Unconventional Ways To Contribute To Climate Care: World Peace, Ozempic, Economic Growth

Update: Now also on substack

It is widely recognised that climate change is so hard to deal with because it is a super wicked problem. Every part of it is connected to everything else and is continuously changing; billions of actors with different opinions and interests disagree about what to do; there is no right solution; every (expert's) way of understanding the problem is a misleading simplification; and so on (previously). 

It is less widely recognised that some of the very features that make climate care so hard also present opportunities for making it easier. In particular, the feature that everything is connected to everything else means that climate change is exacerbated by many other challenges at the same time that our efforts to manage it must compete with those other challenges for our limited resources - political, organsiational, and economic. For example, the New Cold War is geopoliticising international relations and diverting massive resources towards rearmament (in attempts to deter hot war). The New Cold War makes climate care harder. Conversely, however, we may see that any progress we might make in returning the world to more peaceful relations would be enormously helpful for the climate care project. 

Various other challenges - from the demographic transition to public health - may have the same feature. They appear to compete with climate care for our attention, but should actually be understood as complementary to the climate care project because wicked problems get easier to manage when the world gets easier.

The Climate Change Policy Problem: Why Can’t The World Do The Right And Obvious Thing?

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Many of those who care deeply about the environment find the climate change policy problem baffling. This includes the climate scientists who contribute to the increasingly pessimistic scientific consensus, as well the environmentalist activists who see that consensus as a call to action, and the many hundreds of millions of ordinary people (and my academic colleagues) who understand climate change as an existential danger to humanity.

Why can’t the world do the right and obvious thing about this huge and urgent problem?

We Should Fix Climate Change, But We Should Not Regret It

Climate change is a huge and urgent problem. It is natural to suppose that it is therefore a terrible mistake, an unforced error that we should regret and try to prevent ever happening again.

I disagree. Climate change is the unfortunate outcome of the economic growth that has transformed human civilisation for the better. We cannot regret climate change without regretting the vastly better world for most people that the fossil-fuel powered technological revolutions of the last 250 years have achieved. Nor should we draw the anti-technology lesson that solutions are always worse than the original problems, that humans should retreat to living within the bounds of nature rather than attempting to escape them.

Don't Pity the People of the Future

Climate change is such a terrifying large problem that it is hard to think sensibly about. On the one hand this makes many people prefer denial. On the other hand it can exert a warping effect on the reasoning of even those who do take it seriously. In particular, many confuse the power we have over what the lives of future generations will be like - and the moral responsibility that follows from that - with the idea that we are better off than them. These people seem to have taken the idea of the world as finite and combined it with the idea that this generation is behaving selfishly to produce a picture of us as gluttons whose overconsumption will reduce future generations to penury. But this completely misrepresents the challenge of climate change.

Academics Should Not Be Activists

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In a civilised society, academic scientists are granted a special epistemic authority. They deserve to be listened to, their claims believed, and their recommendations considered seriously. This is because what they say about their subject of expertise is more likely to be true than what anyone else has to say about it.

Unfortunately, some academics believe they have a right - or even a duty - to exploit this privileged status as a resource for influencing society to do what they think best. They lead organisations and political movements to campaign systematically for specific laws, policies, and political candidates. They join governments. They tell their students who to vote for and help them organise protest marches. They launch lawsuits and organise boycotts of companies and countries they disapprove of. Here are some high profile academic activists you might have heard of Catharine MacKinnon, Richard Dawkins, Jordan Peterson, Cornell West, Peter Navarro.

My argument is that activism is something different from merely communicating what you know about a pressing topic to the public or even advocating for specific policies that follow from that expertise. Those are right and proper things for academics to do. Activism goes further and crosses a line that separates virtue from vice. It is not only unethical in itself, but is also antithetical to objective empirical research, public trust in academia, and even the functioning of activist organisations. Because academic activism short-circuits the usual quality control systems, even if it succeeds in achieving its aims it is a matter of luck whether or not society benefits. But because of how it works it certainly degrades democracy.  

Almost No Disasters Are Natural

A natural disaster is a disaster because it involves a lot of human suffering, not because the event itself is especially big or spectacular. The destruction of an uninhabited island by a volcano is not a natural disaster, because it doesn't really matter to humans. A landslide doesn't matter, however enormous, unless there is a town at the bottom of the hill.

So what does the word ‘natural' add? We use it to demarcate the edges of responsibility. We don't use it very well.

A Team Approach to Intergenerational Justice

We have difficulty living up to our obligations to future generations. To be precise, our problem is not not that we don’t care about what happens to the world after we're gone. It is that we can’t explain why we should care, and therefore cannot systematically think through and institutionalise the responsibilities implied. That might not matter so much - it hasn't mattered too much before in human history - except that we face at least one big intergenerational problem that just can't be muddled through: Climate Change.

Saving The Planet: Why Cap-and-Trade Is Not Fit For Purpose

Guest post by Tadhg Ó Laoghaire 

"It's not easy being green"

                                                                       -Kermit the Frog

A consensus is finally shaping up among international policy-makers. Market-based emissions trading has become the modern world's primary pollution control mechanism, forming a key part of various national and international bodies' commitment to climate change mitigation. The largest such market is the European Union's Emissions Trading System, which accounts for over 90% of the world's carbon market volume, but market trading systems are also a key part of the Kyoto protocol under the Clean Development Mechanism, and looks set to be adopted in China in the near future. Unfortunately cap-and-trade emissions systems are structurally incapable of delivering us from climate change.

This Christmas, give the gift of a blameless life to someone you love

Do you want to be a good person but find yourself always falling short?

It may not be your fault. These days it is difficult to feel like a good person. In fact the harder you try, the more you may feel like a failure.

The calls on our moral attention are multiplying at an extraordinary rate. We are living through a perfect storm of social justice movements, activist NGOs, an unusually plausible pope, and a flood of academic moral philosophers trying to write for the public. Globalisation means that we have to take account of the furthest implications of our actions. The internet and social media spread the news of our ever increasing obligations and strike down those who sin without mercy.

Rich countries are not to blame for global warming but they should still pay more to stop it

An unfortunate side effect of the moralisation of global warming is the blame game. A large number of people seem to think it makes sense to address the enormous problem of global warming by putting various rich countries on trial for their crimes against the atmosphere over the past 200 years. This project is a foolish one, a backwards looking side-show that - perhaps conveniently - distracts political attention from the pragmatic policy debates we need for actually addressing the problem (previously). But even if we were to take it seriously it wouldn't give the answers one might expect.