I'm sure Robert Samuelson isn't the only pundit who doesn't buy Al Gore's argument that climate change is a moral issue. The Newsweek editor and Washington Post columnist weighs in on "An Inconvient Truth" today by rejecting Gore's characterization of the problem.
The trouble with the global warming debate is that it has become a moral crusade when it's really an engineering problem. The inconvenient truth is that if we don't solve the engineering problem, we're helpless.
Which got me to thinking: if climate change doesn't involve morality, then what does a public policy debate have to involve to constitute a moral dilemma?
It's not that the specter of anthropogenic global warming is necessarily loaded with ethical and spiritual questions. It could be a mere engineering challenge, but anyone familiar with the problem knows that the real world we have created includes disparities and injustices that fiddling with the Earth's ecosystem will amplify. SEED Magazine included a most illustrative example of this sort of thing in the April/May issue by drawing attention to the fact that the poor are going to suffer more than the rich when the temperature starts to climb. (Click on the graph for the full-size version.)
The problem with Samuelson's thesis is that just about every public policy issue is a moral issue. At any given moment, the debates taking place in Congress and the public sphere are at least partly moral debates.
Immigration: It's as much about xenophobia and ethnic prejudice as economics and security.
Estate taxes: Essentially an argument over whether the children of rich Americans are more worthy of a head start than are poorer children.
Gun control: What is more important, the right to bear arms, or the right to a safe environment?
Capital punishment: Well, duh.
Health care: We all agree that quality of life should be determined in part by one's desire to work for it, but what's the minimum quality below which no citizen should fall?
Indeed, any debate over how much of the citizenry's wealth should be appropriated by the state and how to spend it will involve moral choices. Every dollar spent on tax cuts to the super-rich is a dollar not spent on decent text books for public schools. So, yes, climate change is a moral crusade. But so is every other question we ask our politicians to sort out.
I recognize how uncomfortable the phrase "moral crusade" can make those of us who aren't particularly keen on the current trend toward a dismantling of Jefferson's wall of separation between church and state. But the way I see, the best route toward a reconciliation of secular and religious politics is a common recognition that no special interest has a monopoly on morality, that morality is an inextricable part of every policy debate, and the best solutions to those debates will emerge from a consensus on the effects on real people.
This is, of course, a basic tenet of humanism -- that morality is a product of the human condition, not sacred texts. But it seems to me that too often secular thinkers are wont to reduce moral questions to mere physics, just as Samuelson has done with climate change.
Not so incidentally, Samuelson is also dead wrong when he writes that we don't yet have the tools or the understanding to deal with climate change (see "Stabilization Wedges: Solving the Climate Problem for the Next 50 Years with Current Technologies" by Pacala and Socolow in Science magazine), but that mistake warrants a post of its own that I am sure other bloggers can better handle.
[UPDATE, July 6: An intriguing theory as to Samuelson's real motives for his op-ed can be found at in the comments section of a marvelous summary of climate "tipping points" by Gavin atRealClimate. The essence:
Samuelson's editorial seems to me to be either a counsel of despair or a stalking horse for the nuclear industry. By dismissing the moral aspects of continuing behavior that may lead to a disaster of global proportions, he minimizes one of our most potent sources of motivation: conscience.
Indeed.]
- Log in to post comments
I think global warming is a moral issue. In fact, if you look at the ethical guidelines for biomedical research that the NIH requires we all respect, as I wrote about, you can see that globa warming violates all the ethical tenants that scientists are asked to respect.
Why do we ask scientists to respect these ethical guidelines and not politicians?
Regardless of whether global warming is a moral issue or not, I feel the other examples of political-questions-as-moral-issues are a bit disingenuous. It seems that if you phrase it the right way, anything can become a moral issue, with as much legitimacy as that used here.
Should I have cereal for breakfast today? essentially a question of who is more deserving of the cereal, me or my poor dog looking at me with those sad, always hungry eyes from under the table.
Just because something can be couched in moral-debate terms does not make morality actually a part of the debate.
Just as an aside, can we get a link to the seed article? The graphic made me interested in getting more info from the source.
I'll agree with you quite strongly on all but one point - estate taxes. They way you characterize it is, frankly, wrong. It has nothing to do with who's children deserve a head start. It is not true that every dollar not "very dollar spent on tax cuts to the super-rich is a dollar not spent on decent text books for public schools." Making statements like that are just as rhetorical and baseless emotionalism as is any of the crap spouted by the Religious Right.
The fact simply is that estate taxes are a very small portion of the total tax intake by the federal government ($192,635,099 in 2004 according to the IRS in their document, "Estate Tax Returns: By Tax Status and Size of Gross Estate" http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04es01tc.xls ); it is income that has already been taxed twice (sometimes more); it targets a very, very small portion of the population; it is at a punitive tax rate - as high as 55%. For these reasons, I feel it is a very unfair tax.
I certainly agree that it is the responsibility of the wealthiest among us to give back to the community and many do, sometimes in very, very large amounts (the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as the most notable example). I agree that paying a reasonable percentage (15%-20% maybe) of liquid assets is acceptable. But, when families are forced to liquidate family businesses and real estate just to pay an onerous tax bill - a tax bill that becomes due just because a family member dies - is simply unfair. What people do not realize is that the wealthiest in this country already pay a large portion of their income to taxes - much larger than people with average incomes.
I realize there is probably a philosophical difference here, one that centers around redistribution of wealth. I suspect that you believe in a more socialist philosophy of redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor. Inherent in that is a belief that one only deserves to earn and posses only so much, the state takes the rest to redistribute. At least, that has been the case in my experience with others who have a similar philosophical outlook. I simply do not agree with that philosophy completely. I do believe that some redistribution is necessary and a responsibility of those who are very wealthy but, only within reason. I see the estate tax as being way beyond reason as it is currently structured - especially considering the small percentage of the total amount of taxes collected it actually represents. When you look at it from that angle, it is hard to see how it is anything other than designed to be punitive therefor, very unfair.
Has anyone else read John Stossel's article at RealClearPolitics.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2006/07/a_convenient_lie.html
Somebody has to stop him. Here is a short reply I've been trying to get to him and anyone else who will listen.
A Convenient Error
John Stossel trotting out the old �Ice in a Glass� analogy is getting old and lame. He�s right when he says the melting ice will not overflow the glass, but this does not represent an accurate model of the earth. A lot of the melting ice talked about by scientist is held on land i.e.: the polar ice caps, Greenland and thousands of glaciers. This melting ice from land will raise the sea level, melting ice already in the oceans will not. Picture the glass of ice water setting next to table with a plate (representing land) of ice on it. When that ice melts the water will run off the plate and into the ice water. Then the water will rise and the glass will overflow.
Stossel does briefly mention the land-based ice, but when he quotes Christy and Baliunas and complains about what computer models leave out, he sounds as if he's writing fifteen years ago.
My global warming skepticism goes like this:
1.
1.While there is good evidence that some warming has occurred on a global scale over the last century (GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL, SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE INCREASINGLY SHOWS!!!), and that we are at a relatively high point in temperature, the evidence also indicates present and indeed warmer temperatures are not unprecedented and that fairly wide fluctuations in temperature, sometimes over fairly short periods of time, are what has always occurred, including since the rise of mammals to the top of the land food chain. The climate is always changing. Further, there is not good evidence that increased levels of greenhouse gases is responsible for a large part of the increase in temperature over the last century, only that it COULD be. Nor is there good evidence that further increases will cause large amounts of further warming, instead of causing negative feedback mechanisms (e.g. increased cloud cover) that could decrease warming. The models simply arent good enough. What they do is game out possible downside scenarios, to great alarm.
Continuing,
2. The consensus views of climate scientists must be taken with considerable grains of salt, considering what a social/political/environmental cause celeb global warming has become. The incentives are very, very heavily on the side of declaring global warming to be a pending disaster if you are in the field or on its many peripheries. Theres gobs of research money. And theres gobs of social acclaim and attention. The groupies flock to one side, not the other. Which side of the debate is better to take at a party when trying to pick up hotties? Which side makes what you do more important? Who wants to stand with stoggy old style industry and Republicans, as opposed to the socially aware, the nobly willing-to-be self sacrificing and the greenies? None of this would predictably keep other points of view from surfacing, and in fact it hasnt. But would predictably have a big affect on where most people position themselves in the presence of uncertainties.
3. We do not yet have any fixes which would make a major difference in the CO2 level in the atmosphere (and hence in posited effects on global temperatures), without truly massive reductions in living standards. Leaving aside issues of fairness to certain countries (the US, Canada, Australia particularly), even if the Kyoto targets were perfectly attained they would make virtually no difference. Its all about a more religious than engineering/scientific) effort to start someplace, and begin sacrificing.
4. Increases in temperature (even if it does occur from here) can be adapted to. Perhaps there would be some decrease in population in some places but perhaps that would not be such a clearly bad thing for the long term health of the planet. Is doing everything we can do to maximize the total number of people on the planet the highest good -- as opposed to increasing the living standards of a smaller number, yes in many countries?
5. Adapting to climate change has been de regeur throughout biologic history, and indeed the massive increase in human intelligence that enabled the birth of human cultures may have resulted from such adaptations. Further, warm periods have been much more benign for big land animals like us than cold, ice age ones.
6. What many people seem to fail to realize is that fine tuning energy wastefulness (as in e.g. downsizing American cars and raising gas mileage standards), and going for more supposedly green solutions (like increasing the number of hideously ugly and usually awfully noisy windmill farms) or putting solar cells on every roof, isn't going to begin to bring CO2 levels down to pre-industrial levels or anywhere near. And then there's the soon 3 billion Chinese and Indians hurtling towards modernity in larger and larger percentages. And the 2 and soon 5 or so other billion humans like in Africa the Moslem world that we supposedly are rooting for getting there too, and trying to help.
7. The only technologies which could conceivably provide first world living standards (however more energy efficient) to 10 billion or even 6 billion without massive increases in CO2 levels from here, are nuclear combined with some method of making much of the energy portable, such as fuel cells (fueled essentially by nuclear energy separation of the hydrogen fuel from water). There is considerable work to be done (and the US is leading on the fuel cell side in doing it) to make both technologies safe and economic enough. Where we aren't leading anymore is on the nuclear energy side, and we need to be. E.g. we need to ramp up work on designs using nuclear fuel pebbles (which are very difficult to refine to weapons grade). For that ramp back up we need changes on the social/political/legal side e.g a small number of gov't approved new nuclear designs in return for legislated sharp limitations on legal challenges and liabilities.
Yes all this violates greenie religious tenants but if enviros are in any way serious about their global warming concerns they'll choose the lesser evil, as religiously unsatisfying as such practical choices tend to be.
Keith Woosley said:
"Has anyone else read John Stossel's article at [link]. Somebody has to stop him."
What do you mean stop him? What could you mean, STOP HIM?
Sounds clearly Stalinist to me. Clearly diametrically at odds with our own Classically Liberal 1st Amendment. And clearly worthy of major criticsm and censure.
I think one could argue the central difference between liberal and conservative ideologies is what they do or do not consider a "moral issue". Things that a liberal would cast as moral issues - like health care or a livable minimum wage - are considered by conservatives in terms of the free market and rights of businesses. Things that conservatives cast as moral issues - such as abortion and gay marriage - are perceived by liberals is issues of personal freedoms and rights of the individual.
Dr. Dave's distinction between liberal and conservative values is well taken, but it seems to me that those things identified as personal freedoms and rights to liberals are very much moral issues as well. All depends on how widely you want to define morality.
VisualFX says: "it is income that has already been taxed twice (sometimes more); it targets a very, very small portion of the population; it is at a punitive tax rate - as high as 55%. For these reasons, I feel it is a very unfair tax."
While is is true that some income is taxed twice if it derives from dividends, that derived from assets such as stocks and real estate and businesses is taxed only once, when it is sold (capital gains). Those assets owned at death have never been taxed at all, and should not be exempt from an estate tax (which should have a reasonable deductable like $5M, to eliminate taxation for all but the very richest estates). The old canard about families losing farms to the estate tax is simply unsupported by fact (sorry, no link), and those opposed to the estate tax have yet to come up with an example (aside from actors in rightwing ads).
Why not do the right thing, as Warren Buffet just did. By setting up, or donating to a foundation, you can control what is done with it, if you hate to see it go into the federal general fund. And, you can give your kids bloated salaries as directors of the foundation if you choose (snark).
James Hrynyshyn:
Are none of my points well taken?
Dougjnn:
If you want a random persons opinion on your points
I see 4 types of logically separable skepticism.
a. Skepticism about whether it is human driven. (point 1)
b. Skepticism about how bad it is. (pts. 2,4,5)
c. Skepticism about whether we can do anything effective about it. (3)
d. Skepticism about the costs of doing anything about it.(6,7)
Skepticism about a. is probably an indication that you have misread the scientific literature.
Skepticism about b. is fair enough, but most of the scenarios look grim,
Skepticism about c. is also fair, but if societies come to appreciate a, and b, perhaps more brainpower and will can generate solutions.
Skepticism about d., needs to be balanced out against the costs of not doing anything. And will clearly require some hard choices as you suggest. Also, a number of incidental benefits may result from making changes in our co2 production, energy consumption etc.
A. How much of the fairly widely agreed upon 1 degree rise in average global temperature over the last century is man made is I think not at all proven. That increasing greenhouse gases such as methane and CO2 will tend to trap earth's heat from radiating back off the earth is well demonstrated. But the degree to which it does so given all the complex interactions and side effects is not well modeled. The models don't deal sufficiently effectively with the complexities, and when these points are brought up they're never really refuted. Instead we hear things like 'the consequences could be so vast that we can't wait to find out for sure', and 'we need to err on the side of prudence' and 'the opinion of most climate scientists is that it is likely' and the like. Well, in light of the costs of any significant downward revision in greenhouse gas levels with current on the shelf technology, none of that is good enough to take expensive implementation steps. But it is enough to direct research. Safe nuclear and fuel cells in particular.
B. Yes, I think how bad it is is frequently GROSSLY exaggerated, particularly by journalists and some of the popularizers and activists they like to go to. We just can't really model the feedback loops enough.
C. C and D boil down to the same thing. I never say we absolutely couldn't do anything about it, technically (that is leaving out the realities of human politics and motivations and discounting sensibilites). I say that right now we can't and maintain anything like current living standards. Also it's a joke to leave out more than 3/4 of the world's population, particularly the parts which are moderning (and increasing CO2 output) rapidly, such as China and India and SE Asia.
D. Net net, what makes sense to do now is what has other benefits to do now. There are lots of reasons to reduce the first world's dependence on foreign oil, particularly mideastern oil. Especially now that instability and conflict, and rising Asian demand, are making it so much more expensive so rapidly (although the extent to which that line will stay on it's same slop is highly debatable).
So we've already had a big, involuntary, carbon tax. (We're paying it to the wrong people, but we can't help that, and it's creating the right incentives on the payers side regardless.) We can anticipate that we might get some further increases in that tax. Enacting any further carbon tax seems too onerous on the wrong people. Instead lets get nuclear going by a combination of right now law changes and better design deployment, and hurry up completion of nuclear pebble designs and approval for even safer plants, and them implement them and spread the latter internationally. And hurry up with fuel cell research. With a view to phasing in over the next 10 years -- which means some real stuff rolling out the door in at least five.
What I don't favor is hairshirt reduction of lifestyle in really significant ways to do some big time sacrificing RIGHT NOW, when the degree of anthropogenic global warming going forward is so uncertain, and while the effects of same on severity of weather, drought patterns, and sea levels and the like are even more uncertain (really inadequately reliable models to deal with the hurculean complexities).
However, doing things which there are other reasons to do makes all kinds of sense. And that boils down to 1) more research on climate change and its effects; 2) incremental improvements in energy efficiency across the board, with where needed gov't help on research (mostly and maybe entirely not needed in a sharply rising energy price environment); 3) a big push towards research and near term roll out of nuclear electrical generation and fuel cells. Actually a related 4), would be an upgrading of our electrical grid as we anticipate the shift from carbon to uranium is going to mean a much higher percentage of electrical as opposed to local combustion (or fuel cell) energy production. Beef up those cables!!!
This is what strikes me as real about the issue. Most greenie talk doesn't. It strikes me as a combination of religion and partisan sniping.
Gun Control: What is more important, the right to bear arms or the right to a safe environment?
let me get this straight, we should throw out one of the bill of rights so people can feel safer? (was it ben franklin who said something to the effect of: those who would give up liberty for security deserve niether.???)
it is also arguable that more gun laws really have no effect on crime, because criminals are not very likely to follow them anyway. the average citizen that owns a gun is not the one out there committing crimes.
Scientists are in virtually unanimous agreement that human factors are a huge part of recent temperature changes. Furthermore it is stupid to argue that perhaps climate change will be good. It won't be, exposing populations of people and animals as well as local environments to weather patterns that they are not use to is almost certainly not good. Furthermore, the technology we need to curb global warming is available, but people need to act decisively and agressively. Energy efficiecy measures could reduce power usage drastically in a very short amount of time. Over the next years renewable energy should continue to compromise a larger and larger percentage of our energy production. We need to cut pollution 80 percent by 2050. Historically the reduction of air pollution has been simpler and easier that we originally expected. But we need to start now. Case in point acid rain. People were very afraid of acid rain at one point. You never hear about it anymore. Why? because we fixed the problem, and very quickly and efficiently i might add. Lastly, Nuclear power is not a smart option. The reason that we are in this predicament in the first place is that we as a society did not think in the long term and did not use renewable sources. A huge build up of nuclear waste could become something unbelievably difficult to deal with in the future.