It is not on you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist
May 15, 2013 5:44 AM   Subscribe

Joseph Tomaras reflects on the Mauna Loa data and concludes that the main tasks of the moment are neither political nor economic, but ethical or moral.

He makes a start by suggesting we need to

Be Welcoming to the Stranger: Island nations will be inundated, as will low-lying regions (e.g. most of Bangladesh). Much of the tropics will become uninhabitably hot. Continental cores will become inhospitably dry. There will be mass migrations of humanity. Will those migrants be met with razor wire and bullets, or food, water and shelter?
Do Unto Others as You Would Have Done Unto You: Not least because, what befalls one place and people could soon overtake others. Enlightened self-interest is the motivating factor.
Heed the Scientists: The level of specialized knowledge necessary to predict the climatic results of increased carbon forcings is far beyond what any one human mind can encompass; that is why we have computers. The point is not to place scientists in a position of unquestioned authority, as if they were some new priesthood, but to cultivate a valid understanding and healthy respect for the often contradictory and agonistic process of scientific investigation and debate--an understanding and a respect that are largely lacking in many world cultures, including the U.S.
Minimize Further Damage: Beyond the obvious, this means not trusting blindly in the possibility of a technological fix. For example, there has been some speculative talk of distributing aerosols or nanoparticles in the upper atmosphere to increase its reflectivity, and bounce out some of that warming sunlight. That could be wonderful, if and only if it is established first of all that it will not tip the global climate over into a new ice age, and that the compounds in question will not be toxic to existing life forms, etc.
posted by Gilgongo (38 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
Hasn't this been a - maybe the - major ethos since recorded history? We might face different and far more difficult challenges as a species than Socrates and Plato but people - the root cause of climate change - haven't changed a damn. I find politics and economics to be much more powerful tools in managing peoples' ecological behavior, e.g. don't pollute or you will be fined; buy electric cars and get free toll passage.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 6:03 AM on May 15, 2013


Martin Wolf had a very clear column today in the FT: Why the World Faces Climate Chaos (behind a metered paywall, extracted on an FT blog here).
Collectively, humanity has yawned and decided to let the dangers mount. [...]

What makes the inaction more remarkable is that we have been hearing so much hysteria about the dire consequences of piling up a big burden of public debt on our children and grandchildren. But all that is being bequeathed is financial claims of some people on other people. If the worst comes to the worst, a default will occur. Some people will be unhappy. But life will go on. Bequeathing a planet in climatic chaos is a rather bigger concern. There is nowhere else for people to go and no way to reset the planet’s climate system. If we are to take a prudential view of public finances, we should surely take a prudential view of something irreversible and much costlier.

posted by shothotbot at 6:14 AM on May 15, 2013 [5 favorites]


Nevertheless, politics and economics don't seem to provide any realistic solutions. Economically, this is a tragedy-of-the-commons type problem, where the rational thing to do is to keep pumping out CO2 because a) who's going to stop me? and b) there's money to be made and I'm not going to stop until China stops. Plus the auto industry in all its glory really is the cornerstone of many northern economies.

Politically, some of that money from burning fossil fuels can usefully be pumped back into educational efforts to convince people that climate change is not happening, and help them understand how much they appreciate the status quo.
posted by sneebler at 6:17 AM on May 15, 2013


I'm just wondering if one day in 2023 China will announce that they have launched a giant space mirror to block sunlight and "fix" global warming.
posted by shothotbot at 6:20 AM on May 15, 2013


"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it."

You can't appeal to the ethics or morals of a population and expect anything to happen. That's now how people work. En mass, people are just diffuse blobs, they respond only to gross leverage. They do only what is necessary to reduce their own pain and then maybe a little more for their pleasure.

Huge societal shifts only happen when the majority of people feel significant, existentially threatening present pain and an obvious path to an attainable reduction to that pain.

Ethics are meaningless on the world stage; people en masse don't do things because they "should", they do things because if they don't, their life tomorrow will suck much more than it does today.

Foci for Analysis is exactly right: the only way to make changes to the behaviour of people is to make the change "hurt less" than not changing.

And that is usually done, in peacetime, through economic penalties and incentives. With regard to carbon use, this could be gas at $10 a gallon, for example, and tax credits for transit use, installing insulation, etc.

But these things have to come from the 1%; that's where the handles to those levers are moved. Government has to enact these policies and regulations.

But how is this to happen when people will just vote to fill their own pockets anyway every time, or even worse, vote to spite other people?

The only way forward I can see is if a government decides to Do the Right Thing rather than simply Do the Thing That Gets Them Re-Elected.

I keep hoping....
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:21 AM on May 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


A global economic collapse to prevent a global climate cataclysm.

How strange. Jihadists and scientists both looking for global economic collapse and global enlightenment.
posted by surplus at 6:31 AM on May 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


TL;DR, but that won't stop me from trying to FTFY.

I agree (I think) that the first step toward positive action on the Big Problems is a renewal of morality/ethics -- via an understanding of interconnectedness -- and a resetting of our priorities (ie what's more important: some made up electronic bartering system called the economy or the planet we all live on?) After that, politics, law and economics can become the rightful expression of our will to live together for the benefit of all, not just a few.

Sure it sounds utopian, but it's possible to live together on a healthy planet. Basically we've just got to find ways to work together and to manage our collective selfish greed. I wish us all luck!
posted by nowhere man at 7:03 AM on May 15, 2013


The only way forward I can see is if a government decides to Do the Right Thing rather than simply Do the Thing That Gets Them Re-Elected.

Which is to say find it's moral and ethical compass?
posted by nowhere man at 7:08 AM on May 15, 2013


We are not going to de-technologize. Not a chance. For one thing, we have no idea how. For another, "we" have no ideas, period. I'm going to concur with seannmpuckett: the mass of humans is not a rational actor. The cells of the human body are bizarrely, intricately arranged so as to produce human thought and agency; the 7 billion humans of this earth are not. The emergent phenomenon has not happened, legislatures be damned.

When people try to talk concretely about what can be done, they either speak of incredibly insignificant gestures (carry your groceries in a nylon bag, bike to work) or they start talking about what "we" should do. "We" should revert to handmade goods and so on. How, exactly, does "we" pull this off, short of the imaginary nightmare of centralized coercive action? "We" has no brain, no moral agency. We have no power to set the basic conditions of our collective existence.

The other pleasant fiction is to blame "the 1%." Yes, they hold disproportionate power, but they don't determine the root conditions of human life. Besides, suppose you were suddenly a member of the 1%. What would you do, tomorrow, to initiate the kind of large-scale immediate de-technologizing that would be necessary to avert disaster (as if it can be averted; it can't)? Think very specifically about how this would happen.

We're totally fucked. We are all on life support to a system that is killing us, and there is no way to remove the life support. Our dependence on our own technologies is increasing at an increasing rate; so it is for all living systems. No one, not even the evil technocrats, chose this; it would have happened with or without them. Our best option is no option, barring some technological deus ex machina (an atmospheric rebreather of some kind) -- unlikely.

Just as people sometimes think through how they would comport themselves if they had a terminal disease, perhaps we ought to think of ways of comporting ourselves, in groups of whatever size we may do so, with some dignity in what will be almost certainly excruciating times and possibly the end.
posted by argybarg at 7:10 AM on May 15, 2013 [6 favorites]


The fundamental cause, however, is that capital, in its prolonged phase of imperial monopoly, is too heavily invested in the exploitation of existing fossil fuel reserves to be able to swallow any large-scale disinvestment or devaluation of those reserves through state action. The fundamental motive force driving the seemingly inexorable rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is capital accumulation.

Good luck with that. The pessimist in me says that only a cataclysmic event has any "chance" to wake people from their attachment to capitalism and its promises and dreams.
posted by incandissonance at 7:14 AM on May 15, 2013


The only way forward I can see is if a government decides to Do the Right Thing rather than simply Do the Thing That Gets Them Re-Elected.

And then they will be voted out and everything will continue.
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 7:16 AM on May 15, 2013


I'm just wondering if one day in 2023 China will announce that they have launched a giant space mirror to block sunlight and "fix" global warming.

The rise of China can be awesome for a variety of reasons, but you do realize that they've had a bit of problem managing their urban pollution lately? You'd think they'd want to fix their cities first before going all Deus ex machina on the planet.
posted by the cydonian at 7:28 AM on May 15, 2013


If you want to start to make a positive change, start figuring out ways to reduce your dependence on fossil fuels. Solar power seems to be one such option for most home-dwellers, as you can sell the excess power, and don't have to store it. The rate of return is low, but the net effect is to cut the amount of coal and/or gas that is burned on your behalf directly by the amount of power you harvest from the sun.

If you only think in terms of fiscal return on investment, you're not going to make any difference. If you think in this broader set of terms, you can make a real, long term difference. (And possibly save some money)
posted by MikeWarot at 7:30 AM on May 15, 2013


I have to agree with the Wolf piece. Its happening and the majority of people really don't care at all. There is a minority that really cares. But I think most people would prefer to pollute than go without.

The moral and ethical arguments are weak. - There is no real obligation to care for future generations - we don't owe anything to them. We don't feel responsible for past generations. Yes we express regret over things like slavery and genocide but we don't actually want to give up anything to make amends.

I think we recognize that our future children will feel much the same way. Sort of annoyed that we messed up the environment but not much more.

Population control seems one obvious solution, a death lottery, say. Or even just not worrying so much about curing cancer. But these are off the table. So much that many western countries think they need to promote reproduction. In Australia they are actually paying people to procreate. Perhaps we should pay them not to.
posted by mary8nne at 7:51 AM on May 15, 2013


Population control seems one obvious solution, a death lottery, say. Or even just not worrying so much about curing cancer. But these are off the table. So much that many western countries think they need to promote reproduction. In Australia they are actually paying people to procreate. Perhaps we should pay them not to.
posted by mary8nne at 7:51 AM on May 15 [+] [!]


It is almost as if economic growth is it's own population controller. What a novel and unexpected thought here on the blue.
posted by otto42 at 8:02 AM on May 15, 2013


But how is this to happen when people will just vote to fill their own pockets anyway every time, or even worse, vote to spite other people?

It will happen if the 1% realizes that there's money to be made in averting the cataclysm, or mitigating it slightly.

Unfortunately, climate change is like Type 2 diabetes or heart disease. Right now we're at the very tail end of the stage where preventative steps are useful. We could stop chowing down on Krispy Kremes and maybe we wouldn't get sick, or as sick ... but where's the money in telling us to do that? There isn't any. You can't get rich telling people to exercise restraint and not do something.

But once things really start to get bad, then there's money to be made. Lots of money. There will be money to be made selling the planetwide versions of Plavix and Lipitor, perhaps in the form of geoengineering like high-altitude aerosols, or more conventional civil engineering (dike construction, flood control projects, etc.). There will be money to be made in carbon sequestration, probably. Money to be made in carbon offset schemes, if a tax regime ever really gets off the ground. And probably money to be made, Lex Luthor style, in real estate in areas that won't quite be underwater. Lots of opportunities, if you're in a position to take advantage of them ... and not, say, someone who will end up underwater.

And that's in addition to the business-as-usual, frankly boring, public/private-sector government-money feeding trough, which opens up in earnest every time there's a disaster.

But none of that happens unless things get really bad, first. And in the meantime, there's lots of money to be made in coal and oil and natural gas.

We have an economy where the very rich get richer not just from continuous, boring stability -- in which case they would have a vested interest in keeping things on an even keel, with a nice, gentle transition away from carbon beginning decades ago -- but off of movements in the market, off of the occasional destabilization creating opportunities for profit. Obviously only to a certain point; the 1%ers don't want things to totally fall apart, but they're okay and well-insulated against things getting significantly worse than they currently are. So they're making money now, and are going to keep doing that until they can't do it anymore, at which point they'll pivot and make money on the crisis, and then make more money in whatever the 'new normal' is afterwards.
posted by Kadin2048 at 8:19 AM on May 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


Pakistan just issued a press release. They said they have a population bomb and they're not afraid to use it unless we pay the ransom.
posted by surplus at 8:21 AM on May 15, 2013


Population control seems one obvious solution, a death lottery

That's what I don't get.

Anthropogenic climate impact as death lottery is a perfect solution. Quit your griping and get in line.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 8:25 AM on May 15, 2013


That's what I don't get.

Anthropogenic climate impact as death lottery is a perfect solution. Quit your griping and get in line


Not much of a solution, given that the whole point of population control would be to prevent anthropogenic climate change in the first place.
posted by inire at 8:30 AM on May 15, 2013


Also anthropogenic climate impact is very much not a lottery, but places the disproportionate harm on those living in low-lying & tropical areas, as well as the poor.
posted by Lemurrhea at 8:40 AM on May 15, 2013


Anthropogenic climate impact as death lottery is a perfect solution. Quit your griping and get in line.

ha thats actually a good marketing argument for a death lottery today!

If we don't have a death lottery now and cull 50-60% of the world population, then in 20 years climate change will do it for us anyway - and also ruin things for that 40% left alive.
So on the one hand: lottery death today + good* environment
and on the other: lottery* death in 20 years + crap environment.

Why not preempt the future deaths by having a cull now.

* not really "good" and not really "lottery" but close enough.
posted by mary8nne at 9:04 AM on May 15, 2013


You wanna do something abouut climate change? Don't have kids. Or have only one kid.
posted by vibrotronica at 9:05 AM on May 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


Before we start talking death lotteries and whatnot, can we at least just trying to make free contraception available to every person who wants it? I mean, by some estimations, the unmet need for family planning worldwide is so large that this would be enough to stop population growth overnight, if it could be accomplished.

I thought the whole goal of people who are worried about overpopulation is to see to it that population is controlled through the birth side of the equation, rather than the death side.

Of course, people will say that overconsumption is the real problem, and I would agree, but just telling everyone to make do with less so we can make room for more isn't a very moral solution. People everywhere in the world deserve a decent standard of living, and we are on the brink of plunging the entire world into a cataclysm of chronic want, hunger, war and disease because growth is treated as an end in itself.

In the end, I think it is theoretically possible to achieve a global standard of living that can provide for 7 billion people to live in relative comfort and security, but giving everyone the North American lifestyle is downright impossible. As it stands, I seriously worry that the global standard of living is at the inflection point. Things are still getting better, but the slope has turned convex, and on the current trajectory, the maximum isn't too far off.

From there, if we insist on doing our best to destroy the climate that allowed the development of agriculture and organized human communities of a scale larger than extended families or clans, it's a long slide down. Of course, the climate is a bit of a mystery, and just as there is a chance that some unknown negative feedbacks will push the system back to equilibrium and everything will be fine, there is a perhaps more significant possibility that the sensitivity is much higher than we thought, leading to uninhabitable tropics and an anoxic ocean full of hydrogen sulfide making microorganisms. There is no bottom in this scenario, leaving the highly derived corvids of fifty million years hence to puzzle over the the cause of the sudden warming that ended the age of continental glaciation, and whether it had anything to do with the thin asphalt/iron strata that seems to have been globally present at the time. Was it a meteor? Volcanism?
posted by [expletive deleted] at 9:11 AM on May 15, 2013 [6 favorites]


Also, if governments and populations are unwilling to take sensible regulatory steps to prevent climate change for fear of reduced living standards, then a fortiori they are not going to be in favour of a preventative cull.
posted by inire at 9:20 AM on May 15, 2013


Lemurrhea: Anthropogenic climate impact is very much not a lottery, but places the disproportionate harm on those living in low-lying & tropical areas, as well as the poor.

This is a feature, not a bug, as far as the historically primary carbon emitters are concerned.
posted by RedOrGreen at 9:40 AM on May 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


by some estimations, the unmet need for family planning worldwide is so large that this would be enough to stop population growth overnight

Do you have figures?
posted by Steely-eyed Missile Man at 9:41 AM on May 15, 2013


People seem to keep using the same cynical modes of reasoning that got us to this point to try to figure out how we get out. So people are interchangeable widgets (and we can sensibly generalize about how just killing a few might solve the problem--never mind that the least densely populated parts of the planet are responsible for the greatest share of the emissions causing the problem). Growth in resource consumption is inevitable and necessary. Morality is irrelevant.

These lines of thinking are all just assumptions of contemporary ways of doing business and thinking about economics, not laws of nature. At different points in time and place, among different populations of humans--even in America's own relatively recent past--these arguments would have sounded like cynical, inhuman nonsense. And really, that's all they are.

We didn't get to fossil-fuel dependence accidentally. There were massive, deliberate long and short term investments in public infrastructure and policy to build the fossil-fuel driven world we live in today. Now suddenly we're powerless to change directions? I don't buy that. It's just nihilism and cynical defeatism.
posted by saulgoodman at 10:14 AM on May 15, 2013 [5 favorites]




It's not until those with the wealth and power are threatened by the consequences of unchecked capitalism that there will be any change or action toward a solution to this. It's disheartening. Use less fossil fuels is a great mantra, but less demand means lower prices which means the cycle continues until there simply is no more fossil fuel to be used.
That's the endgame i see. solve the contigencies for a post-oil world and work toward getting there as quickly as possible.
posted by OHenryPacey at 10:29 AM on May 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


Humans, as a group, trying to reduce their consumption of resources is somewhat comical to me. We are completely helpless to control our consumption, in the same way that a raging forest fire has no ability to moderate its consumption in order to lengthen its lifespan.
posted by mullingitover at 10:45 AM on May 15, 2013


I think it would be good if some of you folks who still think it matters which lizard gets in would start voting Green.
posted by flabdablet at 11:09 AM on May 15, 2013 [2 favorites]


We are completely helpless to control our consumption

...and how can we blame one raindrop for the flood?
posted by Rash at 11:58 AM on May 15, 2013


Do you have figures?

I can't actually back up the assertion that if a herculean effort was made to make all modern contraceptive methods available to everyone for free it would instantly lower global fertility to below replacement, but I maintain that it's a realistic consequence of an unrealistic scenario. For a more practical take on it, see the chart on page 15 of this study from 2010. The unmet need scenario here takes the baseline population growth assumptions from the UN and compares it to a scenario where the current unmet need for family planning is eliminated over a period that varies by region from 10-25 years. Under this scenario, the growth rate starts out tracking the UN medium scenario, and fertility drops below replacement around 2030.

It's worth noting three things about this study: it does not attempt to model the increase in availability of contraception increasing the demand (which it acknowledges), it assumes in the Unmet Need scenario that the global abortion rate drops linearly to zero from 2010 to 2050, and finally, it estimates the cumulative cost of this program over 40 years at $638 billion in constant 2005 USD.
posted by [expletive deleted] at 12:24 PM on May 15, 2013


Nevertheless, politics and economics don't seem to provide any realistic solutions.

This is untrue, history has illustrated this most persuasively in the the global reaction to CFCs and their effect on the ozone layer. Granted CFCs were not as pervasive as carbon, but their use was regarded as critical in many different products and industries. And said industries spent a lot of money denying their damage.

And yet, the world managed - eventually - to band together and ban them, halt, and even reverse damage to the ozone layer.

International action is super hard, I grant you, and arguably even harder than it was in the 80s when we moved on CFCs, but it is possible. Indeed, it happens every day in less critical spheres, and it is - sloooooooooowly - happening now. The bad news is, the world is not, will not, move fast enough to address climate change in the best way. The good news is the pace of change is steadily picking up and will grow exponentially.
posted by smoke at 4:45 PM on May 15, 2013


We live in the US in an age where it's a major potical scandal that the division of the government responsible for reviewing organizations' applications for tax exempt status looked too closely at the applications of certain known partisan political groups before granting the status anyway, despite the fact that under longstanding US law, politically partisan groups aren't supposed to qualify for tax exempt status. The law being flagrantly ignored is less controversial now, where certain vocal political interests are concerned, than the government merely considering enforcing it in a way unfavorable to those political interests.That's why we can't solve this.
posted by saulgoodman at 5:59 PM on May 15, 2013 [1 favorite]


One of my university's recent speakers was a philosopher talking about climate change.

His question, which has stayed with me — and which I will not render well. (Link to his video, should you wish the full thing.) (Disclaimer: I am not a philosopher and will probably mangle the message. Really, he does a far better job of it than I will.)

You're at the side of a pond, and there's a child drowning in the water. There is no risk to you to jump in and save the child, except some wet clothes. Do you have a moral obligation to save the child? Most people said yes.

Next question: You're at the same pond, but there are now two children in the water. Can we agree that you have a moral obligation to save one of them, but since you can't save both, then they have an equal expectation of your attempt to save at least one of them? Again, most people in the audience said yes.

And next: You pushed one of them in.

That's the folks who we're all drowning — literally — by driving big cars and living in a consumer society. Do they have a moral expectation that we will save them, at a relatively minor expense of a few more people in our midst?
posted by wenat at 9:34 PM on May 15, 2013


That's the folks who we're all drowning — literally — by driving big cars and living in a consumer society.

You make it sound as if the stage for consumer culture wasn't set by years of local and national policy-making that assumed a mobile, automobile-using labor pool and deliberately promoted consumption as a public good in itself. Everything from city development plans and zoning rules designed around the use of automobiles for routine travel to industrial research on the public dime and oil industry subsidies and tax breaks that continue to this day pushed those consumers into that pond. Industrial and political leaders in the post-WWII US worked closely together (which made sense at the time) to establish systems of legal incentives and infrastructure to create the consumer culture we're drowning in. The market didn't just bring it into being to meet consumer demand, contrary to the myth. Much of it (such as the heavy policy emphasis on using fossil fuels to ensure energy security, the construction of the interstate highway system, publicly subsidized airports and communications systems) was originally justified on national defense grounds.
posted by saulgoodman at 7:42 AM on May 16, 2013 [1 favorite]


I'm a bit of a radical, but I don't think this blogger goes nearly far enough as he says,

"We can only aspire to rule the world if we can aspire to understand it."

That, I would argue, is precisely the operating cosmological principle/paradigm that got humanity into this mess-- technocentrism-- that if only our understanding of natural principles was adequately profound, we as a society could manipulate it to our cultural, rather than natural, ends. When you think about it, it's the purest form of hubris-- that we could manipulate or otherwise augment nature beyond its selfsame natural limits, all of the "pushback" controlled for by our supreme intellect.

"We can only aspire to rule the world..." --Is that something one should EVER aspire to, no matter what Tears For Fears may say?

*Waits while some governnment agency adds me to its watchlist*
posted by Perko at 1:33 PM on May 16, 2013


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