#$%^@#$%@#@ I’d nearly finished this post, then I managed to hit just the right key combo to close the window. Love that. With a chainsaw. Anyway.
So, I had an assignment due today, and I was finishing it up an hour or so in advance of the due deadline. The final question on it was, essentially “Given that the US constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, but produces 25% of the greenhouse gases and 25% of the world GDP, does the US have a moral obligation to control its emissions?” After a homework assignment that was 80% unit conversion juggling, that was an odd question to be asked. After initially avoiding the word “moral” I decided “screw it” and I ranted:
The United States has a moral obligation to reduce our emissions, as part of a program to reduce worldwide emissions. This obligation arises both in terms of distributive justice and in terms of reasonable problem solving. Distributively speaking, the costs imposed by emissions typically spread to a population including many parties other than the original beneficiaries of the actions that led to the emissions. Additionally, the United States makes sense as the primary target for emissions reductions based on having the highest emissions per capita, and thus the most potential for reduction, as well as the highest GDP per capita, and thus the most financial resources to apply to the problem.
Additionally, taking the initiative to clean up the atmosphere would be in the best interest of the United States in particular and the world in general. In the long run, the potential damage due to climate change and other emissions effects could produce great harms, likely overwhelming any proximate benefit to directing resources to other tasks. Additionally, working on an issue that benefits the entire world would build better international relations while repairing damage wrought by prior U.S. Foreign policy. Finally, any scientific advances made in producing technology suitable for sustainable development could provide great opportunities for foreign trade.
Pursuing emissions reductions poses major challenges. Our market is built from autonomous, profit maximizing corporations, which profit by selling products and minimizing production costs. Emissions reductions require changes in the way that governments regulate markets and businesses conduct their operations. Markets must be regulated to produce environmentally sensitive corporations. Otherwise, producers have no reason to take the effects of their operations into account.
Additionally, many categories of emissions, most pointedly carbon dioxide, are a global problem. The United States can’t reduce other countries emissions for them, and even if the United States immediately stopped all emissions, 75% of the problem would remain. Successful emissions reductions require international cooperation.
Finally, the diffusion of interest relating to global emissions concerns limit the political power of the movement. Atmospheric emissions and their damaging consequences spread out geographically from sources large and small, each contributing to a global problem. We are all contributors and we are all victims. Few people are sufficiently damaged by any single action to take action out of individual self interest. Those with the most resources will be those best able defend themselves from harm and delay the personal impact. And just as the United States holds the record on both GDP and emissions, those with the most resources will cause the biggest problems. Like the international problem above, this highlights the importance of cooperation. This requires a change in the basic structure of our society to work together for the common good and a realization that these benefits will not arise from individual self-interested action.
I then had another “Whatever, I’ll do what I want!” moment and picked my rant as my piece to review in my writing class that followed the class in which the assignment was due. My classmates liked it, and my professor came in right as we were beginning my review. She is not a woman easily derailed, and she has a formidable reputation in the policy field. She said it was powerful, and insightful, and loved my thesis. She and my three classmates (we’ve broken up into subgroups to discuss the writings) all described my writing as powerful, and all praised one sentence in particular, close to the end.
They also pointed out the jarring transition between the first and second paragraphs, the excessive use of the word additionally, a couple minor grammar errors (left in because I’m lazy), points where I could strengthen the tone, use of unclear antecedents, etc, etc.
One of my classmates described my tone as “white coat scientific” but very approachable. *pat self on back*
“senioritis” may have some benefits.
quick question,
one: did you verify the initial assumption?
two: did you take into account quirks such as the fact that cattle ranching accounts for more greenhouse gases than automobiles do? if a third world country cannot afford a food staple like beef because their population is too poor and thus does not produce that greenhouse gas, can you expect the US to eliminate beef production and lower itself in that respect to the level of the developing nation which has been recognized to be deficient in basic foodstuffs?
is an abundance of cows that detrimental to the enviornment, if so is it morally acceptable to kill populations of animals for this reason?
-DS
one: I’m guessing you’re referring to the 5%/25% assumption. No, I didn’t verify it. I started writing this an hour and a half before it was due. I also had to make lunch time out of that. The 5% I have no doubt of. The 25% is a little trickier as a definitional question, but I certainly buy it. Do you think it’s off?
two: Maybe you’ve forgotten I’m an environmentally motivated vegan, maybe not. Ask a Hindu if beef is a basic foodstuff. Not having beef in my diet hasn’t resulted in anemia or other nutrient deficiencies, because beef, and for that matter, meat, isn’t an essential part of a healthy diet.
I don’t think the “slaughter of the cows” scenario is that dramatically different from what we do on a regular basis. If we simply sterilize a major portion of the existing cattle stock and eat them at the normal pace that would probably be adequate. We wouldn’t have to eliminate the species to dramatically reduce the emissions resulting from their rearing. Just cut back. Large parts of the country don’t believe they’ve eaten unless an animal died for the meal, and lots of them don’t count anything other than beef for those purposes. It’s hardly a wonder that heart disease and obesity is rampant in this country.
I’m not saying this is a technical fix, far from it. Plenty of people who just had their first (or seventh) heart attack can’t wait to get out of the hospital so they can go back to having whatever sugar-coated greasebomb they typically ate before their emergency. And I’d bet most of the patients that do that could tell you their doctor told them not to, then flip the bird at their doctor (okay, the last part is poetic license). Not like there aren’t chainsmoking, beef-at-every-meal doctors, too, who’d advise their patients to cut back on both. This is a social values problem. Your hamburgers or your life.
Then there’s the question of what elements of cattle ranching cause the trouble. If it’s fuel consumption that’s the major element, due to transportation, herding, etc, etc, biodiesel would provide a major benefit.
But if we keep up the business as usual program, we can expect increasingly higher rates of tsunamis and hurricanes, continuing expansion of deserts, increased climate instability and other results which would crimp our lifestyle in ways we don’t control.
Growing up, my parents had the same “not a meal without meat” philosophy, which I could never understand. I moved out about 5 years ago and now whenever I visit and they’re eating dinner, meat is a much rarer occurrence. I don’t know what happened, but I’m all for it.
Wow… the livestock turnover rate is so extraordinarily high that they wouldn’t need to be killed just for that purpose. Rather, we could just stop breeding more of them.
*applauds*
attaboy!
Your essay is well written, technically.
But I don’t think global warming is a bad thing, it’s merely part of a carbon respiration cycle that covers a billion years of evolving life on earth. And I don’t think humans will be able to stop it.
The global climate has never been stable, the global environment has never been stable, life has always been forced to adapt to changing conditions. If humans weren’t warming the global climate, then the global climate would probably be cooling instead. All that fossil fuel carbon used to be in the atmosphere, we humans are merely returning it to where it belongs, so plants can once again remove it.
Isn’t this just the opposite assumption? It’s like “You say greenhouse gasses matter, I say they don’t (in the whole scheme of things)”
Maybe the point is better made that this is one of only a few human questions that concern the entire earth over very large timespans, and there’s no great way to figure out what exactly will happen if we just ignore it and continue living as we do.
But doesn’t it make more sense, instead of saying “we’re America, we do what we want,” to hedge our bets and try to be less of an influence on the otherwise natural course of the planet? I mean, we don’t have to stop all human advancement in the name of reducing pollution, but it’s just as stupid to say “Ah, it probably doesn’t matter.”
Hmmm, I wonder what you think of this graph of atmospheric CO2 and attendant explanations. Worthy of note: global CO2 levels have been cyclic. We now have siginificantly higher concentrations than at any point in time during the existence of our species, let alone our civilization.
It’s not that I think the earth will erupt into flame or anything. I worry about the viability of the planet for the survival of us as people and as a society.
It’s great that many species would survive an ice age (or a hot age), but I’m concerned about one species in particular. I do not care where the carbon “belongs,” (according to whose judgment?) I care about the quality of life for human beings.
I understand that people are concerned, and that they want to do something about it. They might not really be able to do anything about it.
Even if all the industrialized countries cut their emissions back down to a 1990 level, atmospheric carbon levels would continue to increase. Cutting back some isn’t going to avoid the problem. To avoid the problem you’d have to go back to the carbon levels of at least a couple hundred years ago, if not a couple thousand years ago.
There’s a fallacy in thinking that: if humans caused something, then humans can fix it. No, not always, not this time. You’re not going to be able to make all six billion humans stop burning any fossil fuels. The effect on living standards would be catastrophic, and people simply won’t do it.
So, am I correctly distilling your argument to be that people should just accept their fate and adapt as best they can?
I have something to add that’s anecdotal, rather than well-researched. It seems as though emissions have a more significant impact on the local geographic area. For the improved health of the U.S. population, companies etc. operating in the U.S. should be cutting down their emissions. And yes, air quality _is_ bad — asthma and other lung diseases are on the rise.
In India, air population is a major problem. They suddenly had a lot of kids with asthma. You never saw blue sky in New Delhi except in certain places. Planes couldn’t land because the visibility was so poor. I was there and was told it used to be much worse. I couldn’t breathe. I wore my headband around my mouth and tried to breathe through my nose. At the end of the day, when I blew my nose, the kleenex was full of black, soot-like gunk.
I came back two years later, when most of the buses, taxis, and rickshaws had started using CNG gas. You could see sky occasionally. My asthma was manageable.
As far as impact to the world goes, that’s hard to measure, but the impact to the local population was HUGE! That’s reason enough to fix it.
It depends on the emission. You’re correct that most emissions effects are local. Carbon Monoxide, Sufur oxides, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, ozone, partially combusted hydrocarbons, various nitrogen oxides, and more are local. It’s mostly carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide that are global. And the main problem from those is global warming.
Local impact is particularly noteworthy in areas with high population densities. See also India and major metro areas anywhere.
Global warming isn’t actually as hard to measure as you might think. It’s a matter of how much radiant energy is absorbed by the atmosphere and converted into heat. I did some number crunching on it for the aforementioned homework. But you’re right, local impact is huge, and an excellent reason to work on emissions of all stripes, because many of the solutions that work for one of them make major strides in all of them.
the newest version of Opera web browser comes with a trash can icon that you can click on to retrive recently closed pages. I’m not sure if it preserves filled in text boxes and such. I’ll have to try that when I get home.
My solution to this particular problem is to righ-click text fields and choose to compose the text in an external editor. In my case, vi.