The factual premise, that if you don’t affect whether the plane flies then you don’t affect emissions, is wrong. Your mass and the mass of your luggage force the plane to expend more fuel to accelerate, decelerate, and to maintain cruising speed on a given route.

Which would be no-one. You get to 4-ish assuming 1.5 tanks per leg (which would be conservative, cos it’s probably closer to 2). Next time try reading before mouthing off.

Second, I think you’re reading Parfit sort of backwards here: He explicitly wants to argue that each “torturer” acts wrongly even if we think the notion of “imperceptible pain” is a sort of nonsense, and even stipulating that an individual torturer causes nobody any pain at all. Bottom of page 80, if you’re following along at home.

The quote the brought me here, translated with one word substitutions makes something of a point, namely turning ‘flying’ into ‘voting’ and ‘global warming’ into ‘fascism’ with some creative license:

“THE LOGIC OF COLLECTIVE ACTION Will Wilkinson asks whether it’s useful to refrain from voting in order to prevent fascism. Answer: no. Any one voter’s demand will not impact the level of punitive instead of productive taxation levels, just as no citizen who recycles will actually cause the amount of food shortages to fall; the random mismatch in the supply and demand in your local market for carbon credits will far exceed the number of chickens you might have eaten for any time frame you choose.

So why vote? To create a cultural norm about democracy, or fascism, says Will. I have a different intuition, which is that if you want everyone to give up limousines, you are morally bound to do it too, even though limousines are all full of tacky 1970s decore and empty bars unless you pre-pay for that sort of thing. I am rethinking that — but I have a sense that those sorts of illogical bourgeois committments to virtue are precisely what allow us to talk over the heads of normal Americans.”

- Nik

P.S. Typewrite alert to computer users: The use of ‘–’ is an old TYPEWRITER trick to make a DASH instead of two hyphens, but if you simply type alt-1050, oh, forget it, wow, I thought it was there, but I used to use the little Macintosh utility called ‘keyboard’ to copy and paste it: Option-Hyphen – vs. a normal dash -. See the difference?! I don’t, but if I make a bunch of them, you’ll see some difference –––—-–––—––—––– like Morse Code, but more subtle. But we all know, don’t we, why we all use (except for the *one* guy who is going to protest this comment) QWERTY keyboards? Because *early* typewriters were too mechanically prone to jamming that they figured out how to SLOW down the typist as best as possible. How? By putting common characters in very inconvenient locations. Which is the most obvious character? I’d say ‘p’ since I have to reach way up with my pinky to get it, but also, the DELIBERATE confusion between ‘c’, ‘v’, and ‘b’. So what letters so our eight (thumb is just the SPACE bar, only, even though HUMANS are defined by having a versatile “opposing thumb”?!) fingers placed upon? My right pinky is on the semicolon; what a travesty. My main finger, my Index Finger is on the lost letter ‘j’, as in JERK, JUGS or JESUS, which do not rhyme with COLONoscopy. And there’s no dash on the keyboard. At all. You must enter code to get one!!!

—

Ha ha!!! Look!!! I’ll add a few to my ‘–––—-–––—––—–––’:

————————————————–––—-–––—––—–––————————————————–––––––––––

You can’t see it at the very end, but if you look CLOSELY, the last 11 digits are almost half as long as the ones preceding it, an have no relation to the hyphens or “underscores” available to normal people.

In 1962, computers keyboards got something new, SINCE BEFORE THEN IT WAS ALL LIKE THIS. They got a shift key. Dashes_were-hyphens=were under_scores. But they left out the actual dash.

So…it you’d ever like to use a real dash instead of a hyphen, just go to Wikipedia and copy one for pasting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash

Also, I’m largely having fun here. The contractarian compliance problem, which this is an instance of, is one of my fortes. As you know, I think the point of moral conventions is precisely to overcome the myopia of rational self-interest. If carbon emissions really are harmful, and new consumption norms that limit emissions would really make people better off, then I’m all for them. But my point, RE: Henry, is that the same reasoning then applies to paying tithes to the government — if you really happen to think a bigger government budget would improve society. If you think moral conventions are insufficient, you might want coercion as a backup, but it doesn’t make sense to discourage the development of the moral norm.

Of course, but skipping your sister’s wedding while patting yourself on the back for “Saving the Earth” does more to improve one’s self esteem and sense of moral superiority than does putting a gun to your head and pulling the trigger. Takes less effort too.

So total consumption really doesn’t matter in the equation. What matters is if the reduction is “moral” in the first place.

Now the idea of assuming that climate change already causes 150,000 deaths is where the problem lies. What they are really saying is that C02 emissions cause 150,000 deaths, but that’s only half the equation. Considering the carrying capacity of the earth without the C02 emmissions is on the order of millions not billions you need to add back in the billions.

So the net lives saved by climate change is in the billions.