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Why can’t the world do the right and obvious thing about this huge and urgent problem?
The science is clear and not really in question. The core mechanism of how certain molecules create a greenhouse warming effect on the earth is well-understood (and has been known for over a century). Evidence that human activities are releasing greenhouse gases in dangerously disruptive quantities is also very clear and well-established, as is the obvious conclusion that humanity has to stop doing this. Moreover, the economic costs of transforming the global economy to run on non climate-destabilising energy sources, while substantial, seem quite affordable, especially when compared to the costs upon humanity and the wider world of continuing 'business as usual'.
Of course there are myriad important sub-questions to investigate about climate change, the answers to which are still contested by the relevant expert groups of scientists (like how all the extra heat being absorbed by the world is distributed geographically, and its precise impact on different weather systems). However, basically, the science is clear. Moreover, more or less all the world’s governments accept the scientific definition of the problem and the solution. And yet the clear and obvious solution remains unimplemented!
1. The Political Problem: Countries Not Companies
Some climate change activists take an unfortunately conspiratorial view of the climate change policy problem. They point to vested interests that benefit from the continuation of the fossil-fuel economy, and the lobbying and climate change denialism of especially the Western multinational oil companies (Shell seems to be a particular, almost pathological obsession of many, despite being dwarfed by multiple state-owned companies).
This view correctly identifies the central policy problem as political (and not primarily technological or economic). However it badly misdiagnoses the character of the political problem as a case of us vs them. In classic populist style, the ‘real’ people of the world (honest, decent, innocent) are set against a corrupt elite that has captured our political institutions and uses them to advance their own narrow and selfish financial interests while driving the world to hell.
Populism is an instinctive human response to a mismatch between the government we have and the outcomes we want. It is especially common as a reaction to Wicked Problems, in which it is much easier to generate agreement that some state of affairs, such as a war or racism or violent crime or expensive housing is unacceptable than it is to agree on how to best address it. Populism typically diagnoses the solution as simple - basically the absence of the immediate cause of the problem. For example, if you think that illegal migration is a problem then the populist response is to demand that the government just deport them all. Crime could be solved by just locking up all the criminals. Climate change by just eliminating the emission of greenhouse gases. Why does the government refuse to do this one simple thing? It must be because they don't want to - perhaps because they are not really on our side - and need to be forced to do the right thing or replaced by someone who will.
Populism is of course almost always badly wrong as a guide to understanding or addressing our wicked problems. The main business of governments is managing (but never solving!) such problems. Many governments have become pretty good at this (often by finding the right ways to leave things alone, as in capitalism), which is why so many people around the world live so much better than humans have ever done before. Nevertheless, the character of wicked problems means that there are always reasonable complaints to be made both about the new problems introduced by every attempted measure to address them, the incompleteness of those measures, and the whole messy process.
In the case of climate change the activists are correct that there is a particular political division that makes the policy problem even harder. But it is the division between countries, not between pure innocent humanity and wicked fossil fuel companies. The basic problem is that the world is divided into countries but climate change is not:
The benefits from investments to reduce emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gases are a global public good. They require costly investments by individual countries. However, the benefits from the lower emissions are spread widely around the world, and the country undertaking the investments will receive only a tiny fraction of the benefits….
Global public goods differ from national or local public goods because there are no mechanisms—either market or governmental—to deal with them effectively. Under international law, countries must consent to joining international agreements, and all agreements are therefore essentially voluntary. If countries act rationally in their own self-interest, they will have a strong incentive to free-ride on the emissions reductions of others. One result of free-riding is the failure of the only significant international climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, along with the difficulties of arriving at effective arguments and measures to follow up the treaty. (William Nordhaus, Nobel Prize winning economist, who also suggests an ingenious ‘Climate Club’ solution)
In other words, addressing climate change is a classic collective action problem requiring national governments to somehow overcome their clear interest in free-riding on the greenhouse gas reduction efforts of others. Evidence of the world’s failure to act effectively is not evidence that some agent (such as the nefarious Shell) is interfering with our political system and making our governments behave irrationally. Our political systems are functioning more or less as one would expect of a world divided into nation states.
The democracies are following the logic of the social contract and prioritising the interests of their own citizens (the ones who actually vote, not the imaginary future ones). The dictatorships are prioritising their key interests in preserving both their regime and their ability to extract the most loot possible from their populations. In both cases what is irrational would be to expect national governments to follow the utilitarian moral logic of sacrificing their interests (which include their rule and hence ability to address climate change at all), in order to advance the good of humanity as a whole. Even – especially – low lying poor countries at existential risk from climate change are eager to explore for oil and sell any they are lucky enough to discover. The additional fossil fuels burnt accelerate global warming only slightly, while the cash received massively enhances the state’s ability to adapt to and survive the rising waters.
Of course it is unfortunate that the net result of this is a degree of climate change that will make all countries significantly worse off. But this collectively foolish outcome does not result from a failure of rationality by our governments. It is not a cognitive error that can be put right if the facts are properly explained and corrupting influences removed, even if the ritualistic performances of protestors blocking motorways and throwing paint at museum exhibits could magically accomplish such a thing. (To repeat: Almost all the governments of the world already know and accept the science of climate change.)
Nation states have been a fantastic institutional device for achieving security, rights, and prosperity by giving specific organisations monopoly privileges to rule over the populations within certain territorial boundaries, and hence also clarifying the organisation that the people can hold responsible for what happens to them. Despite its huge achievements, this system has clear shortfalls. For example, many (billions of) people are unlucky enough to be ruled by governments that refuse to take their responsibilities seriously and instead use their monopoly on power to terrorise the population into submission and extract wealth from them. More pertinent here is that dividing the world into countries means that solving local problems has become much simpler (though never easy), but solving global problems like pandemics or climate change or nuclear proliferation has actually become harder because of the sovereignty barriers that separate human beings from each other and prevent us from organising for our collective good.
So here we are at the real political problem preventing the effective management of the climate change challenge: countries. Effective political action on climate change can only be carried out by nation states. But the political logic of nation states cannot support the kind of dramatic policy measures required to prevent massive climate disruption. We are stuck with the kind of policies that make sense to nation states:
- Waiting and hoping for technological development to lower costs enough that effective action won’t require any real sacrifice of their state’s interests
- Reconciling ourselves to climate change and investing in adaptation measures (which are generally national rather than global public goods)
- Holding the ‘silver bullet’ of geoengineering in reserve (a gamble, but cheap enough for at least some individual countries to carry out by themselves)
2. The Appeal to Global Democracy
Many environmentalists rightly recognise that their national governments aren’t working for humanity’s interests. (Leave aside their unfortunate conspiratorial fantasies that governments are working for Shell instead.) They believe they can fix this by finding ways to make their government care about the full costs to the world of the climate disrupting gases they allow their citizens and businesses to emit. That is, they seek to persuade their national governments to internalise those global harms so that minimising them becomes part of their own interests. The global defense against climate change would become a matter of national defense.
This presents a special justification for the democratic character of coercive but non-violent political activism that is usually lacking. In a democracy the people are already free to try to persuade each other that an issue (such as the cost of housing) is an important problem that should be politicised, i.e. be addressed by state interventions. So when a few dozen or hundred people turn out to block a busy road while waving banners about their cause, it is reasonable to see this group as disrespecting democracy and their fellow citizens rather than contributing to it (previously). Who are they to decide for all the rest of us what our government should do?
However, the same protest on behalf of climate change policy action can be given a democratic justification insofar as the protesters can claim to be representing what the people of the world would demand if they were organised as a global political constituency.
It is true that – as in the case of national political protests – the protestors’ claim still depends on an assertive act of imagination that may still strike us as presumptuous. However, in this case one cannot so easily declare that protestors are assuming a political authority that does not belong to them, for in this case they are not usurping the properly constituted authority of any existing political entity. Not only is there no world government, but there are scarcely even any genuinely global organisations that are not inter-national ones (i.e. organised between and accountable to national governments). Humanity as a whole is politically unrepresented. Our interests as citizens of the world are not counted and do not count anywhere.
If humanity could speak up politically, what would we ask for? Probably not the kind of things that most Western environmentalists - or liberals like myself - consider right and good. Judging by World Values Surveys data, traditionalist and collectivist social values dominate much of the world, especially the Global South, and so would dominate the choices that a global democracy would make. Ideas like universal individual human rights would be unlikely to have majority support, nor particular liberal values like the legalisation of gay relationships, let alone gay marriage.
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| From The Economist's recent write up of World Values Survey data |
Of course, democracy has the potential for transforming values, not just revealing them. We can’t know what people would ask for if they could talk and organise freely with each other across borders and know that their opinions would actually count. But we should set limits to our optimism there too. It seems pretty clear from actually existing democracies – large and small, rich and poor – that while democracies are generally the best regimes to live under (on average and over the long run), they are not particularly wise or enlightened states (further, David Runciman).
Nonetheless, perhaps we can identify a reasonable minimum global consensus regarding the problem of climate change. Whatever else they value or might come to value, a global citizenry would see global warming from a global rather than a national perspective. In other words, it can reasonably be claimed that a global citizenry would frame the climate change policy problem in the same way that environmentalists and climate scientists instinctively already do!
Taking up a global democracy perspective appears to legitimise the environmentalists’ expectation – and demand – that every nation state government should consider themselves as acting on behalf of the whole of humanity rather than merely their own interests, and therefore should rationally take more costly actions than would otherwise be justified. Yet there are at least two major problems with environmentalists’ belief that the world could quickly get to carbon zero if only they could persuade their governments to adopt the perspective of humanity as a whole.
3. The Non-Ideal World Problem
The first problem is that just because something would work out for the best if everyone did it does not mean that each individual ought to do it regardless of what others do. This is because the point of the action is to achieve some outcome, and whether that will actually be achieved depends on whether enough others will also do that thing.
Consider:
P1. When every nation state government limits itself to considering the costs and benefits of climate change mitigation policies to its own interests, they will each make choices that end up making the whole world – and every individual country – worse off (a classic prisoners’ dilemma).
P2. If every nation state government adopted the global perspective then the costs and benefits analysis would favour sufficient mitigation to prevent (further) drastic climate change.
Therefore C: Each nation state government should adopt the global perspective.
Compare:
P1. War is bad
P2. If every country unilaterally disarmed there would be no war
Therefore C: Every country should unilaterally disarm
Environmentalists expect and demand that their government follow a utilitarian moral logic, of choosing whichever actions are likely to maximise aggregate (global) rather than individual (national) welfare. And they assume that such a utilitarian policy-maker would opt for dramatic carbon reduction policies that generate the greatest benefit to the world. But this does not actually follow.
Suppose that the EU as a block were to be persuaded or coerced by an aggressive political campaign by extinction rebellion (or, more plausibly, some much more reasonable and hence popular environmentalist political movement) to adopt the utilitarian point of view. Suppose at the same time that many of the other governments of the world – China, the US, India, and so on – are not persuaded to become utilitarians. Then the correct utilitarian choice for EU policy-makers might be some 2nd or 3rd best action, such as to maximise economic growth and invest in adaptation technologies that can be shared with other countries. Otherwise they might end up simply reducing consumption of fossil fuels in one rich part of the world and thereby allowing people and businesses in other parts of the world to be able to afford to consume them instead (effectively a carbon subsidy, which economist Hans-Werner Sinn has argued actually describes the main outcome of 30 years of post-Kyoto efforts).
4. The Costs vs Benefits Problem
The second problem lies with the environmentalists’ assumption that just because humanity as a whole would value stopping climate change, that they value this as much as environmentalists do. In this case the problem is not that the environmentalists are wrong about what a utilitarian policy maker should actually do, but that they are wrong to suppose that the population of the world as a whole would endorse a really utilitarian moral calculus in which present and near-term consumption should be very severely restricted in order to create the greatest possible benefits for the humans who may come to live here in the next thousands or millions of years. Another way of putting this is that cheap energy has allowed humanity to escape from Malthusian poverty into comfort, freedom, and opportunities our ancestors could only dream of, and we are not going to give that up (previously). The simple and obvious solution to climate change is a non-starter.
The first reason is that humans are biased in favour of the present. There's a lot of variation here between actual people, but we all care much more about how our lives are going now than we do about how our own lives will go in 30 years, let alone the lives of future strangers. Hence why we smoke, drink, eat too much junk food, and don’t get around to doing all the important projects we say we would like to. Environmentalists may object that this is irrational according to utilitarianism, but if one’s claim is to be representing the actual will of global humanity then this objection is not helpful.
The second reason is that we have lots of other projects competing for our attention and resources besides climate change. Environmentalists seem to forget - or willfully wish away the complication - that climate change is only one of the many huge, urgent wicked problems that human societies are facing. For example, numerous governments have recently discovered that the world is not as peaceful as they would like it to be, and they will somehow have to find more money to spend on soldiers, tanks, and anti-missile systems to defend against a different kind of existential threat. (And unfortunately, by becoming an increased danger to each other, countries have also become an even greater challenge to the politics of climate change action.) At the same time, an aging society creates ever more demand for ever more expensive care while reducing the number of people working to create the resources from which to fund this and our other projects - such as all the other environmental challenges from nitrification to biodiversity collapse that are also pressing.
It is not clear to me that individual democracies are doing such a bad job trying to balance the demands of all these competing challenges. Certainly it is not something that could or should be left to the real scientific experts who contribute to IPCC reports, nor to the self-appointed champions of climate science who join groups like Extinction Rebellion. But given the global democracy gap - that most humans do not live under real democracies, and that there is no global democratic constituency - one may reasonably wonder whether we are doing enough to prioritise the global challenge of climate change.
One way to get some idea is provided by environmental economists like Nordhaus, who look to the aggregate economic behaviour of humanity to reveal our actual, all things considered, priorities. We don't have global democracy, but we do have more or less global markets. Nordhaus suggests that market interest rates may be read as indications of the minimum economic return a project needs to generate to compete with the other uses we could find for those resources. The claim is that humanity as a whole already reveals how much we care about future vs present consumption in such ways, and if someone wants to argue that the climate change issue requires a different system of accounting the burden is on them to show why it makes sense for humans to care so much more about future states of affairs involving climate disruptions than we do about the future in general.
To make the costs and benefits of climate action compatible with actual human interests and their actual value to us, Nordhaus recommends a ‘climate ramp’, with much slower initial rates of emissions reductions than environmentalists typically propose. (See below.) As it happens, this trajectory is much closer to the one the world is actually on. Perhaps the world's messy, muddled, fractious management of the climate change challenge is not going quite so badly after all.
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Scenarios: The Nordhaus DICE model indicates paths of future global emissions over time in a baseline no-policy scenario (Base), an optimal scenario (Opt), a scenario that keeps global temperatures from increasing more than 2.5 degrees C (T<2.5) and a scenario using a low discount rate as advocated by the Stern Review. Source (Original source: Nordhaus 2018) |
Note: A previous version of this essay appeared on 3 Quarks Daily
