As you’ve undoubtedly heard, last Saturday, the State of Israel was invaded by Hamas, which controls the government of the Palestinian territory of Gaza. To put this in an American context, it’s as if the Alabama Republican Party decided to invade California. Since it’s the hot topic of the week, I thought I’d use it to illustrate the importance of framing and extending the rationale to cover climate control. While this conflict has traditionally been framed as a territorial dispute between geographical rivals, I think it can be reframed differently to cover this event and conflicts elsewhere in the modern world.

NOTE: This is not a politically oriented series, and I am not a pundit, so I will not wade into the tit-for-tat details of the dispute. Let me stipulate that both “tribes” have legitimate arguments. If I could implement a definitive resolution satisfactory to both, I’d be up for the Nobel Peace Prize.

While I can’t even propose solutions to the problem as it is currently cast, I can use my experience to recommend a different framing. Why is that important? Since 1948, when Israel was established out of the debris of the Ottoman Empire, the conflict has been framed as between Israel and the Arabs (essentially the entire Middle East other than Israel). It was considered one of the most intractable conflicts of the 20th Century, but before last Saturday, Israel had enjoyed 16 years of peace. How can framing help to find a solution?

Instead of describing it as a territorial dispute steeped in history, I think looking at it as a conflict between the past and the future could be more helpful. Over the past 75 years, Israel has been forced to focus on the future as a new country isolated by its geographical neighbors. They’ve had to fix the immediate problems of survival rather than fixing the blame for their predicament on outside forces. In contrast, the Palestinian state government of Hamas is focused squarely on the past, denying Israel’s ‘right to exist’ in its foundational documents (years after the country was established) and ignoring previous international agreements that led to peaceful coexistence.

By reframing the problem as “survival in the future” instead of “reparations for past offenses”, the Start-Up Nation of Israel has thrived, including developing world-leading desalination and drip irrigation systems to grow food in the desert, one of the ongoing themes of this newsletter. At the same time, Hamas remains focused on reversing the past, fixing the blame on Israel (and, by extension, people of the Jewish faith) and seeking “justice.” That hasn’t worked out so well for their constituents: The per capita GDP of Israel is roughly 100 times that of Gaza, and the gap has continued to grow.

This framing is not particular to Israel. The same could be said of Ukraine after its separation from the USSR, where Putin has looked toward the past while Ukraine has its eyes set on the future. In this country, we have the Make America Great Again faction, which, as its name implies, also looks to return to the past. Brexit is another example of a fixation on returning to past glories. Don’t get me wrong, if you’ve been reading this for any length, you know that I’m a history buff, and I believe in understanding our prospects through studying the past. After all:

All data lives in the past.

It’s much easier to perseverate about the past, with all of its problems (but where all the data is), than to look toward the future, with often unfulfillable promises and few assurances of success.

OK, Burbaum, that’s interesting. But what does this have to do with climate control?

By focusing on ‘decarbonization’ as a solution to global warming, we’re 350 years too late—half of the carbon emitted by coal mined in England in the 1600s is still in the atmosphere. Focusing on the past is the wrong strategy, despite the preponderance of data that lives there. The time to stop carbon emissions was at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, not today. Regret is not a helpful emotion: If we focus on climate control in the future instead and develop practical solutions to that existential problem, we’ll have a fighting chance.