The environment – Page 60 – a sibilant intake of breath

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.

2012

No matter what else we achieve, if the generations alive now fail to prevent catastrophic climate change we will be seen as failures by the generations that will suffer after us. We will be remembered as the people who had all the knowledge and technology required to preserve a habitable Earth, but who were too ignorant or distracted or greedy to actually do it. We will be the generation that breaks the chain of inheritance – which has links extending back through all of human history – and that passes on a degraded and dangerous world after having received a promising and prosperous one.

It’s remarkable to read Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, published in 1989 when I was six years old. In it, he describes everything that is happening now: the growing scientific certainty accompanying increasingly perceptible changes in the outside world, the body of scientific research and understanding being assembled over decades and centuries. And yet, despite how the message has been clear and compelling for decades, the world hasn’t even started moving in the right direction yet, much less started moving that way quickly enough to avoid disaster.

The stupidity of what we are doing is startling.

What to do about climate change

Recently, I suggested that perhaps there is a division between ethical questions that are hard to answer and those where the answers are merely deeply inconvenient.

Something a bit similar is probably true of climate change policies. There are a few things we should obviously do, but many large questions outstanding.

Something clear: carbon pricing

For example, I think it’s clear that we need an economy-wide price on carbon. Every activity that produces greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution causes harm that isn’t reflected in its price. When you buy a car, or gasoline, or a laptop, or airline tickets, the cost should include some reckoning of how much harm is being done by the GHG pollution you are causing. As I mentioned before, the purpose of this extra cost isn’t to pay compensation to the victims, but rather to discourage the harmful behaviour. As such, the price on carbon needs to be set high enough to drive people to change their behaviour.

There are those who object to the idea of pricing carbon at all – often because they distrust capitalism and market mechanisms. I can understand the sentiment, but I think the urgency of climate change obligates us to develop mechanisms that are capable of working within the general systems we have. Carbon pricing fits the bill. (More on my fantasy climate policy is here).

Something uncertain: nuclear power

One question with no clear answer is what ought to be done with nuclear power. In a weird reversal of their stereotypical roles, The Economist is now calling nuclear power “the dream that failed” while George Monbiot is emphatically encouraging the British government to stick with nuclear because of the importance of cutting GHG pollution.

I have written before about the tricky balance involved in the nuclear decision (PDF). I don’t think the answer is clear. Nuclear power stations have certainly played a role in making GHG pollution levels lower than they would have been in a world without nuclear power. At the same time, nuclear power stations are dangerous, both in terms of accidents and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In terms of cost, I still think the figures that are available are too contradictory and untrustworthy to be used as the basis for sound decision-making.

One shot

In the end, humanity only has one shot at this. We have one planet that we will warm to a greater or lesser degree and one global civilization that we will power to a greater or lesser degree in one way or another. We have options with varying levels of risk and types of risk (risks of doing nothing, risks of geoengineering, etc). Finally, we have governments that have largely failed to appreciate the seriousness of the issue, and a powerful assortment of industries dependent on fossil fuels that have been very effective at pressuring governments to do nothing major about the problem of climate change.

One way or another, the people who are young today will probably live to see which way the world will go. If we keep burning fossil fuels in the way we are now, the best science suggests that we are headed for a world more than 4°C warmer with sea levels several metres higher and other serious unpredictable effects. Alternatively, if we get serious about the multi-decadal project of decarbonizing the global energy supply, people who are young today may live to see the emergence of a global civilization that runs on renewable forms of energy within a stable climate.

P.S. I think the question of what individuals can most productively do in response to climate change is pretty clear: lobby your elected representatives. If you really want to focus on reducing your personal impact instead of changing the system, the best choice may be to travel less, eat less meat, and avoid having children.

Ethical questions: the unclear and the unpalatable

There are two kinds of difficult ethical problems: situations where it is genuinely hard to work out what the right course of action is, and situations where the right course of action is fairly clear but people are unwilling to do it.

Air travel is an example of the second type. I think it’s pretty unarguable that our excessive emissions of greenhouse gas pollution are unethical. Long flights produce excessive amounts of CO2, and many (perhaps most) of those long flights serve morally unimportant purposes. As such, people should fly less, because their decisions to fly harm innocent strangers. And yet, few people are willing to do that. They put their own preferences and convenience ahead of the interests of others. Eating most types of meat and dairy products probably falls into this category too – at least if you think the suffering of non-human animals has any moral importance.

The international distribution of the costs of dealing with climate change may be an ethical problem of the first type. It’s not entirely clear what the ethical status of historical emissions is, what the relevance of population is, the importance of per capita emissions, etc. While it may not be entirely clear who should pay exactly what, I do think it is clear that every country needs to take action – far more action than they are taking now.

Accelerating in the wrong direction

In terms of its actions, Canada continues to deeply misunderstand the nature, seriousness, and implications of climate change.

What we know about the history of the climate and the nature of greenhouse gases strongly suggests that the continuing build-up of greenhouse gas pollution in the atmosphere is highly dangerous.

Since burning fossil fuels is the major source of that pollution, both Canada and the world as a whole need to be talking about how to phase out fossil fuels.

Instead, we are talking about how to massively increase our production and exports of these dangerous substances. We should be winding down production of coal, oil, and gas – not continuing to dig and drill more and more, or building thick new export corridors for hydrocarbons that really ought to remain underground.

Meteorologists on climate

The other day, I saw a Vancouver Sun article called “Meteorologists split on global warming“.

I was struck in particular by the sub-headline: “Fewer than one in five specialists in the U.S. see human influence as the only driver”.

At first glance, may seem like a garden-variety example of climate change skepticism from experts in fields other than climatology. People who are experts in one area often have misplaced confidence about their expertise in others.

On second reading, the sentence betrays considerable ignorance about the subject of climate. If “19 per cent of U.S. meteorologists saw human influences as the sole driver of climate change in a 2011 survey” then at least 19% of U.S. meteorologists have no idea what they are talking about.

Nobody is arguing that human behaviour – or CO2 emissions exclusively – is the only thing that affects the climate. Look up the concept of ‘radiative forcing‘ and you will quickly learn that scientists have studied many of the causes of climate change in detail. The work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has involved consideration of other things. They looked at impacts from changes in ozone, albedo (the reflectiveness of the Earth’s surface), aerosols, linear contrails, and changes in the energy output of the sun. When you look at all of these factors, you see that greenhouse gases are simply the most important cause of change in the climate right now, and we are poised to emit vast additional quantities of them as the world continues to burn fossil fuels.