“We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

The Cheshire Cat, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

When I look around me nowadays, I find it hard to disagree with the Cheshire Cat – and I say that in full knowledge that he lived down a fictitious rabbit hole and his party trick was to spontaneously morph into a disembodied smile. That said, ‘madness’ is such a maddeningly ambiguous term that I feel obliged to clarify what it is exactly that I am agreeing with. It isn’t that I believe that we are all suffering a mental illness, because that would be a mad thing to claim. What I mean instead is that we seem to live in a world where extremely foolish and irrational beliefs and actions seem to have become the new normal. Worse still, it seems that it is no longer possible to have two opposing, rational views on a given subject – instead there has to be one’s own view, and that held by your mad opponent. And since one can assume that your mad opponent feels the same way about you, that means we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.

In the two great debates of our generation — climate change and covid-19 vaccination — such accusations and counter accusations of craziness have a strong tradition, heavily fuelled by acrimonious and largely fruitless internet exchanges. For the most part the accusations are born of frustration that the other guy just can’t seem to grasp the obvious. More worryingly, however, some of these accusations have been elevated to the status of pseudoscience by a vocal coterie of academics who should know better. Take, for example, the climate change debate, in which the so-called denier’s cognitive shortcomings and irrationality have been extensively analysed and pathologised by the psychology profession. It’s an analysis that is supposed to be founded upon expertise in cognitive bias, and yet the psychologists’ accusations of such biases are made in a manner that itself exhibits extreme cognitive bias. Unfortunately, the profession has been allowed to get away with this to such an extent that the received wisdom is now that climate change ‘denial’ goes beyond simple foolishness and ill intent and strays into the territory normally occupied by the psychotic.

A good example of such an accusation can be found in an article written by Australian activist, Jeff Sparrow. In a rambling diatribe, he accuses sceptics of engaging in ‘kettle logic’, which is an irrational ability to simultaneously entertain two contradictory conspiracies, usually to avoid having to admit having been wrong. Of course, in an individual, such irrationality would be a sign of madness. Nevertheless, the accusation is made in all seriousness and is intended to apply to all climate change sceptics. Interestingly, however, the only evidence Sparrow offers for the existence of this mass pathology is the ability of sceptics to disagree with each other at conferences and their ability to form conditional arguments (along the lines of ‘I don’t believe x but even if I did there would still be y’). I think you would have to be mad to find any of this convincing, but such accusations are seriously entertained by psychologists. Somehow they are able to misinterpret incoherent thinking within a group as being multiple cases of incoherent thinking within the individual. This is known as a ‘category error’.

But where it really gets interesting, as far as I am concerned, is when the boot is on the other foot and the accusations of psychosis are made by the sceptic. That’s when the fun starts. That’s when the psychologists really adopt the rampant pose and start clawing at the sceptic’s throat.

Enter the ‘formerly’ reputable…

The theory that seems to have severely rattled the psychologists’ cage is the brainchild of Robert Malone MD, who chose to share his ideas with the world in a Joe Rogan podcast back in December 2021. Malone starts by asking “What the heck happened to Germany in the 20s and 30s? Very intelligent, highly educated population, and they went barking mad.” He suggests that similar mass behaviour can be discerned in the response to the covid-19 epidemic. He dubs it ‘Mass Formation Psychosis’, and he explains it thus:

When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety in a sense that things don’t make sense, we can’t understand it, and then their attention gets focused by a leader or series of events on one small point just like hypnosis, they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere.

The podcast went viral and the psychology profession went apoplectic. Typical of the negative response was that given in a New England Psychologist article written by John Grohol Psy. D.

If this doesn’t sound particularly scientific or based in psychological science, you’d be right. Malone isn’t a psychologist and doesn’t have any background or experience in psychology, human behavior, or psychiatric research. Instead, his description sounds like some sort of pop psychology mumbo-jumbo from someone who took Psychology 101 in college.

Grohol continues by doubling down on Malone’s lack of required qualifications:

None of his work touched upon psychology or psychological theory. Suddenly, however, Malone feels qualified to express his expertise about “mass formation psychosis.” He knows so little about the field, he basically invented a term (or repeated something he heard once somewhere), instead of using the already well-known and accepted terms, mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illness.

This all sounds rather damning, but before I go any further I think it would be worth my while to reflect upon one particular statement made by Grohol that he thinks gets to the heart of Malone’s failure to understand the basics:

Anyone who suggests there’s “free-floating anxiety” that’s “just like hypnosis” has a very limited understanding of what these things mean. People just can’t be hypnotized without their knowledge or consent — that’s not at all how hypnosis works. And while anxiety is indeed a significant issue for many people, it doesn’t “float” from person to person or otherwise become infectious.

My qualifications to discuss psychology may be no better than Malone’s, but I will venture to suggest that the above quote demonstrates, more than any other, just how seriously Grohol has failed to understand Malone’s ideas. As a psychologist, surely Grohol knows that free-floating anxiety is a technical term, defined by the American Psychological Association as “a diffuse, chronic sense of uneasiness and apprehension not directed toward any specific situation or object.” It is in that sense that it floats; it isn’t anchored to anything specific. By saying that it is free-floating, Malone isn’t suggesting that it is an anxiety that transmits from one individual to another; instead he is referring to a chronic and pervasive societal unease exhibited by a decoupled society. Furthermore, by virtue of its detachment from any specific and discernible cause, the unease can be readily co-opted by leaders with an agenda. The impression of hypnosis comes from the readiness by which the masses can be persuaded of the cause of the diffuse societal anxiety, and thereby led.

Anyone, such as I, who has been diagnosed with free-floating anxiety can attest to its irrational nature. The anxiety is intrinsic; it doesn’t need a trigger or explanation. And yet there will always be plenty of environmental factors upon which it can be pinned – if you are so inclined. Malone obviously knows this and adds the insight that societies can exhibit traits that are akin to an individual’s emotional states. But he doesn’t offer the rationale for this comparison and so leaves himself open to accusations of mumbo-jumbo from the likes of Grohol. Grohol simply dismisses the concept of societal anxiety as a category error and further proof of Malone’s incompetence. I think it is anything but, and I’ll tell you why.

Enter the ‘never has been’ reputable…

I would like to remind you at this point that some six months before Malone introduced the world to Mass Information Psychosis I had written an article here at Climate Scepticism espousing a very similar theory. The starting point was to suggest that, at its essence, emotion is the name we give to a complex, autonomous, adaptive, self-monitoring system’s cognition of its internal state. Our bodies are such a system and our central nervous system provides the self-monitoring. Emotion is what we experience as a result. Consequently, insofar as our decision-making relies upon an awareness of our internal state, we are doomed to rely upon emotion to make a decision. Furthermore, since societies are also complex, autonomous, adaptive, self-monitoring systems, they too will exhibit decision-making that is essentially emotion-based in the system theoretic sense, i.e. a society’s pre-occupation with its internal state constitutes an essential element of its decision-making. A consequence of this is that, just as individuals can suffer neurotic and phobic anxieties in a literal sense, so can societies in a more abstract sense.

This is not a category error, because in both cases we are dealing with the same class of object, i.e. a decision-making, complex, autonomous, adaptive, self-monitoring system. One can only start making a category error if one takes the analogy too far in believing an abstract concept such as  ‘society’ can actually experience emotion in the same sense as a conscious entity can. The term ‘anxiety’ is used in an abstract manner when applied to societies, as indeed are terms like ‘panic’, ‘phobia’, ‘psychosis’ and ‘hypnosis’. But there is a legitimacy to the use of this terminology that goes beyond metaphor. Despite his remark about ‘literally’ becoming hypnotised, I believe that is what Malone is doing. He didn’t use the ‘already well-known and accepted terms, mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illness’ because they are quite different to what he was talking about. They are group behaviours that emerge when the emotional states of individuals interact and feedback upon themselves. They result in collective emotional behaviour and, as such, are psychological phenomena. That’s not what I am talking about, and I don’t believe it is what Malone is getting at either. As I put it:

To be clear, I am not saying that societal decision-making is essentially emotional just because the decisions are being made by individuals who are acting emotionally. This may be true, but I am referring to a more profound sense in which society’s decisions are emotionally driven. They are emotional in the sense that the cognition of the internal state of a complex, autonomous, adaptive, self-monitoring system (i.e. society) is the driving force.

Whilst there are similarities between my thoughts on the matter and Malone’s, there are important differences. Firstly, I have chosen to focus upon the importance of internal monitoring as an essential component of emotional phenomena. In particular, I have pointed out that this can lead to phobic anxiety in the individual and, by analogy, to a legitimate concept of societal phobia. I speak, for example, of societies having panic attacks. Malone doesn’t do this, preferring instead to reflect upon free-floating anxiety in the individual and suggesting the possibility of an analogous societal free-floating anxiety. The propensity for society to ‘panic’ is therefore replaced in Malone’s version by a propensity for it to be persuaded to act in a tendentious manner, simply by offering it an after-the-fact rationalisation for its diffuse anxiety. This is a different emphasis to mine but, even so, it isn’t a major divergence. In fact, both theories entertain the idea of diffuse societal anxiety, albeit with different causations (hyper-sensitivity to internal states in my theory, or a ‘decoupled’ society in Malone’s). And both theories recognise a tendency for societies to rationalise such anxiety. As I said:

Having established [through hyper-sensitive self-monitoring] a self-inflicted sense of crisis we have compounded the error by then looking for external threats and causes of internal dysfunction that could possibly explain our extreme agitation.

Put another way, we have taken free-floating anxiety and anchored it to a causation. Furthermore, such anchorage can be easily facilitated by those with an agenda. Consequently:

One has to wonder, if we didn’t obsess so much over the ills of society, what appetite would remain for rebooting it to address climate change.

We band of disreputable brothers

It’s a funny thing, but when Grohol and his fellow professionals looked at Malone’s theory, all they could see was an unqualified charlatan attempting a psychological thesis without even understanding the basics of the subject. I, on the other hand, could see a kindred spirit, crossing disciplines in an effort to understand what seems on the face of it a quite incomprehensible phenomenon – why seemingly intelligent and sane people can be so easily swept up in an insane enterprise. I was not troubled by Malone’s use of non-standard terminology; one would not find it in the cannon of psychology because, at its essence, his wasn’t really a psychological thesis. It’s a theory about control, and the decision-making of what is actually a complex, autonomous, adaptive, self-monitoring system. As such, his thinking, whether he appreciates it or not, benefits from a paradigm that can apply to more than one application area. Moreover, his is an attempt to explain how individuals may find themselves able to entertain personal suboptimal thinking simply in order to fit in with decision-making at the societal level and yet, at no stage, experience any cognitive dissonance.

But let us not kid ourselves here. Malone’s greatest sin was not to overreach himself by proposing an inchoate theory in an area outside of his expertise. It was that he chose to apply himself to finding an explanation for a phenomenon that the orthodoxy does not willingly accept exists. He sought to explain why there was so much eagerness to engage in an irrational project when, as far as the powers that be are concerned, the project is perfectly rational. To those who get to decide who is mad and who is not, he was looking for an explanation for a madness when part of that madness is to declare that only the mad would think an explanation were necessary. That’s what made it so easy for Grohol to see the lack of academic grounding in Malone’s arguments and yet fail to see the wisdom in his metaphor.

When Stephan Lewandowsky and John Cook developed their ideas regarding the alleged madness of conspiracy theorists, none of their fellow professionals thought to step forward and point out the category errors upon which they were based. Far from it, they received European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) funding to write them up in a handbook. But when Malone only appears to commit a category error, the whole world explodes in an orgy of indignant rebuttal. At the end of the day, however, this is the asymmetry we have to deal with. Any opposition to the authorized view will be automatically branded as irrational in a way that compliance never will. We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad. But not everyone has keys to the asylum.

Alice wasn’t too impressed with the Cheshire Cat’s philosophy and objected to being called mad.

‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice.

‘You must be,’ said the Cat, `or you wouldn’t have come here.’

I think I know the feeling. Sometimes there is something irrationally futile about trying to make sense of the world.

Roger Caiazza

New York State recently banned the use of natural gas from most new buildings that was described as: “a major win for climate advocates, but a move that could spark pushback from fossil fuel interests”.   I have been following New York’s net-zero transition plan for years and there are some interesting aspects associated with the “major win for climate advocates”.

Climate Act Background

The Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act (Climate Act) established a New York “Net Zero” target (85% reduction and 15% offset of emissions) by 2050 and an interim 2030 target of a 40% reduction by 2030. The Climate Action Council is responsible for preparing the Scoping Plan that outlines how to “achieve the State’s bold clean energy and climate agenda.”  In brief, that plan is to electrify everything possible and power the electric gride with zero-emissions generating resources by 2040.  The Integration Analysis prepared by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and its consultants quantifies the impact of the electrification strategies.  That material was used to write a Draft Scoping Plan.  After a year-long review the Scoping Plan recommendations were finalized at the end of 2022.  In 2023 the Scoping Plan recommendations are supposed to be implemented through regulation and legislation

New York’s official website for the Climate Act promotes the strategies in the Scoping Plan including a fact sheet describing the plans to decarbonize New York’s buildings.  It includes the following:

Adopt Zero-Emission Codes and Standards: More efficient, zero-emissions equipment for heating and cooking is increasingly available. That makes replacing existing equipment and appliances with cleaner and healthier alternatives an easy choice for New Yorkers. New construction projects will be required to install zero-emissions equipment in 2025 for single-family and low-rise buildings and in 2028 for high-rise and commercial buildings.

The Scoping Plan includes specific recommended strategies for the buildings sector.  The relevant theme, “Adopt Zero-Emission Codes and Standards and Require Energy Benchmarking for Buildings”, included three strategies:

B1. Adopt Advanced Codes for Highly Efficient, Zero-Emission, and Resilient New Construction

B2. Adopt Standards for Zero-Emission Equipment and the Energy Performance of Existing Buildings

B3. Require Energy Benchmarking and Disclosure

The text states:

In existing buildings, the best opportunity for energy improvements is during routine home and capital improvements and when HVAC equipment is retired from service. Since the useful life of HVAC equipment ranges from 15 to 30 years, seizing the opportunities to electrify

buildings by 2050 requires near-term action.

Electrification and efficiency improvements in existing buildings present a larger challenge of sheer scale.  The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), DEC, and New York State Department of State (DOS) should work together to adopt regulatory requirements that will bring about the end of fossil fuel combustion in buildings by prohibiting replacement of fossil fuel equipment at end of useful life, coordinated with action taken by the PSC and New York State Department of Public Service (DPS) to regulate gas utilities and with New York State Department of Labor (DOL) and the Office of Just Transition to promote workforce development. Building performance standards also will compel efficient operation of buildings and capital investments in high-performance building envelopes and efficient HVAC systems.

New York Legislation

As noted previously the plan for 2023 is to promulgate new regulations and pass new legislation to implement the Scoping Plan recommendations.  New York’s strange political process includes an annual legislative self-made crisis in which legislation is held hostage to the annual budget.  On May 2, over a month past the April 1 due date, the Legislature and Administration finally passed the budget bill that included the gas stove ban that got so much attention.  The point of this article is that there were interesting aspects of the budget discussions this year that have bigger implications than the passage of the ban.

In my opinion, and certainly the belief of the climate activists, the Scoping Plan is pretty clear that fossil-fueled equipment is to be banned outright.  Indeed, the legislation prohibits installation of “fossil-fuel equipment and building systems” in newly constructed buildings seven stories or less, except new commercial or industrial buildings over 100,000 ft² on or after 12/31/25, and for all other buildings on or after 12/31/28”.  However, the prohibition does not apply to     

• The repair, alteration, addition, relocation, or other changes to pre-existing buildings
• The fossil-fuel prohibition shall exempt equipment and systems used for emergency back-up power and standby power; manufactured homes, and building used as a manufacturing facility, commercial food establishment, laboratory, car wash, laundromat, hospital, other medical facility,  critical  infrastructure, agricultural building, fuel cell system, or crematorium.
• To the “fullest extent feasible”, fossil-fuel equipment and building systems in such buildings are to be limited to areas where a prohibition is infeasible, and such areas must be “electrification ready”, except for those serving manufacturing or industrial processes.  Emissions from allowed use must be minimized.  “Financial considerations shall not be sufficient basis to determine physical or technical infeasibility.”
• The Energy Code shall exempt new building construction that requires new or expanded electric service, pursuant to §31.1 of the Public Service Law, when electric service cannot be reasonably provided by the grid.

When the ban on natural gas in new construction was first announced there was intense pushback.  Apologists and the Governor were quick to point out that the ban only affected new construction and that nobody was coming to take away existing natural gas appliances.  However, the Scoping Plan recommendations make it clear that the plan is to eventually ban the replacement of most existing fossil-fired infrastructure. Furthermore, the original language did not include all the caveats that ended up in the final bill described above.  I interpret that to mean that the reality is that accommodations have to be made to pass Climate Act implementing legislation.

Emissions Accounting

The New York political theater starts with the Governor’s State of the State address in early January that outlines her legislative agenda for the year.  This is followed by specific legislative proposals from the Administration, Senate, and Assembly.  This year the initial budget bills from the Governor, Senate and Assembly included significant policy aspects related to the Climate Act that did not get included in the final budget bill but the debates are instructive.

For example, sometime during this process there was a revelation that prompted a specific legislative proposal to modify the emissions accounting because of excessive costs.  Climate Action Council co-chairs Doreen Harris and Basil Seggos explained that::

“First and foremost, the governor is trying to maintain New York’s leadership on climate. It’s a core principle that she brought into office and we have been carrying that out for several years,” said Seggos.

But Gov. Hochul instructed both the DEC and NYSERDA to look at the affordability of Cap & Invest.

“We began running the numbers on that, based on some of the metrics being used by Washington state and some of our own, and revealed some…potentially extraordinary costs affiliated with the program,” Seggos explained. “So that’s really what this is.  It isn’t a focus necessarily on methane itself, or any particular pollutant. It is how do we implement the CLCPA in a way that doesn’t put extraordinary costs on the pockets of New Yorkers.”

It seems astounding to me but it does appear that someone in the Administration finally started really looking at the potential costs of the Climate Act.  When the first auction of allowances for the Washington state program produced costs higher than expected, DEC and NYSERDA ran the numbers and the results were a reality slap to the Administration.  The response was to propose a change to the unique emissions accounting scheme used in the Climate Act.

In order to maximize the purported harm of natural gas use the Climate Act specified the use of global warming potential over 20 years rather than over 100 years as used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United States government, and every other jurisdiction (since its implementation the state of Maryland has also begun to specify GWP-20).  The result is that the number of tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions are increased and when that emission total was  multiplied by the closing price of the Washington state auction the result was “extraordinary costs”.

In one word the response by climate activists to this legislation was  “meltdown”.  For example, NY Renews, a coalition of over 300 environmental, justice, faith, labor, and community groups that bills itself as the “force behind the nation’s most progressive climate law” had this to say:

S6030/A6039 is part of a larger pattern of attacks by the fossil fuel industry that threaten to sabotage New York’s nation-leading climate law, the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, and roll back hard-won standards for accurately accounting for the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions, particularly methane. If passed, the bill would change how the state measures methane and carbon dioxide emissions, pave the way for polluting corporations to emit without consequence, and harm the health and well-being of frontline community members who live, work, play, and pray in neighborhoods across NYS. 

NY Renews unequivocally opposes the inclusion of this bill in the state budget and any deal that would include it. We’re calling on the state legislature to uphold the Climate Act as written into law and reject amendments that would threaten its power to protect and prepare New Yorkers facing the worst effects of the climate crisis.

In response to the outcry the Administration backed down from the proposal.  They claimed that it distracted from the importance of passing the budget bill.  Nonetheless, Seggos said “The fundamental takeaway is it’s full steam ahead for cap and invest with the climate action rebate and any other elements we’ll take up as soon as we can.”

Discussion

The reason that I am encouraged rather than discouraged by the enacted gas appliance ban on new construction is that a couple of issues came up that will have to be addressed.  The political approach to punt difficult problems down the road can only work so long.

The initial blowback to the gas stove ban prompted the Administration to propose legislation that gradually eliminates fossil fuel-burning heating equipment from nearly all New York buildings, consistent with the Climate Action Council plan, but takes less aggressive steps to reduce the use of gas stoves.  The proposed changes:

• Dec. 31, 2025: Prohibit all equipment (including stoves) that burn fossil fuels in new construction of single-family homes or apartment buildings of three stories or less.
• Dec. 31, 2028: Prohibit all fossil fuel-burning equipment (including stoves) in new construction of commercial buildings and multifamily structures of four stories or more.
• Jan. 1, 2030: Prohibit installation of heating or hot water equipment (but not stoves) in any single-family home or apartment building of three stories or less.
• Jan. 1, 2035: Prohibit installation of fossil fuel heating or hot water systems (but not stoves) in any commercial building or larger multifamily structure.

The final legislation only addressed the first two components.  The Administration apparently hopes that the Scoping Plan recommendation to mandate electrification when existing fossil-fired appliances reach their end of life can be made palatable if gas stoves are exempted.  I think that is naïve because so many people appreciate the resiliency and capabilities of fossil-fueled furnaces and hot water heaters too.  When the legislation to implement a prohibit in-kind replacement of existing appliances comes up, I believe there will be intense blowback.

The final budget bill also included legislation for distribution of the proceeds from a cap and invest auction.  I don’t see an easy path for the Administration to walk back their statements that the auction will result in extraordinary costs.  They are on record saying the costs are unacceptable so how do they reconcile that?

Conclusion

At the start of the year the idea that the government is coming for your gas stove was dismissed as a right wing conspiracy:

• NYT: “No One Is Coming for Your Gas Stove Anytime Soon” 
• Time: “How Gas Stoves Became the Latest Right-Wing Cause in the Culture Wars”
• Salon: “Rumors of a gas stove ban ignite a right-wing culture war”
• MSNBC: “No, the woke mob is not coming for your gas stove.”
• AP News: “FACT FOCUS: Biden administration isn’t banning gas stoves”
• The Washington Post: ​​“GOP thrusts gas stoves, Biden’s green agenda into the culture wars”

However, New York’s Climate Act implementation demonstrates that a net-zero transition requires such a ban.  It is not going to be possible to put off a debate about personal choice options and the advantages of fossil fuel for residential use because the New Yorkers who are blissfully unaware of this aspect of the Climate Act will demand to be heard.

The other aspect of this relates to the cap and invest program and the costs of the program.  The Hochul Administration narrative is that the costs of inaction for the net zero Climate Act transition outweigh the costs of action but that statement is misleading unless they issue a caveat that the costs in the Scoping Plan do not include the costs of “already implemented” programs. My analyses of costs have found that there are other  significant “already implemented” program costs (for example the costs of transportation electrification) and that means that the Administration claim does not include all the costs to transition to net-zero.  It gets worse because as far as I can tell the Integration Analysis does include the benefits of already implemented programs while it excludes the costs.  In order to get the desired result, the State analyses have a thumb pressing down on one side of the scale and the other thumb is pushing up the other side of the scale.  I don’t see how the Administration can avoid a meaningful discussion of the costs that they admit are extraordinary.

CNN described the New York State ban on the use of natural gas from most new buildings as “a major win for climate advocates, but a move that could spark pushback from fossil fuel interests”.   Advocates refuse to acknowledge the possibility that fossil fuel interests could align with the interests of the majority of New Yorkers who appreciate and value the resiliency and affordability of our existing fossil-fueled infrastructure.  The proposed wholesale shift to unwanted technology without proper accounting of costs will be under intense scrutiny this year.  I do not see how the Hochul Administration can avoid an open debate about the implications of the Climate Act for all New Yorkers.

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Roger Caiazza blogs on New York energy and environmental issues at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York.  More details on the Climate Leadership & Community Protection Act are available here. He has written over 300 articles about New York’s net-zero transition because he believes the ambitions for a zero-emissions economy embodied in the Climate Act outstrip available renewable technology such that the net-zero transition will do more harm than good. This represents his opinion and not the opinion of any of his previous employers or any other company with which he has been associated.