A person from the richest 0.1% produces more carbon pollution in a day than someone in the bottom 50% produces all year.

- source: https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/person-richest-01-produces-more-carbon-pollution-day-someone-bottom-50-produces-all

Questions:

Why would a fossil fuel company popularize carbon footprint?
Let’s assume majority of humans follow suit towards a environment-friendly lifestyle, may be 50%, or even 90%. But if carbon inequality remains, does that mean, just the tiny non-environmentally-compliant 1% (or even 0.1%) humans produce enough emissions to not only cause but also accelerate the climate crisis?

The answer to the second question is a short “unfortunately, yes”.

About the first. Why would a fossil fuel company popularize carbon footprint?

Perhaps the company is ethical? The most ethical thing a fossil fuel company can do to mitigate the climate crisis is to stop being a fossil fuel company. Just change the business. Is money more important than life? A short read at BP’s wikipedia page, including sections of ‘Polical Influence’, reveals that for BP, money indeed is more important than life.

BP is not alone. Half of world’s CO2 emissions come from just 32 fossil fuel firms.

But.

But, these companies exist because we all consume their goods and services, right? If we just stop consuming their goods and opt for better companies, individual actions can avert the climate crisis, right? Look at the bottom 50% of humans. The average income of the bottom 50% of humans was about $3920 per year. That’s about INR 4,26,000 or 32,300 Yuan annually. If you factor in regional disparities, the picture should be sharper. The poorest 50% simply do not consume enough to have any significant impact on the climate. Honestly, having grown up in India, if I did not need to factor in retirement funds, the ever-rising housing prices, and (future) children’s college fees, INR 4,00,000 is actually a sufficient income for a comfortable life in an Indian town. So, what exactly do the rich consume that throws their carbon pollution off the charts compared to the rest of us?

Before that, just remember that carbon footprint as popularized in the media was a tool used by fossil fuel companies to divert attention from their own misdeeds. That’s not to say, individual actions do not matter. But solely focusing on them would completely miss the climate goals, given the carbon (and income) inequality highlighted above.

The best illustration of how the rich consume is perhaps made not by text, but by videos:

At 20 minutes, it is several times longer than the average instagram or youtube shorts, but hopefully, it is a nice watch down the subway, or during your dinner or lunch break!

The standard guess is that the rich use private jets and yachts that pollute. And that is certainly true. The rich certainly consume more. 1000s of times more than the poorest. But when we say that 12 billionaires pollute more than 2.1 million homes, we are looking at a million-fold disparity. The difference in consumption habits only accounts for a thousand-fold inequality.

In terms of consumption alone, Taylor Swift emits more than the CEO of Exxonmobil! However, persons like the latter are also in charge of highly polluting means of production, such as fossil fuel and cement. Holcim’s cement production in 2020 alone produced about 19,000 times the carbon emissions of Taylor Swift’s private jets! In general, the cement industry is owned by roughly 7,000 individuals (< 1/1,000,000 of humans) and emits about 8% (about 1/12) of the global carbon emissions. The worse case holds for the fossil-fuel industry with 100 companies (their owners and the board) accountable for 70% of global emissions. It is also not the case that there are no solutions. There exist alternative means of production that can still drive profits. But perhaps, this is lesser profit than what can change the rich owner’s minds.

Besides controlling the means of production, the rich owners also engage in political lobbying influencing legal policies and public opinions. Remember the carbon footprint debacle?

Essentially, if you are rich, I commend you for reading this far. If you invest, you can choose to invest in environment friendly firms.

For the others, perhaps our actions need to be more thoughtful in terms of the impact they produce. They need to consider not only our individual consumption, but the means of production themselves, that are the final source of all the crisis. What concrete actions should we take? That’s a good question I don’t have the answer to.

Software Development as simultaneous Prediction and Explanation

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 19:34:01 +0100

There is often the talk that prediction and explanation can be opposed to each other. Simple models aid explanability but may hinder prediction. Complex models aid prediction but may hinder explanability. Or so the story goes in my understanding.

However, consider software development. Particularly of large softwares. Take this for example.

Google has 2 billion
Mac OS has 80 million
Microsoft Office has 40 million
…

Perhaps, no Googler understands all of Google’s codebase, no Mac OS core-developer understands all of Mac OS, no developer of Microsoft Office understands all of Microsoft Office. Yet it is true that these are more-or-less reliable products produced by humans. It is true that individual humans fix bugs or add features to these behemoths.

It is true that individual humans do not understand these softwares in their entirety. However, an individual human can understand different aspects of the software once they put their mind to it. The task of combining the different aspects into an interactable whole is left to the computer. Most well-maintained softwares have potential understandability even if they are not understandable.

In a similar manner, scientific explanations too can use the computer to construct potentially understandable models without giving up on complexity. Taking inspiration from software development, one can build complex scientific models that may be non-understandable but be potentially understanable.

Of course, the task of coming up with a language to program scientific explanation might be a lifetime of work in itself. Though, see Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics. (Might be unrelated – I haven’t read it!)