The Apocalypse is Near, Change Your Lightbulbs!

The appropriately named Environmental Crusaders will be bringing yet another one of their priests to the Athenaeum. This time it’s Eban Goostein who’ll help us pay proper reverence on that timeless pagan festival, Earth Day (critical theological question at hand: can the pious young activist turn his attention from Cesar Chavez Month for even one day to make equally bountiful sacrifices to Mother Earth?)

The Ath write-up, clearly written by the group, gives themselves a nice little pat on the back for a cheesy “panel” they held earlier on in the semester. Here’s what it says:

On January 30, 2008, CMC helped to focus the nation on global warming with its faculty panel, "Global Warming: Is It Our Responsibility?" CMC faculty from economics, chemistry, government, and philosophy dicussed the problem of climate change from their unique disciplines, adding to our understanding and analysis of the problem of global warming. The same day, thousands of other college students also participated in Focus the Nation, a countrywide educational initiative to bring global warming to front and center on college campuses. Eban Goodstein is the founder of Focus the Nation.

(Yes, that should be “discussed,” but what you do expect from a Fortnightly write-up? Here’s my favorite line from this issue: “As a commentator, Pipes has written regular columns for Chief Executive, Investor’s Business Daily, and the San Francisco Examiner, and is the wife of Professor of Government Charles Kesler.” Not quite the way I would have presented her background, though it's a talk I do urge you to attend.)

Anyways, about that panel. I was there, and I have to admit that if it accomplished anything, one hopes it encouraged our dogmatic friends to entertain some skepticism--if not about global warming itself, then at least about the worthiness of their crusade. (Though I wouldn't mind anyone campaigning to end the intellectual pollution currently clogging the Ath. More Salvatori speakers, please!)

First up was Professor Purvis-Roberts. Representing chemistry, she didn't have much to say about science, but she was adamant that there is complete consensus in the "serious" scientific community about global warming. But that she felt the need to insist on this point again and again made it indeed obvious that no such consensus exists, especially when we begin to talk about the more pertinent questions--how much humans contribute to global warming, how bad it will get, and what we can do about it. Professor Rajczi flatly contradicted her when it was his turn to speak, and later on he stressed that there are more skeptics than we generally admit.

But interestingly, she acknowledged that U.S. has the economic capability to cope with all the flooding, heating, drought, and fire problems that may arise due to climate change. So wait, I thought, if we have the ability to adapt to these problems by entrepreneurial activity and technological development, what's the big deal? Well, she explained, the problem is that Lesser Developed Countries will be hit the hardest, and it's all the fault of us More Developed Countries. Worst of all, little island cultures may be lost forever when people have to move.

But Alex Rajczi managed to outdo the Professor Purvis-Roberts in his condescending talk. There, he proposed groundbreaking ways for us non-scientists to approach the issue. First, he said if we don't know a whole lot about the science, we ought to just trust what the majority of scientists believe. This is what we do in everything in else. After all, he pointed out, there are scientists who think AIDS is not caused by HIV (though even Obama's spiritual mentor knows that AIDS is caused by HIV, which of course was invented by the government to kill off black people).

Now surely this comparison is a tad unfair, but then again I'm no philosopher. While it's obvious that we should defer to experts when dealing with technical science, it should also be obvious that we focus on those experts who actually study the climate--where as it turns out there happens to be the most dispute. More importantly, this really doesn't help us much when it comes to complex questions about how much we can curb the effects of climate change and whether or not the attempt is even worth it given the huge economic costs.

Excuse me, did I say complex? I meant to say simple. Most environmental crusaders take it as an article of faith that green industries created by government regulation and subsidies will somehow be more productive than industries that have to respond to real demands and real competition.

But the question is even more simple if you apply Rajczi's gee-golly philosophy. According to Rajczi, there might be a lot we disagree on ethically, but we can all agree that going out of our way to hurt others is bad. For instance, we may disagree about how much aid to give to the poor, but no one thinks we should just kill them. And so it goes with global warming. Because global warming is primarily caused by highly industrialized countries like ours, and because the impacts will be the most devastating for people abroad in poor countries, the responsibility for the crime rests on our shoulders.

Now, since the professor is right that arbitrarily whacking people isn't very controversial, we might ask him to address the real political problem. What happens when you add self-interest into the equation? Are we allowed to do anything for our own good that might have an adverse effect on others? And what happens when we have to choose between harming those we love or our political community on the one hand, and strangers or mankind generally on the other? Now common sense tells us that question is pretty easy, but I'm not sure what answer Rajczi's tool-box for everyday philosophy would give. Based on his answer concerning global warming (it's all our responsibility to do what we can to stop it, regardless of the burden), it seems his approach is more categorical.

(In that case, we would need to challenge him to offer some grounding for this radically egalitarian philosophy. I tend to find philosophies that tell us that the purpose of life is only moral--by this they generally mean avoiding doing anything to disadvantage others--both utopian and grim because they set a rather low threshold for moral excellence. In the end, moral action becomes a simple matter of constantly placating others. It leaves no place for self-interest or external goods, or even our own happiness. But if our own natural happiness is not the ultimate basis for moral action, then what is exactly?)

Anyways, the point is that Racjzi's clever answer to the moral debate over global warming falls apart the instant we realize there are reasons we do the things that contribute to rising temperatures (you know, like using electricity). Sorry, it turns out we aren't just capriciously wiping out innocent victims.

I would also encourage Rajczi to consider what happens when what the poor need most of all (economic development), depends on robust trade, which we can only offer them if our industries aren't tied down by green regulations. (And mind you, by Rajczi's own moral calculus, global poverty is worth at least "three German Holocausts a year"--damn.)

Rajczi might have profited from listening closely to Professor Christian's talk from the political perspective. Christian thinks that global warming is a serious problem that demands policy attention. But for him, nothing that would reasonably pass through the U.S. government would come close to solving the problem. He suffers no illusions and knows that the most effective policies, such as carbon taxes, would come at a major financial burden that most people aren't willing to accept. If that's the case, isn't some resignation in order? Or should we go on to enact a bunch of half-way measures that won't stop climate change but will surely slow down growth? The Kyoto Protocol, which has virtually no effect because it excludes China and India, comes to mind.

Professor Blomberg, who talked about the economics of global warming, only further made the environmentalist dogma hard to swallow. His overall argument was that the attempt to determine the full economic costs and benefits of addressing global warming is both extremely difficult and subjective. He pointed out that due to natural economic growth, future generations will be far richer than us and will have much better technology. In all likelihood, their relative burden will be much smaller than ours, no matter how big a mess we leave those little snobs to clean up. So to me at least, it seems like some generational discrimination is in order.

But Blomberg and the other panelists all agreed that it is in our best interest to do what we can to halt global warming. So it was perhaps most revealing when none of them could adequately answer the devastating question posed by Professor Eliott. Eliott asked them what they would make of environmental and economic expert Bjorg Lomborg's suggestion that with limited resources, spending on global warming should fall very low on the global priority list. Making a dent on global warming would take a massive economic sacrifice we can't afford, and if we are so interested in saving the plight of the global poor, our dollars would make a much bigger difference if spent on goods like water and healthcare. (If you are interested, you can read some op-eds that summarize Lomborg's arguments: here, here, and here.)

I am sympathetic to Lomborg's position, but then again I'm also sympathetic to rational debate about this issue. But it seems our friends marching in the crusade and leading the Campus Climate Initiative would have us shut off our minds before we shut off our lights. Like the Darfur campaign before it, this crusade is animated by a religious fervor--a need to find meaning in our empty "bourgeois" lives. We are moving beyond the time of politics and war. We don't need "fear," we need change.