Joe Brewer of The Rockridge Institute (aka, the George Lakoff Center for a More Scientific Leftwing Propaganda) discusses the “cognitive dimension of climate policy” in “How Conservatives Have Duped Us in the Global Warming Fight.” As far as I can tell, this duping consists entirely of basic social-scientific literacy. Here’s Brewer’s expose of the enemy frame:

Idea No. 1: Protecting the environment harms the economy

This idea has been promulgated for decades by conservative think tanks like Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, Competitive Enterprise Institute and others. It is based on the foundational claims that (1) the environment and the economy are fundamentally different things, and (2) they compete with one another in a zero-sum manner — meaning that a gain for one amounts to an equivalent loss for the other. This idea takes many forms. Here are a few that we hear all the time:

• Environmental action will cost us jobs.
• American companies will be burdened by additional costs.
• Addressing global warming will put our economy at a competitive disadvantage versus the rest of the world.
• Renewable energy must compete with traditional energy sources, like coal and oil, before it can be implemented.

This is just weird. What does (1) even mean? Does he really think anyone thinks that? And (2) is a bald-faced misrepresentation. The general market environmentalist view is that there is something like an environmental Kuznets curve (or set of curves for different pollutants and environmental goods), according to which environmental quality degrades in early stages of economic development, and then improves at later stages.

How about those bullet points? Here’s what a bona fide Cato-style market environmentalist thinks:

• Environmental action may or may not cost jobs, depending on the action. When Chad Pegracke enlists volunteers to clean up local rivers, that’s both effective environmental action, and it doesn’t cost jobs.
• Most environmental regulations do burden companies with additional costs. How is this wrong? Does Brewer think regulatory compliance is free? If he thinks the cost is worth it for all of us in the end, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a cost bone disproportionately by the company and its shareholders.
• Imposing heavy restrictions on carbon emissions will put firms using America-based production at a competitive disadvantage relative to those using foreign-based production unless we can ensure general compliance with global restrictions. And we probably cannot. China and India (not to mention all of Africa) are on the left side of the Kuznet Curve, and they are not going to kneecap themselves for the rest of us. How is this incorrect?
• Renewable energy must be as efficient as traditional energy sources, or else using them will be more expensive, and using the more expensive alternatives leaves us with less to spend on other things. I suppose the very idea of a budget is rightwing agitprop?

Here’s Brewer’s attempt at reframing:

Idea No. 2: A healthy economy depends upon a healthy environment

The well-being of our communities (isn’t that what we mean by a healthy economy?) is intimately bound to the preservation of life-giving qualities from nature. In other words, a thriving economy depends upon protection of the environment. Separation of environment from economy is fictitious, an artifact of a flawed way of thinking.

This begs the question, “what is wealth, and where does it come from?” A progressive response might be that wealth is the well-being of individuals, society, and the earth. Wealth is more than simply material wealth. It comes in many forms — having good relationships with friends and family, maintaining physical health, and yes, living in a community where clean skies, thriving forests, and healthy streams are preserved. Clean air, drinkable water, and fertile soils are inherently valuable because our well-being depends on them — independent of markets. A consequence of this meaning is that resource preservation is wealth creation. The logic works like this:

• Wealth is anything that increases well-being.
• Clean air increases well-being, so it is a form of wealth.
• Dirtying the air reduces well-being, so it is a loss of wealth.
• Keeping the air clean is preserving wealth.

This is not an equally valid prism through which to see the issue. This is just an insistence that words come to mean what one wishes them to mean. But suppose we accept the redefinition of “wealth” as “anything that increases well-being.” It then follows that clean air is wealth only insofar as it increases well-being. If there is in fact a tradeoff in certain places between higher incomes and cleaner air, and there is, and higher incomes do more to increase well-being than cleaner air at certain stages of development, and they do, then cleaner air decreases well-being relative to the relevant alternative. And so cleaner air can be a form of poverty. QED.

The whole thing turns on denying the possibility of tradeoffs, which is just stupid. You can’t just insist that people spend more money on what you want them to spend more money on and then say that it didn’t cost them anything because it made them wealthier by your very special personal definition of wealth. Well, you can say it. And you may even manage to persuade some people. But it makes you look either foolish or dishonest to people who know better.

I’m all for availing ourselves of any useful indicator of well-being. But this can’t be merely stipulative. You need to show that something contributes to health, happiness, longevity, creativity, the realization of basic human capacities, etc. The story these indicators taken together tells us is that the greatest increases in human well-being have been a consequence of rapid economic growth, traditionally construed. This has taken a certain toll on the environment, but that hasn’t left us worse off has it? Indeed, the opposite is true. So Brewer has it backwards.

The evidence — the whole set of well-being indicators, and not just the income numbers — says that growth-based environmental changes have been associated with an increase in well-being. Historically, pollution has been side-effect of wealth, as Brewer construes wealth. Now, it is completely misleading to attempt to try to brand carbon as a pollutant, as Brewer seems to wish to do. But even so, the places that emit the largest amounts of carbon per capita are precisely the places where people tend to do best on pretty much every well-being indicator imaginable, and this relationship seems to be largely casual, and not incidental. So pretty much all the relevant evidence points to the conclusion that cutting carbon emissions in the absence of equally efficient sources of energy will reduce well-being. It will impoverish us. This is not a right-wing framing conspiracy. It’s called a considered judgment based on empirical evidence. Try it!

Now, I’m quite open to the idea that carbon taxes are an efficient method of getting folks to internalize the costs of the negative external effects of their activities. But Brewer clearly thinks that if the debate proceeds in economically-literate terms, he will not get the policies he wants.

Here’s a question and answer from AskPhilosophers that bears on the question of individual moral obligation in matters where only coordinated collective action can make any meaningful difference.

If I don’t fly from London to my sister’s wedding in New Zealand she will be upset, I will cause her pain and so that’s morally bad.If I do fly to my sister’s wedding in New Zealand I will put about four tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which will contribute to climate change, which, according to the World Health Organisation, already causes about 150,000 deaths every year. Clearly that’s also morally bad.Which is the morally correct thing to do?

December 4, 2007

Response from Thomas Pogge on December 7, 2007

In dilemmas of this kind, always start by thinking about whether they are really inescapable. One escape in this case it to speak with your sister. If she likes New Zealand, she is unlikely to be indifferent to the environmental degradation that is already so much in evidence elsewhere. Plus you can offer to donate the flight cost to a good cause of her choice, in honor of her wedding. In any case, it is much easier for her to understand and accept the decision if she was herself involved in making it or at least in thinking it through.

BTW, I checked your numbers because 4 tonnes seemed like a lot. But you are basically right. A Boeing 747-8 takes a bit over 200 tonnes of fuel (over half its take-off weight), roughly 137 gallons of fuel per passenger. Each gallon produces 20 lbs of carbon dioxide. So that’s about 1.3 tonnes per person. But then one tank does not get you there, plus you’ll have to fly back as well. So 4 tonnes is a very good estimate. Way too much, indeed.

Well, I sure wouldn’t have given Thomas Pogge’s answer, which I think is really quite silly. Even granting what I’d guess are the underlying extreme AGW assumptions, surely the correct answer is this:

Your choice is very unlikely to determine whether or not a airplane leaves London for New Zealand. So, chances are extremely high that the same amount of carbon will be emitted whether or not you choose to go. Staying or going will make no difference at all to the condition of the atmosphere. But even if your choice quite improbably keeps that plane in the hangar, the effect of that flight is infinitesimally small in the overall scheme of things. Your choice is also likely to do nothing whatsoever to improve the probability of enacting some kind of future global climate treaty or some kind of scheme for incorporating the cost of the environmental externality into the cost of plane tickets. So, if not being a horrible selfish brat of a brother matters to you at all, then you should go. In fact, you sound suspiciously like a shit trying to find a bogus, holier-than-thou excuse to wriggle out of ponying up for a flight to your sister’s wedding. If you’re broke or cheap you’ve got to tell her the truth about why you won’t go. You are emphatically not allowed to hide behind Al Gore.

Thomas Pogge is an eminent moral and political philosopher, and not a complete idiot, so what’s going on here?

The RealClimate guys report on a conference on the ethics of climate change. Here’s their summary of Henry Shue’s presentation:

Henry Shue, a Oxford philosopher well known for his work on such issues as the moral implications of torture and pre-emptive war, made the argument that the moral implications of not dealing with climate change should be thought of not only in terms of harm, but in terms of potential harm. Unfortunately for those of us that would like to keep burning fossil fuels at our current rate, Shue argues that uncertainty — the possibility that harm caused to future generations from anthropogenic climate change will be relatively small — does not get us out of our moral obligation to change our behavior. That is, one need only recognize that business as usual will increase the risk of significant harm – a point that almost nobody debates – for it to be clear that business as usual may be unethical.

Maybe this isn’t what Shue actually said, and surely he said rather more, but I find this pretty uncompelling as stated.

First, the idea of obligations to distantly future generations strikes me as incoherent. These are people that do not actually exist, and the people who do eventually exist is a function of what we do and don’t do now, which is surely a serious complication. Even if we can imagine determinate future persons to whom we might have duties, it remains that we stand outside the Humean circumstances of justice with them, and so don’t in fact have duties with respect to them. I can make sense of an ”intergenerational chain” conception of obligations to future generations: I have obligations to my children and grandchildren; my children and grandchildren have obligations to their children and grandchildren; etc. I think this can get us a few general principles, like “leave enough and as good for the kids,” but it’s unclear how this can undergird any kind of significant sacrifice for indeterminate far-distant beneficiaries.

Second, even if we can find some ground for obligations to far-future generations, we’d need to be established that “business as usual” will in fact be a net harm to future generations. Suppose a small reduction in future warming requires a small reduction in economic growth every year from now to then. The longer the time frame, the greater the harm to future generations from reduced growth rates. At some point, the loss in standard of living will completely swamp the gains from reduced warming. And, of course, the longer the time frame for significant warming, the less likely it will be that dislocations from warming will be serious. Gradual changes in patterns of capital investment, migration, etc. will move many people out of harm’s way, and perhaps move many other into areas that will benefit from warming. And, of course, the more rapid the rate of economic growth, the more likely it is that effective technologies that will retard warming, or mitigate its effects, will come on the scene. The allegedly obligatory deviation from “business as usual” may be in the direction of doing more to accelerate economic growth. It is by no means obvious that this isn’t the best course. 

Looking at the RealClimate summaries, it seems to me that there is a bit of a bias toward emphasizing the potential harms of warming while de-emphasizing — or even arguing down — anything that might prevent or mitigate those harms. RealClimate’s Steig and Schmidt write:

one of the commentators at the conference made the argument that it was an open question whether we had any moral obligation towards future generations for our impact on the climate, since that impact could in principle be averted (for example through carbon dioxide removal via ocean iron fertilization). This is equivalent to saying that we will not have to address the issue of climate change if we address it, an argument that has no bearing whatsoever on whether we have a moral obligation. We were a bit surprised to hear it from a philosopher since it is a tautology (usually anathema to philosophers).

Sounds like the unnamed philosopher may have been saying something close to part of what I was saying above, and it doesn’t sound like a tautology to me. It sounds to me like he was saying that if we’re thinking about the probability of harm, then we also have to take into account the probability of the emergence of technologies that would prevent that harm because, otherwise, you can’t calculate the total probability of harm. Why try to avoid the obvious force of that point? Steig and Schmidt’s reply amounts to this, as far as I can tell: If the emergence of this technology is motivated by the recognition of a moral obligation to address the issue, then it weirdly self-defeating to argue that people therefore don’t have a moral obligation to address the issue. Sure, but I truly doubt that was the argument. It is confused to talk about whether “we” do or don’t address warming. Not everyone invents or even funds new technologies. If someone or other does this in the future, whatever their motivation, and that makes the problem go away, then the problem will have gone away. If the probability of this is high enough, and we know it, then the rest of us non-inventing, non-invention-financing folk, are obviously off the hook right now. Now, I don’t know the probabilities of any of these things. And neither does Steig and Schmidt or Henry Shue.