More arguments by analogy to slavery

In the "hard to make this stuff up" category: an article today in The Guardian titled "Once, men abused slaves. Now we abuse fossil fuels." Here's an excerpt:

In 2005, while teaching history at a French university, I was struck by the general disbelief among students that rational and sensitive human beings could ever hold others in bondage. Slavery was so obviously evil that slave-holders could only have been barbarians. My students could not entertain the idea that some slave-owners could have been genuinely blind to the harm they were doing.

At the same time, I was reading a book on climate change which noted how today's machinery – almost exclusively powered by fossil fuels like coal and oil – does the same work that used to be done by slaves and servants. "Energy slaves" now do our laundry, cook our food, transport us, entertain us, and do most of the hard work needed for our survival.

Intriguing similarities between slavery and our current dependence on fossil-fuel-powered machines struck me: both perform roughly the same functions in society (doing the hard and dirty work that no one wants to do), both were considered for a long time to be acceptable by the majority and both came to be increasingly challenged as the harm they caused became more visible.

You can read the rest of the article here.

The article has already generated a fair amount of commentary and criticism. Keith Kloor's blog post, "A Tortured Analogy," at Collide-a-scape is particularly good.

Thoughts, comments?

Is-ought and climate change

More on the is-ought problem and climate change policy, from philosopher and law professor Keith Burgess-Jackson's blog:

The Great Climate Hoax

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the globe is warming. What follows, as a normative matter? Nothing. As David Hume (1711-1776) pointed out long ago, you can't validly deduce an evaluative proposition from a set of factual propositions. (Put differently, there has to be at least one evaluative premise in order for there to be an evaluative conclusion.) What we should do about global warming (again, assuming it exists) depends on the consequences of global warming. Few if any changes have only good consequences or only bad consequences. Almost always, there are both good and bad consequences. Whether we should do something to stop the change, therefore, depends on which type of consequence—good or bad—predominates.

How often have you heard a dispassionate discussion of the good consequences of climate change? All you hear, day after day, is a depressing litany of bad consequences. This alone shows that global warmists are biased. They want intervention to stop climate change, so they mention only the bad consequences of climate change. A rational person with no ideological axe to grind would attend to good consequences as well as to bad consequences. For example, how many people around the world die of extreme cold as opposed to extreme heat, and how would that change if the globe warmed? What is the optimal temperature for the alleviation of suffering, for both humans and sentient nonhuman animals? How many different species of animal or plant would there be if the globe warmed, as opposed to how many there are today? What is the optimal temperature for food production? Would there be more food rather than less if the globe warmed?

Change per se is neither good nor bad. Whether a given change is good or bad, all things considered, depends on its consequences (and how these are evaluated). I wish scientists would inform the public of all the consequences of global warming, so that the public can decide for itself whether to expend its scarce resources in preventing it. That scientists have not done this is the best evidence yet that they are advocates rather than, as they purport to be, disinterested observers. Is it any wonder that they are not trusted? Do you trust people who are hell-bent on selling you something to the point where they omit relevant information? In law, this is called fraud.

Posted by Keith Burgess-Jackson at 8:28 PM

I think Burgess-Jackson is exactly right here. Note that this is simply to make a point about logic, and agreement with his logical point says nothing about my own (or anyone else's) position about climate change policy.

As an aside, I think it is unfortunate that he uses the term "hoax" in his title, what with the connotations such a term has with other pejoratives such as "climate denier." But presumably he chose that word carefully in order to provoke his readers' thinking.

Jim

Post-environmentalism?

This is very good. Michael Schellenberger and Ted Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute have just written a very thought-provoking essay titled, ”The Long Death of Environmentalism.” Here's a brief summary of the context:

Last week Breakthrough co-founders Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus returned to Yale University for a retrospective on their seminal 2004 essay, “The Death of Environmentalism.” In their speech they argued that the critical work of rethinking green politics was cut short by fantasies about green jobs and “An Inconvenient Truth.” The latter backfired — more Americans started to believe news of global warming was being exaggerated after the movie came out — the former made false promises that could not be realized by cap and trade. What is an earnest green who cares about global warming to do now? In this speech, Nordhaus and Shellenberger reflect on what went so badly awry, and offer 12 Theses for a post-environmental approach to climate change.

The entire essay is worth reading, but here is an excerpt: their “Twelve Theses for a Post-Environmental Movement.”

Twelve Theses for a Post-Environmental Movement
Today, the need to remake ecological politics is clearly more urgent than ever. That will require that we actually learn from our failures and let those lessons become the underlying assumptions for a new, post-environmental climate movement.

First, more, better, or louder climate science will not drive the transformation of the global energy economy. The resources necessary to make such a transformation will not be forthcoming in pursuit of climate benefits that are uncertain and far off in the future. Many greens have imagined that as the evidence of climate change becomes ever clearer, the case for action will become stronger. But the reality is that the more our understanding of the full complexity of the climate system advances, the greater the uncertainties about the impacts of climate change and the attribution of those impacts to anthropogenic activities will become. This is not because the evidence for anthropogenic warming will become weaker. It will in fact become stronger. But our understanding of how that warming impacts the climate system at regional and local scales will become harder to characterize, not easier.

Second, we need to stop trying to scare the pants off of the American public. Doing so has demonstrably backfired. Climate skepticism is on the rise, every snow storm is the subject of partisan rancor, and we are no closer to acting in any meaningful way to address climate change. Skepticism about climate science has been motivated by concerns about the remedies that greens have proposed. The solution is not more climate science but rather a different set of remedies.

Third, the most successful actions will not be justified for environmental reasons. The only two countries to significantly decarbonize their energy supplies — France and Sweden — did so for energy security reasons in response to oil price shocks, not for environmental reasons. Many conservatives who are skeptical of claims made by climate campaigners believe it’s a bad idea to send half a trillion or so a year abroad for foreign imported oil, which brings with it a whole host of threats to national and energy security. Others simply see three million current air pollution deaths a year as a far higher priority. We should put shared solutions at the center of our politics, not our view of the science.

Fourth, we need to stop imagining that we will solve global warming through behavior changes. There are no doubt many good reasons for those of us with enough affluence and control over the material circumstances of our lives to turn away from accumulative consumption. But we should not imagine this to be a climate strategy.

What most greens mean when they suggest that we need to fundamentally change our way of life isn’t so fundamental at all. They mostly mean that we need to stop crass consumerism, live in denser cities, and use public transit. And while there are many reasons to recommend each of these particular remedies, none will have much impact upon the trajectory of global emissions. That’s because much of the world already lives in dense cities- more and more of us every day. Relatively few of us globally today have the means to consume crassly, or even own an automobile.

Global development and urbanization are salutary trends – for they bring with them the opportunity for billions of us to live longer, healthier, and freer lives. But these trends also suggest that the green obsession with moralizing against profligate American lifestyles is entirely irrelevant to the future disposition of the global climate, or much anything else that really matters to the big ecological challenges that we will face in the coming century. More and more of the world will adopt the very living patterns that greens have so long valorized. And as they do they will use vastly more energy and resources, not less.

Fifth, we have to stop treating climate change as if it were a traditional pollution problem. As we noted in our book, climate change is as different from past pollution problems as nuclear warfare is from gang violence. Climate change will not be solved with end-of-pipe solutions, like smokestack scrubbers and sewage treatment plants that worked for past pollution problems. Rather it will require us to rebuild the entire global energy system with technologies that we mostly don’t have today in any form that could conceivably scale to meet that challenge.

Sixth, we will not regulate or price our way to a clean energy economy. Regulatory and pricing solutions tend to succeed when we have good, low cost alternatives to the activities which we are attempting to discourage or eliminate. We dealt with acid rain once we had access to low sulfur coal from the western United States and reached an international agreement to phase out CFCs only once DuPont demonstrated that they could produce a cheap alternative at scale.

Greens have, in recent years, substituted the almighty Market, in the form of a response to a carbon price signal, for their past faith in command and control regulations. But the substitution problem is largely the same. Without cheap technologies, carbon prices will need to be prohibitively high to drive a quick transition to low carbon energy.

Seventh, we need to acknowledge that the so-called “soft energy path” is a dead end. The notion that the nation might meet its future energy needs through renewable energy and low cost energy efficiency has defined virtually all environmental energy proposals since the 1960s, and was codified into dogma by anti-nuclear activist turned efficiency consultant, Amory Lovins, in his 1976 Foreign Affairs article. Lovins claimed that efficiency would allow America to dramatically reduce its total energy use and that renewable energy technologies like wind and solar power were ready to replace fossil fuels.

But the reality is that for centuries, the global economy has used ever more energy, even as it has used energy ever more efficiently and renewable energy, which Lovins and others were claiming even as early as the late 1970′s was cheaper than fossil energy, remains expensive and difficult to scale. Renewables still cost vastly more than fossil based energy, even before we calculate the costs associated with storing and transmitting intermittent forms of energy. Wind energy, according to the latest EIA estimates, still costs 50% more than coal or gas. Solar costs three to five times as much. In the end, what the soft energy path has given us is coal-fired power plants, mountaintop removal, global warming, and an economy that uses 50% more energy, not solar panels and wind farms.

Eighth, we will not internalize the full costs of fossil fuels, even if we are able to agree upon what they actually are. Like the climate science upon which they are based, economic models that attempt to model the social costs of carbon emissions are endlessly disputable. Don’t like the result? Change the estimated climate sensitivity, the damage exponent, the social discount rate, or any number of other assumptions until you arrive at one you do like. The degree that we do internalize the cost of carbon will be determined by the tolerance within specific political economies for policies that increase energy costs.

Ninth, we will need to make clean energy technologies much cheaper in order to decarbonize the global energy economy. Clean energy technologies, where they have been deployed at all, still require vast public subsidies in order to be commercially viable. This is simply not a recipe for bringing those technologies to scale. Subsidizing more of the same old technologies will bring down their cost incrementally, but not enough to displace fossil fuels at a rate sufficient to have much impact on emissions. There will be no significant action to address global warming, no meaningful caps or other regulatory frameworks, and no global agreement to limit emissions until the alternatives to fossil fuels are much better and cheaper. This will require technological innovation on a vast scale and will require sustained state support for radical innovation through large investments in basic science, research and development, demonstration, and commercialization of new energy technologies.

Tenth, we are going to have to get over our suspicion of technology, especially nuclear power. There is no credible path to reducing global carbon emissions without an enormous expansion of nuclear power. It is the only low carbon technology we have today with the demonstrated capability to generate large quantities of centrally generated electric power. It is the low carbon of technology of choice for much of the rest of the world. Even uber-green nations, like Germany and Sweden, have reversed plans to phase out nuclear power as they have begun to reconcile their energy needs with their climate commitments.

Eleventh, we will need to embrace again the role of the state as a direct provider of public goods. The modern environmental movement, borne of the new left rejection of social authority of all sorts, has embraced the notion of state regulation and even creation of private markets while largely rejecting the generative role of the state. In the modern environmental imagination, government promotion of technology – whether nuclear power, the green revolution, synfuels, or ethanol – almost always ends badly.

Never mind that virtually the entire history of American industrialization and technological innovation is the story of government investments in the development and commercialization of new technologies. Think of a transformative technology over the last century – computers, the Internet, pharmaceutical drugs, jet turbines, cellular telephones, nuclear power – and what you will find is government investing in those technologies at a scale that private firms simply cannot replicate.

Twelveth, big is beautiful. The rising economies of the developing world will continue to develop whether we want them to or not. The solution to the ecological crises wrought by modernity, technology, and progress will be more modernity, technology, and progress. The solutions to the ecological challenges faced by a planet of 6 billion going on 9 billion will not be decentralized energy technologies like solar panels, small scale organic agriculture, and a drawing of unenforceable boundaries around what remains of our ecological inheritance, be it the rainforests of the Amazon or the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Rather, these solutions will be: large central station power technologies that can meet the energy needs of billions of people increasingly living in the dense mega-cities of the global south without emitting carbon dioxide, further intensification of industrial scale agriculture to meet the nutritional needs of a population that is not only growing but eating higher up the food chain, and a whole suite of new agricultural, desalinization and other technologies for gardening planet Earth that might allow us not only to pull back from forests and other threatened ecosystems but also to create new ones.

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts--in some ways these authors are offering a 'response to deep ecologists.'

Small Nuclear War Could Reverse Global Warming for Years?

This is kind of hard to believe . . . amazing that they fund this kind of research.

Small Nuclear War Could Reverse Global Warming for Years?

An excerpt:

Charles Q. Choi

for National Geographic News

Published February 22, 2011

Even a regional nuclear war could spark "unprecedented" global cooling and reduce rainfall for years, according to U.S. government computer models.

Widespread famine and disease would likely follow, experts speculate.

During the Cold War a nuclear exchange between superpowers—such as the one feared for years between the United States and the former Soviet Union—was predicted to cause a "nuclear winter."

In that scenario hundreds of nuclear explosions spark huge fires, whose smoke, dust, and ash blot out the sun for weeks amid a backdrop of dangerous radiation levels. Much of humanity eventually dies of starvation and disease.

Today, with the United States the only standing superpower, nuclear winter is little more than a nightmare. But nuclear war remains a very real threat—for instance, between developing-world nuclear powers, such as India and Pakistan.

To see what climate effects such a regional nuclear conflict might have, scientists from NASA and other institutions modeled a war involving a hundred Hiroshima-level bombs, each packing the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT—just 0.03 percent of the world's current nuclear arsenal. (See a National Geographic magazine feature on weapons of mass destruction.)

The researchers predicted the resulting fires would kick up roughly five million metric tons of black carbon into the upper part of the troposphere, the lowest layer of the Earth's atmosphere.

In NASA climate models, this carbon then absorbed solar heat and, like a hot-air balloon, quickly lofted even higher, where the soot would take much longer to clear from the sky.

Climate Change and Justice

"Must-read" essay by Mike Hulme about climate change controversies at the RSA Journal website. In particular, his claim that climate change has become an all-explaining metaphor for the future place of humans in nature:

But climate change has come to signify far more than the physical ramifications of human disturbance to the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and its energy balance. Climate change has become as much a social phenomenon as it is a physical one. Arguments about the causes and consequences of climate change – and the solutions to it – have become nothing less than arguments about some of the most intractable social, ethical and political disputes of our era: the endurance of chronic poverty in a world of riches; the nature of the social contract between state and citizen; the cultural authority of scientific knowledge; and the role of technology in delivering social goods. Climate change has become a metaphor for the imagined future of human life and civilisation on Earth.

Here's also what Hulme has to say about how the climate change topic is framed in "lesser developed" countries:

The different meanings that can be attached to the idea of climate change are illustrated well by considering ways in which the issue is framed in India. For many in this country, the key concerns are how to secure financial reparations for environmental damage caused by northern nations through the proxy of climate and how to use climate change to advance the development of the 500 million people living in absolute poverty. This framing of climate change is very different from that which prevails in much western discourse and implies a very different set of international and domestic policy prescriptions. The issue is less about how to reverse a two-degree temperature change, how to save polar bears or how to avoid metaphorical tipping points than it is about how to secure hundreds of billions of dollars to invest in basic human welfare.

The idea of nations using climate change as a means of improving basic human welfare sheds a different kind of light on the social justice aspects of the issue. That Hulme describes India's actions as an attempt to "secure financial reparations" makes the essay especially relevant given next week's concluding topic.

The entire essay is well worth reading.

Climate Scientists Behaving Badly (series)

Just ran across the following series of articles by Nick Shackel on the recent controversy over climate scientists' internal documents being leaked to the press and evidence that scientists have not been completely honest in their pronouncements about climate change.

climate-scientists-behaving-badly-part-1.

"Global warming hawks claim the moral high-ground, claim to speak for what is right against grubby self-interest. It behooves those who take the high ground to behave well themselves. Do they?

"Data and email exchanges between climate scientists have been stolen from the servers at University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and published online. Whether the data or content of these emails tell us anything about global warming is not an issue I am concerned with. Nor, for that matter, am I concerned with bad behaviour in the sense of global warming hawks being rude about global warming skeptics. The bad behaviour of interest is epistemic bad behaviour, and on this matter I think the emails tell us quite a lot. Furthermore, the Climatic Research Unit is one of the world’s leading players and so the behaviour of its members tells us something about the epistemic state of climate science.

"On the whole I would have to say that the attitude of the hawks towards the lay public has been high handed. They do not think we can be trusted to form our own opinions about what is happening and what should be done about it, and they think this despite the very great success they have had in convincing us that the climate is warming and that humans have caused it. One must wonder, therefore, why they have this attitude.

"Part of the answer is that they are, in a certain limited respect, right. Climate scientists are experts and we should rightly give greater weight to their testimony within the realm of their expertise. But that is only the beginning of the matter. We are not required simply to submit to experts, nor can experts expect us to become experts before we can have a view and even disagree with them. There are significant constraints on the weight we should give to expert testimony that depend on our assessment of their testimonial reliability, and since we can’t assess them on the content of their testimony we must make use of other information: information about their epistemic character and information about how reliable expertise is in particular and in general.

epistemic character

"Since Francis Bacon rejected the Idols of the Mind, science has demanded that its practitioners hold themselves to the highest standard of epistemic character. Amongst the epistemic virtues required are objectivity, impartiality, disinterestedness, restraint in not going beyond ones knowledge, fairness to opposing views, intellectual competence, imagination, originality, honest dealing in the conduct of enquiry, sincerity of testimony and honest dealing with opponents. In addition, it is essential to science qua natural philosophy that basic evidence is publicly available—hence ruling out as evidence claims that originate in special insight or revelation not granted to us all. It is this that imposes on scientists the obligation to keep records of methods and original data and make such records freely available.

"How high is the standard of epistemic character that hawks hold themselves to? I fear it is not as high as it ought to be. Even prior to the leaked emails we had evidence of failings in these virtues. The emails give yet more evidence and also show how little hold the enumerated epistemic virtues have on the professional milieu of climate science. Indeed, it appears that within climate science, epistemic vice is practised without shame, and with little awareness that the vicious practices are vicious. In part 2 I will run over that evidence."

He is up to the fifth installment, which was just posted today (Feb 20). Here are the links to each installment:

climate-scientists-behaving-badly-part-1.html
climate-scientists-behaving-badly-part-2-objectivity.html
climate-scientists-behaving-badly-part-3-the-conduct-of-enquiry.html
climate-scientists-behaving-badly-part-4-what-is-owed-to-other-enquirers.html
climate-scientists-behaving-badly-part-5-virtue-in-testimony.html

William Nordhaus on climate change policy

Hi everyone,
here is a link to an article by William Nordhaus about climate change policies and their economic implications. His conclusion about Kyoto:

"Climate change is a complex phenomenon, subject to great uncertainties, with changes in our knowledge occurring virtually daily. Climate change is unlikely to be catastrophic in the near term, but it has the potential for very serious damages in the long run. There are big economic stakes in designing efficient approaches to slow global warming and to ensure that the economic environment is friendly to innovation. The current international approach in the Kyoto Protocol will be economically costly and have virtually no impact on climate change. In my view, the best approach is also one that is relatively simple—internationally harmonized carbon taxes. Economists and environmentalists will undoubtedly continue to debate the proper level of the carbon price. But all who believe that this is a serious global issue can agree that the current price—zero—is too low and should be promptly corrected."

If you're really interested, you can download a prepublication copy of his book A Question of Balance (Yale University Press, 2008) from his website at nordhaus.econ.yale.edu/Balance_prepub.pdf -- pay attention to Chapter 9 on discounting.

Bio-fuels and EJ

A number of us had an interesting conversation after class on Thursday about bio-fuels and in particular, bio-diesel. A link to the following article just got passed along on the International Society for Environmental Ethics (ISEE) listserv, wonder what you all might think about it. The group advocates for a "future without global capitalism," and the final paragraph emphasizes an environmental justice perspective:

"In our Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions we reject the idea of mitigation and adaptation to climate change, within the existing capitalist economic structures. It is damaging the poorest and most powerless in society, not protecting them from the effects of climate change – and it is doing it without making any significant reductions in emissions. An alternative system of energy production and land ownership is urgently needed."

Anyway, here is the full piece:

Forests under threat in carbon offsets scandal

Campaigners fear a new surge of forest destruction as a result of both the reactionary Copenhagen Accord and a new European Union bio-fuels directive.

It seems that EU member states will be forced to accept palm oil grown in plantations planted on cleared forest – whether they like it or not.

The EU is committed to a target of 10% of all road transport fuel being based on renewable energy by 2020, and a new directive claims that palm oil plantations can be classified as forest, and meet so-called “sustainable standards”.

According to Rainforest Rescue, razing rainforest to plant oil palm would not count as a change in land use under the new directive, which also says that “member states may not set additional criteria of their own. They may not exclude biofuels/bioliquids on sustainability grounds where these meet the sustainability criteria laid down in the Directive”.

This is entirely in line with the Copenhagen Accord, the wrecking agreement forced through by powerful nations at last year’s climate conference.

Without a successor to Kyoto the controls on carbon off-setting (weak as they were) will become non-existent. It will lead to large-scale destruction of eco-systems and unprecedented land grabs, as spurious projects are classified as carbon offsets. There will even be carbon credits for tree and crop monocultures and GM soya, planted on cleared rainforest.

Stella Semino from Grupo de Reflexion Rural (Argentina) states:

If these new proposals are agreed upon we will see a massive boost for crop and tree plantations alike which, in the name of ‘climate change mitigation’, will speed up the destruction of forests and other vital ecosystems, the spread of industrial agriculture, and land grabbing against small-farmers, indigenous peoples and forest communities. Industrial monocultures are already a major cause of climate change and their expansion will make it worse.

The problem is even bigger than palm oil – the whole concept of bio-fuels replacing oil is flawed because of the nature of the capitalist system and the system of private land ownership. An example is the development of new oil plants that will grow on so-called “marginal land”.

The Jatropha plant is being grown by Kijani Energy of Canada in Mozambique on land classified as marginal. This very experimental process, with an incredibly toxic plant which can harm farmers as they harvest and crush it, is already being claimed as a biol-fuel breakthrough.

It is reported that Kijani has now purchased 200,000 acres of land in the Thar province of Pakistan for Jatropha cultivation. Local people say that far from being unused land, this area belongs to them, and their centuries old livestock grazing rights are being violated.

In our Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions we reject the idea of mitigation and adaptation to climate change, within the existing capitalist economic structures. It is damaging the poorest and most powerless in society, not protecting them from the effects of climate change – and it is doing it without making any significant reductions in emissions. An alternative system of energy production and land ownership is urgently needed.

Penny Cole
Environment editor
11 February 2010