The environment – Page 62 – a sibilant intake of breath

Jaccard and others blocking coal trains

Simon Fraser University environmental economist Mark Jaccard and others were arrested in White Rock, British Columbia today while blockading coal trains owned by Warren Buffett.

As reported by the CBC, Jaccard considers Canada’s actions on climate change so far “entirely inadequate” and goes on to say:

I now ask myself how our children, when they look back decades from now, will have expected us to have acted today… When I think about that, I conclude that every sensible and sincere person, who cares about this planet and can see through lies and delusion motivated by money, should be doing what I and others are now prepared to do.

Coal exports from North America result in millions of tonnes of greenhouse gas pollution annually. Just the Westshore Terminal, at Roberts Bank, ships over 20 million tonnes of coal per year.

Maria van der Hoeven on climate change risks

Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), has issued a stark warning about the world’s inaction on climate change and the consequences that may have. The Guardian quotes her as saying that the world is “on track for warming of 6°C by the end of the century” and that this level of warming “would create catastrophe, wiping out agriculture in many areas and rendering swathes of the globe uninhabitable, as well as raising sea levels and causing mass migration, according to scientists”.

It’s a shocking thing to read from the director of a relatively conservative organization. It certainly suggests that the policy-makers of the world have their priorities badly misaligned with the welfare of their own citizens and of humanity as a whole.

For years now, the IEA has been calling for global carbon pricing.

Earth Day 2012

If you want to do something meaningful for Earth Day, I recommend contacting one of your elected representatives tomorrow morning (Member of Parliament, etc) to share your concerns about climate change or another environmental issue. If there are going to be solutions to the dire environmental problems we face, they are going to be at the level of all of society, not at the level of individual consumption. Signing the petition against the Northern Gateway pipeline wouldn’t hurt either. Every way you look at them, the oil sands are an environmental disaster and a violation of our obligation to pass on a healthy planet to our descendants.

Michael Maniates explains why we must go beyond individual action well in his article: “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?” (Global Environmental Politics 1:3, August 2001):

The other road, a rocky one, winds towards a future where environmentally concerned citizens come to understand, by virtue of spirited debate and animated conversation, the “consumption problem.” They would see that their individual consumption choices are environmentally important, but that their control over these choices is constrained, shaped, and framed by institutions and political forces that can be remade only through collective citizen action, as opposed to individual consumer behavior. This future world will not be easy to reach. Getting there means challenging the dominant view—the production, technological, efficiency-oriented perspective that infuses contemporary definitions of progress—and requires linking explorations of consumption to politically charged issues that challenge the political imagination. Walking this path means becoming attentive to the underlying forces that narrow our understanding of the possible.

To many, alas, an environmentalism of “plant a tree, save the world” appears to be apolitical and non-confrontational, and thus ripe for success. Such an approach is anything but, insofar as it works to constrain our imagination about what is possible and what is worth working towards. It is time for those who hope for renewed and rich discussion about “the consumption problem” to come to grips with this narrowing of the collective imagination and the growing individualization of responsibility that drives it, and to grapple intently with ways of reversing the tide.

If you really want to take individual action, I would suggest that you make a start on doing something substantial:

Resolving to eat less meat
Resolving to travel less
Resolving to have fewer children

At the very least, replace a few incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent or LED alternatives. Then at least you will be making a contribution with a value that extends beyond 24 hours.

Building options and resilience

It seems to me that one fairly central human aspiration is to have a broadening set of options; it’s encouraging to see new options becoming possible, and worrisome to see options that existed before being closed off forever. In addition to satisfying human preferences, broadening options may also serve the purpose of building resilience in the face of massive change. If we don’t know what the future is going to be like, we have all the more reason to avoid committing ourselves to choices that may end up being poorly matched with the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Previously, I have written about the idea of a steady-state economy. In particular, I stressed the distinction between an economy that is stable in terms of the total biophysical impact of humanity and an economy in which everything stays the same. One critical difference between the ‘constant impact’ and the ‘set in stone’ options is technological development. With a set amount of copper and electricity and silicon we can now make a much better computer than we could ten or twenty years ago. Because we can make better use of resources – as well as avoiding waste, and handling the waste we do produce better – we can still aspire to an improving quality of life, even if we keep the amount of raw material we take from the planet constant and keep the amount of waste we release into the environment constant.

That’s not the only way of keeping our options open, along with those of future generations, but it is a relatively optimistic scenario. I don’t think what matters from a moral perspective is the total number of people on the planet, the size of their homes, or the amount of energy they use. What matters is the richness of their lives. Since the richness of the lives of future generations matters as much as the richness of our lives, we have an obligation to interact with the planet in a way that doesn’t close off too many options for the people who come after us. To me, that implies minimizing serious and irreversible changes in the functioning of the planet system, which in turn requires us to replace the global energy system with a sustainable one, while working to increase the sustainability of other activities. From this perspective, one of the most morally dubious things we can do is continue to invest in a fossil-fuel based economy. Not only will it be increasingly dysfunctional as fossil fuel reserves are exhausted, but our reliance on fossil fuels is the primary cause of climate change.

Life inevitably involves the narrowing as well as the broadening of choices. We can’t hope to keep everything that is possible today possible forever. That being acknowledged, I think a strong case can be made that there is both a practical and moral importance to keeping options open, including across an intergenerational timespan. Similarly, we should pay more attention to irrevocable choices (like “burn all the world’s coal”) than to reversible ones. When it comes to these irreversible choices, we should also be especially on guard for people who simply make the choice that works best for them personally. There is a huge risk of moral corruption wherever the possibility of a big up-front payout with a big long-term cost exists, given that you can take the payout and fob off the cost on others (a favourite strategy of tax-cutting conservatives everywhere). Perhaps adjusting our thinking to pay more attention to keeping options open could be one way of reducing the seriousness of such problems.

The political importance of jobs in the oil sands

Economists sometimes defend inflation by saying that it is a useful means for allowing the real income of some people to fall, without actually reducing the nominal amount. This is connected to human psychology. For some reason, it is more upsetting to have your salary cut by 2% at a time when prices are stable than it is to experience an amount of inflation that generates the same reduction in what you can consume. People like having an income that seems to grow or stay the same, even if it is an illusion, and they hate having an income that seems to shrink.

A related asymmetry arguably exists in terms of entire industries. Once an industry exists, it will fight for survival no matter how irrelevant or damaging it has become. People in the industry will lobby their political representatives for assistance and – especially if the number of people employed is large – they will often succeed.

This is why Canada still has an asbestos industry, even though the material is too dangerous to be used domestically and most people agree that it is unethical to sell abroad.

One reason why I worry about the rapid pace of oilsands expansion is because of the ever-larger constituency of people whose livelihood and financial security now depends on the continued operation of the oil patch. In the future, it may become completely obvious that the oil sands are bad for Canada and bad for the world. Even so, the more people employed by the industry, the harder it will be to wind down. It will also require scrapping more multi-billion-dollar hardware.

Growing the oil sands is politically easy; shrinking them is almost impossible. That’s another argument for slowing the pace of growth. It means there will be less inertia to overcome when we make the transition from digging up ever-more oil to phasing out our fossil fuel industries.

Oil sands similes

Exploiting the oil sands is like drinking seawater, when you are already dangerously dehydrated.
It’s like starting up a smoky old kerosene lantern aboard a space station that is rapidly running out of air.
It’s like giving more whiskey to the already-drunk guide who is paddling our canoe over Niagara Falls.

And yet, huge expansion plans are being implemented. The fact that is is profitable has led us to ignore the fact that it is incredibly reckless, as well as an act of violence directed against vulnerable people and future generations.

Climate change and the categorical imperative

In many situations – especially those that can be characterized as a ‘tragedy of the commons’ or ‘free rider’ problem – taking the ethics of the situation seriously often involves ignoring the game theoretical aspects and applying a maxim of moral reasoning like the categorical imperative. If each actor behaves in such a way that their behaviour would be a good model for everyone to follow, then the problem of collective action goes away.

In terms of climate change, this sort of behaviour is important in areas like determining the appropriate policy for fossil fuel extraction. Every individual company and country has more to gain (at least in the short term) from digging up and selling fossil fuels then from restraining themselves. And yet every major fossil fuel producer will need to show restraint if we are to address the problem successfully. Not even Russia, Canada, and Saudi Arabia will benefit if we allow abrupt or runaway climate change to occur. The outcome is best for everyone when individuals ignore the reality that their actions alone will not determine the outcome of collective action, or when they are forced to behave as though they are ignoring that fact.

For those who don’t want the planet to be subjected to the risk of catastrophic climate change (say, warming of over 4˚C, which is where we’re heading now) the practical question is how to get individuals, companies, and states to behave as though they are taking the categorical imperative seriously.

Alternatively, perhaps we should abandon the idea that people will ever voluntarily restrain their pollution for the sake of others. In that case, we need a legal and institutional structure that makes behaving in an antisocial way personally costly (carbon taxes, restrictions on particularly harmful activities, etc).

Climate: the astronaut letter

This is an interesting anomaly:

Some prominent voices at NASA are fed up with the agency’s activist stance toward climate change.

The following letter asking the agency to move away from climate models and to limit its stance to what can be empirically proven, was sent by 49 former NASA scientists and astronauts.

The letter criticizes the Goddard Institute For Space Studies especially, where director Jim Hansen and climatologist Gavin Schmidt have been outspoken advocates for action.

…

“The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.”

“We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated.”

“We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject.”

It’s true there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding abrupt and runaway climate change scenarios. That’s true almost by definition, since they represent major deviations from the functioning of the climate as we know it and we have no ability to conduct experiments on a planetary scale. It also seems fair to say that the possibility of abrupt and runaway climate change scenarios cannot be entirely excluded, if the world continues to emit vast amounts of greenhouse gas pollution.

While they are clearly objecting to some of the worst-case scenarios raised by James Hansen and others, I don’t think the people who signed this letter are likely to be of the view that climate change isn’t a problem at all. Unfortunately, it’s certain that this letter will circulate for years as a tool used by climate change delayers to argue that we should do nothing about the problem of accumulating CO2.

Other thoughts?

The End of Nature

In The End of Nature, Middlebury College professor and 350.org founder Bill McKibben makes the case that humanity has put an end to nature by altering the climate, and then goes on to consider the implications. McKibben’s book – first published in 1989 – briefly explains why human activities are increasing the quantity of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, and why this will produce change on a planetary scale. His tone is mostly one of lamentation. He expresses sadness about that which is already doomed to destruction, before progressing extensively into the question of what can still be saved, and what means might achieve it. Reading The End of Nature in 2012 is dispiriting. It proves how everything important about climate change was well understood decades ago, including why our political and economic systems have done nothing serious to slow it down. Nonetheless, McKibben’s appeal is a poignant and effective one. By putting humanity’s current activities in context, McKibben conveys the reality that what happens to the Earth now will mostly be a matter of human choices, and that the philosophies we adopt in the decades ahead will affect the prospects of all the life forms that depend upon this planet.

The basic idea of the book is that humanity has no so thoroughly altered the planet that nothing can be considered ‘nature’ in the sense of ‘unpopulated wilderness’ anymore. Climate change is the most important and dramatic change humanity has produced, but our chemical signature is also written in the form of novel isotopes from nuclear tests, changes to the ozone layer, and in the legacy of pollution and pesticides. According to McKibben’s definition, nobody my age has ever seen nature – only nature as modified through human industrial activity.

Along with climate change, McKibben devotes a fair bit of space to talking about genetic engineering. He sees it as a possible way of keeping humanity’s billions alive in a world that is increasingly damaged by our choices. But it is also another step away from ‘nature’. He envisions a world of trees and fish and animals modified to tolerate a changed climate, and modified further to better serve human needs. Reading these passages in 2012, it seems like he over-estimated the importance of genetic engineering, or at least under-estimated how long it would take to arrive. For instance, he imagines custom organisms that draw in nutrients through tubes and produce the parts of chickens many humans enjoy eating. Margaret Atwood’s ‘ChickieNobs’ from the dystopian 2003 novel Oryx and Crake are described in basically identical terms in McKibben’s book, but nothing remotely like them seems to exist in the real world. So far, genetic engineering has been more about experimentation than implementation, and nothing too world-changing seems to have arisen from it. Perhaps that perspective reflects ignorance on my part, especially given the evolving character of the global ‘agribusiness’ and biotechnology industries.

Because I borrowed a copy of the book from a library, rather than buying one, I didn’t take the detailed marginal notes that I usually do when reading a book. I did, however, pick out a few passages that I think are especially evocative and worthy of discussion:

On the habits of humanity

“The problem, in other words, is not simple that burning oil releases carbon dioxide, which happens, by virtue of its molecular structure, to trap the sun’s heat. The problem is that nature, the independent force that has surrounded us since our earliest days, cannot coexist with our numbers and our habits. We may well be able to create a world that can support our numbers and our habits, but it will be an artificial world, a space station.

Or, just possibly, we could change our habits.” (p.144 2006 Random House trade paperback edition)

Timing

“I have tried to explain, though, why [dealing with climate change] cannot be put off any longer. We just happen to be living at the moment when the carbon dioxide has increased to an intolerable level. We just happen to be alive at the moment when if nothing is done before we die the world’s tropical rain forests will become a brown girdle around the planet that will last for millennia. It’s simply our poor luck; it might have been nicer to have been born in 1890 and died in 1960, confident that everything was looking up. We just happen to be living in the decade when genetic engineering is acquiring a momentum that will soon be unstoppable. The comforting idea that we could decide to use such technology to, in the words of Lewis Thomas, cure “most of the unsolved diseases on society’s agenda” and then not use it to straighten trees or grow giant trout seems implausible to me: we’re already doing those things.” (p.165)

On caring for future generations

“We flatter ourselves that we think of the future. Politicians are always talking about our children, our grandchildren, and, as individuals, we do think about them, but in the same way we think about ourselves. We lay aside money for them, or land. But we do not really think of grandchildren in general. “Future generations do not vote; they have no political or financial power; they cannot challenge our decisions,” said a perceptive introduction to the United Nations report on Our Common Future. Future generations depend on us, but not vice versa. “We act as we do because we can get away with it.”” (p.170)

Beyond what one person can deal with

“The inertia of affluence, the push of poverty, the soaring population – these and the other reasons listed earlier make me pessimistic about the changes that we will dramatically alter our ways of thinking and living, that we will turn humble in the face of our troubles.

A purely personal effort is, of course, just a gesture – a good gesture, but a gesture. The greenhouse effect is the first environmental problem we can’t escape by moving to the woods. There are no personal solutions. There is no time to just decide we’ll raise enlightened children and they’ll slowly change the world. (When the problem was that someone might drop the Bomb, it perhaps made sense to bear and raise sane, well-adjusted children in the hope that they’d help prevent the Bomb from being dropped. But the problem now is precisely too many children, well adjusted or otherwise.) We have to be the ones to do it, and simply driving less won’t matter, except as a statement, a way to get other people – many other people – to drive less. Most people have to be persuaded, and persuaded quickly, to change.” (p.174)

So McKibben lays out the challenge that has been occupying some of the most capable and driven people in the world for decades (occupying them, but not yet producing even the beginnings of success) and which seems likely to be the defining activity for humanity as a whole for the decades and centuries ahead.

Since 2007, McKibben has been an important organizer of environmental campaigns and the founder of 350.org, an organization that aims to keep the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide below 350 parts per million. Beyond that level, the sensitivity of the Earth to greenhouse gasses is such that we would likely see the disappearance of nations like the Maldives along with large parts of nations like Bangladesh and the Netherlands, accompanied by profound changes to physical and biological systems around the world. Keeping the level of greenhouse gas pollution in the atmosphere below 350ppm is incredibly ambitious and far beyond what any large country on the planet is meaningfully aiming for now. If implemented globally, Canada’s policies would probably put us more in the territory of 1000ppm by 2100 – territory that involves changes so profound that they might threaten the future of the human species, as well as the future of countless other less resilient species in the ecosystems of the world.

The End of Nature is a reminder of the scale of the fight we have on our hands, as well as of the stakes involved. If we are to have any chance of succeeding, we must be committed, passionate, strategic, self-sacrificing and willing to do what has never been done before.

Gambling with high stakes

As with other high-risk activities, I think gambling on climate change is irresponsible and reckless, even if the people making that bet turn out to be right.

If a person runs across a minefield in order to experience the thrill of danger, few people are likely to congratulate them for their bold choice in the face of uncertainty. Even if you get away with it, it is foolish to run careless risks, especially when the consequences of getting it wrong are severe. This is why Russian Roulette is commonly regarded as an absurdly irresponsible pastime.

Say there is some powerful negative feedback that climate scientists haven’t yet identified. And say it manages to reduce the severity of climate change substantially. Imagine it is 2100 and we are looking back at 2012. I think the people considering the problem from that vantage would be quite willing to recognize how scary climate change looked in 2012. I also think they would be willing to chastise us for our inactivity on the problem, even in a scenario where it worked out that our most extreme fears for what climate change might mean weren’t recognized. Rather than being concerned about climate change ‘alarmists’ who called for action, I suspect impartial citizens in 2100 would be critical of the people who wanted us to plow heedlessly on with fossil fuel development, despite the serious outstanding questions on what effect that would have on the future of human civilization.

From any rational perspective, it makes sense for the world as a whole to take serious action to reduce the seriousness of climate change and the probability of extremely bad outcomes. The problem is that this course of action is not in the short-term interests of many individuals, including powerful people whose wealth and influence is rooted in the status quo.

The real question, when it comes to climate change, is how to make individuals, companies, and countries behave more like they would if they were taking the rights and welfare of everybody seriously. Something like the Categorical Imperative (or even the Harm Principle) provides the moral backing for this view. The question is how to discourage selfish and destructive behaviour while encouraging the cooperation and sacrifice that are required to protect the planet and discharge our duties with respect to future generations.