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What are our personal obligations toward the environment?
From the hum of the city, while pondering fossil fuel consumption, Megan McArdle writes:
I understand that people's desires for large houses in leafy suburbs are every bit as valid as my ardent desire to live near the peaceful hum of traffic. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a policy that effects everyone equally, and the painful job of being an adult is doing things we don't like because they're the morally right thing to do.
From my mid-sized house in a leafy suburb, I will assume that a) environmental concerns are real, b) we will fall short of fixing those problems through public policy (Megan uses the word policy but mostly her post is about personal obligation), and c) we do in fact have personal obligations to limit consumption. The question remains how much fun we can have. Fossil fuel consumption isn't necessarily the area of optimal sacrifice. For instance here are two other options:
1. Send money and other forms of aid to the victims and future victims.
2. Have fewer children than otherwise, if only in the stochastic sense (e.g., don't move to Alaska at a young age). Climate change is not the last environmental burden we will place on the world and probably not even the biggest such burden, but fewer people does mean less human pressure along many environmental dimensions, present and future.
Assuming that restriction is indeed called for, either of those might be more personally imperative than:
3. Fly and drive less and buy a smaller house.
Most people focus on #3 because lower energy consumption makes them feel less affiliated with the particular problem at hand. But instrumentally speaking at a low discount rate #2 is more potent and at any discount rate #1 can be a more effective form of aid to the victims.
In this setting, I can see a few theories of our duties:
a. Do that which yields the highest net social return if only you do it.
b. Do that which yields the highest net social return if many people were to do it.
c. Cut back on your activities which most closely resemble aggressive interference into the lives of others.
d. Perform the action most likely to influence the behavior of others.
Belief in "a" favors sending money. Belief in "b" favors having fewer children. Belief in "c" favors restricting your driving and flying. I am not sure which course of action follows from belief in "d."
You might think that you should do some mix of 1, 2, and 3, But if your MU schedules are sufficiently flat, an argument from Steven Landsburg implies it is optimal to concentrate your sacrifice in a single "best returns" project. So it may suffice to pick either 1, 2, or 3 and do it very well.
The bottom line: Perhaps I should call this blog post An Apology for Me.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on September 11, 2008 at 06:38 AM in Philosophy | Permalink
Comments
By the iron laws of economics, if you sacrifice to reduce your consumption all you accomplish is to make scarce resources cheaper for others to consume. All the resources that go on the market *will* be consumed at some price, if there's *anybody* who wants them.
I propose a large tax on fossil fuels, with 100% of the tax distributed equally to voters. If gasoline costs $10/gallon and you get $300/month from the government that you can use to pay for your gasoline, you aren't hurting that much. But every gallon you don't buy is $10 you can use for something else.
The more fossil fuels you use, the more money you pay that subsidises the people who use less.
Much better than just not doing it and making the price cheaper for those who do.
Posted by: J Thomas at Sep 11, 2008 7:23:11 AM
The idea that fewer children puts less pressure on the environment seems empirically suspect. In the 70's, when I grew up and I suspect you did as well, the environment was in much worse shape than it is now, but our population is now much larger. I know this is a U.S. perspective, but as other countries achieve wealth similar to the U.S. it is reasonable to think their environments will improve as well.
Posted by: Tom Kelly at Sep 11, 2008 7:24:24 AM
Channeling Julian Simon here: If fewer people means less specialization and less inventiveness, fewer people might not be the best choice.
On the other hand (speaking as me rather than as JS) there's presumably an optimum population size for a given tech level, and I have no idea if we're near it.
Posted by: Nancy Lebovitz at Sep 11, 2008 7:31:38 AM
I quite like this idea, because it means as long as I have no children (which I was planning to do anyway) I don't have to worry about anything else. Excellent!
Posted by: jon at Sep 11, 2008 7:35:18 AM
If you believe in a long-run growth model with increasing returns to scale from research, it makes sense to have lots of children and encourage them to become scientists and engineers...
Posted by: Millian at Sep 11, 2008 7:45:21 AM
I'm not sure what it speaks to that Tyler and and some of the other commenters think that having less children is a more optimal area of sacrifice in terms of fun than reducing fossil fuel consumption. Yeah, trans-continental travel is more fun than diapers, but still...
Posted by: Ryan at Sep 11, 2008 8:33:37 AM
Tyler shouldn't think about this too much. This is exactly why conservatives are happier than progressives.
I support pleasure and beauty for their own sake. A large yard gives me that. Therefore, I am happy. End of story.
Posted by: thehova at Sep 11, 2008 8:42:48 AM
if we have fewer children, fewer people will be around to enjoy what's left of the smoldering hot world, no? why not have lots of children and give them lots of money?
Posted by: Nate at Sep 11, 2008 8:51:20 AM
A question of welfare economics, no?
Making some assumptions about people's talents, I'd guess the best use of our energies would be to ensure that Pareto efficiency rules. A likely step in that direction would be to help manage the pricing mechanisms for carbon, based on the assumption (a good, but imperfect one, I think) that every person of the world has equal claim to a non-baked life. Since carbon does the cooking, and since we all produce carbon a world transfer mechanism is appropriate: I, who travel frequently, pay the Brazilian whose forests sequester all the carbon I release, a price that can clear the net carbon generation.
Right now, almost any reasonable carbon "tax" would NOT incent others enough to sequester carbon quickly enough, but as a start, would slow down generation. Some investments in pilot projects, etc., would be valuable in speeding the day that we reach an equilibrium.
Posted by: Walt French at Sep 11, 2008 8:52:44 AM
"... it makes sense to have lots of children and encourage them to become scientists and engineers..."
Or rather go out there and encourage a lot of those children already there!
Posted by: reader at Sep 11, 2008 9:34:18 AM
Don't call the post "an apology." Too final. Call it "a work in progress." I have been following MR for a long time, and sense some change on this moral question. Option 1 (and the related option of buying offsets) is okay if the contribution stands on its own merits but its' a cop-out as an ethical answer to environmental problems, option 2 I can't preach about (have two kids). Option 3 is hopeless if it requires real hardship for privileged people, but what if it doesn't? Let's market option 3 better by saying: "Option 3. Learn over time to enjoy and appreciate low-impact goods and services, move to a smaller home near public transportation at the next convenient relocation, treasure high-impact activities such as world travel as rare treats, and steadily reduce climate impact from each year to the next."
Posted by: Parke at Sep 11, 2008 9:35:57 AM
Climate change is an environmental burden humans place on the world? Methinks Tyler has spent too much time near the beltway.
Posted by: barry at Sep 11, 2008 9:37:48 AM
Mid-sized house
Mid-sized house for a human, for a human in a developed country, for an American?
Begin sarcasm
I believe that everyone should consume only up to the level that I do or maybe a little more. If they consume much more than I do I will call them pigs. I call it Floccina's law of environmental relativity.
End sarcasm
We humans have been successfully improving the environment for humans since man first purposefully planted seeds. I see no end to that improvement. Perhaps if one would like to speed that advance one would invest in science.
So don’t worry, be happy.
Posted by: floccina at Sep 11, 2008 9:40:29 AM
thank you, tyler, for suggesting the politically incorrect remedy of reducing human reproduction rates. that is simple the best solution to most of the resource and environmental problems facing humanity.
Posted by: samson at Sep 11, 2008 9:40:36 AM
Your assumptions (a), (b) and (c) are always the same. Why not weight them by probability or importance?
(c) makes me uneasy. I think it is strange to talk about obligations to environments, but it is natural to think about obligations to my stomach or my children.
Posted by: mpkomara at Sep 11, 2008 9:43:18 AM
I think you missed a very important - perhaps THE most important one.
The Soviets started having fewer and fewer children some time in the 1960s (maybe 50s?), their population was falling. They also drive very few cars and rode almost no airplanes. They provided aid - social support systems - for victims. Yet they were environmentally among the worst contributors.
Why? Because their technology was incredibly poor - because their economy was horrifically unworkable.
Similarly, each mile driven in a car of today pollutes less than one a decade or two ago. Each kilowatt-hour of electricity produces more and pollutes less than it used to. etc
This is why this statement is wrong: "fewer people does mean less human pressure along many environmental dimensions, present and future."
If those people come together in a global economy and, with division of labor and exchange, create new clean technologies, we will exert less pressure not more.
The best thing that we can all do is to contribute to new and better technology (through going into engineering, science, any field which can move those forward) or contribute to growth in the economy (business, free market policy, economics, etc). The second best thing we can do is simply to not interfere with the advance in technology, by interfering in the process through Luddite ideologies or market restrictions.
Posted by: liberty at Sep 11, 2008 9:55:59 AM
Eat less meat: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7600005.stm
From a public policy point of view: tax fuel/energy more (and tax income and capital gains correspondingly less)...that will drive up the cost of heating/cooling big houses, driving from suburbs, eating energy-intensive foods like meat, and generally raise the cost of having the marginal child. It seems so obvious, why do you never hear it talked about?
Posted by: david at Sep 11, 2008 9:58:51 AM
Ditto what J_Thomas said (minus the very high desired gas price/prebate), and I confess i'm a bit confused about
why economists haven't said the same thing. "Unilteral disarmament" doesn't work here; someone else will
gobble up the fuel you didn't. Unless the world acts in unison, there's no point, which is why it makes much
more sense to just do some solution that doesn't depend on others joining in, like sinking the CO2.
And J_Thomas, $10/gallon gas isn't justifiable even on AGW grounds. Before you hit $5/gallon, it becomes profitable to use nuclear power to slurp CO2 from the atmosphere and store the energy in gasoline (the details of which a federal lab has already worked out) which is carbon neutral. No, that doesn't violate the laws of thermodynamics because you still have to take the energy for the fuel from the nuclear power reaction.
Another thing: "social pressure" and shunning against those that "waste" energy just doesn't work, because you have to solve the calculation problem in order to figure out who needs to be shunned :-P
Posted by: Person at Sep 11, 2008 10:06:39 AM
@liberty: That doesn't work either. Eventually the economy will grow so that the higher consumption makes up for the more efficient consumption in the aggregate (exactly the situation with respect to the US and USSR!). Then what?
Posted by: Person at Sep 11, 2008 10:10:18 AM
Having a significantly older population worries me. We are already living longer. Having fewer children would only exacerbate the problem. Most developed countries are shrinkng and have been. A significantly smaller population also more or less guarantees increases the payroll tax rate and cap. Children help take care of you when you are old (in the elderly welfare program sense), or as my mom and our family assisted my grandpa (not financially he was a saver) with the things in life that you need a loved one to do.
Posted by: Joe at Sep 11, 2008 10:16:10 AM
Here is a question that I am too lazy to look up, but maybe someone here knows. With all the talk of Alaska in the last two weeks in general and Tyler's post here in particular, it strikes that Alaska is subsidizing larger families by sending $3,269 to each person each year, and I would think that Alaska family sizes should all else equal be larger. For a family in the 25% marginal federal tax bracket, that is equal to about an extra $13,000 personal exemption per child on top of the federal personal exemption and child tax credit. Everything else equal, that should increase family size in Alaska, but everything else is never exactly equal. Are Alaskan families larger?
Posted by: liberalarts at Sep 11, 2008 10:19:27 AM
Person,
I am not sure that this is true - and it certainly isn't true a priori. If we are continuing to get cleaner, and at an accelerating pace, why should our continued growth out-run our technological improvements?
In the shorter-run, population growth slows at a certain point as people have fewer children, but our lives extend and our consumption increases; these must be compared with the improved clean technology over the same period. Perhaps they are hand in hand, perhaps we don't reduce our imprint much, but its not obvious that we increase it. And at the same time our lives improve and we set the stage for the longer run.
In the longer run, if we can reach a place of clean enough consumption, then it won't matter how much our consumption increases, because it will all be clean.
As to US vs USSR, can you give me a cite? I am pretty sure that the USSR was much worse on the environment than the US, even given its lower consumption. For one example, just think Chernobyl. For some others - their rivers and air as impacted by their horrific factories.
Remember as well - aggregate production was much higher than it needed to be for aggregate consumption because of all the waste; if they consumed 1/5 of what we consumed (even of poor quality, not-demanded goods), they produced more than 1/5 of what we produced. Production is what pollutes, not consumption. Efficient, clean production allows for higher consumption AND a smaller footprint.
Posted by: liberty at Sep 11, 2008 10:44:11 AM
To what extent does voluntarily limiting consumption exacerbate your (b), the problem of falling short of fixing probs via public policy?
Didn't this blog report on someone's idea to refuse to donate organs without pay in order to hasten the day when a (presumed by him) beneficial market comes into existence?
Maybe the ethical thing to do is to treat prices as reflective of costs in order to hasten the day when (and/or degree to which) public policy makes them that way.
Or maybe this is self-serving nonsense. I haven't figured out how to evaluate the magnitude of this effect (help welcomed).
Posted by: fmb at Sep 11, 2008 10:53:47 AM
If you disagree with 'b' don't worry, the people who take this route will be all gone in a generation...
Posted by: Veeder at Sep 11, 2008 11:04:09 AM
It’s not that it’s manifestly impossible to do these things in a low-carbon way, it’s just that doing so is too difficult and expensive for the huge majority of people to do at this time. Continent-crossing electric bullet trains powered by renewable energy would be great, but they are not available to those trying to cross North America today.
Given the total capacity of the planet to absorb greenhouse gasses, it may be fundamentally impossible for the number of people alive today to ever do these kinds of things sustainably. As such, responding seriously to the threat of climate change requires pretty significant personal sacrifices and, to a considerable extent, a reduced expectation of how much energy-intensive stuff we can aspire to do in the course of our lives. Building a low-carbon society is a way of taking back the freedoms lent to us by hydrocarbon energy, but it definitely remains to be seen whether equivalent per-capita potential will be created by such means during the lifetime of anyone alive today.
More:
http://www.sindark.com/wiki/index.php?title=Major_climate_change_issues#Global_equity
Posted by: Milan at Sep 11, 2008 11:07:08 AM
