Don't Even Think About It (29 page)

And so it is with climate change. We diffuse the responsibility into multiple stages, each one protected by the passive voice. The oil is produced. It is burned in the car. The climate is changed. Someone’s life is destroyed in a climate disaster on TV. Or, as the
Wall Street Journal
says, “climate concerns cannot and must not be ignored”—this, incidentally, in a quotation from a report arguing for the production of Canadian tar sands.

So where in this chain
does
responsibility for climate change lie? Stephen Gardiner, professor of philosophy at the University of Washington, argues that
all
the decisions concerning action or inaction on climate change are ethical issues—especially in regard to intergenerational rights.

Which, for Gardiner, raises an interesting question: Why is there so little discussion of the ethics of climate change? The answer is that this is yet another area in which people shape the issue to avoid the discussion. Certainly no one is in a hurry to invite ethicists into the policy discussions. In 2010, the United Nations considered creating a Universal Declaration of Ethical Principles in Relation to Climate Change. After ten international consultation meetings, its ad hoc working group concluded that the U.N. “should be given the opportunity to review the desirability of preparing a draft declaration.” I don’t think that was a yes, even by U.N. standards.

This is exactly the kind of obfuscation that prompts Gardiner to suggest what he calls “a very unpleasant thought” that politicians deliberately create needlessly complex treaties and unworkable processes to draw attention away from the need to do something. This observation is not lost on other commentators.
Guardian
journalist George Monbiot argues that “government policy is not contained within the reports and reviews it commissions; government policy
is
the reports and reviews.” He says, “Government creates the impression that something is being done, while simultaneously preventing anything from happening.”

The key factor that determines moral responsibility is intentionality. Humans are acutely alert to interpreting people’s intentions—even children as young as three respond differently to identical harmful acts depending on whether they regard them as intentional or not intentional.

The reason that an enemy narrative motivates the emotional brain is because an enemy has the clear
intention
to
harm us
.
If scientists had discovered that North Korea was pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere with the intent to destabilize the world’s climate, there would be immediate political consensus to take action, regardless of the cost. That, of course, would be a very big problem but, crucially, a
tame
problem, and far more easily solved.

So climate change struggles with intentionality. No one wanted climate change to occur. No one ever purposefully wanted to hurt anyone through climate change. As the journalist Gwynne Dyer argues in his book
Climate Wars
: “Nobody is to blame for the crisis that hangs over us—not my mother who had five children, not William Levitt who invented the modern suburb, or Henry Ford.”

But that is in the past. It is much harder to argue one’s innocence when one
knows
that one’s actions are causing harm. If climate change becomes intentionally harmful only when people
know
they are causing it, is it any surprise that most people do everything they can to avoid learning about it or accepting that it exists?

Like many skeptics, U.C. Berkeley physicist Richard Mueller would be very happy if there was no discussion about morality at all. Talk of responsibility, he says, is all about blame. Mueller recalls a Frenchman accusing Americans of being arrogant for blaming themselves—as though only America could be important enough to count. We both have a laugh at this: Is blaming someone for blaming themselves some kind of meta-blame, I wondered. This issue, Mueller says, needs “problem solvers not blame seekers.”

But if we want to be problem solvers, we still have to decide exactly where that problem lies. Whether we are concerned with wellhead, tailpipe, or both, we still have to agree who is going to make the changes. And that leads straight into the issue of fairness and back into the ethical dimension. Ethics are unavoidable.

Everyone is strongly in favor of the principle of fairness. The problem is that everyone also defines fairness in terms of his or her own self-interest. This can be taken to a ludicrous extreme. The Republican chairman of the House of Representatives debate on the Kyoto Protocol, David M. McIntosh, argued that the protocol was “patently unfair” because it exempted countries that already had the “competitive advantages of cheap labor, lower production costs, and lower environmental, health, and safety standards.” Such, it would seem, are the unfair economic advantages of grinding poverty.

Psychology research suggests two key reasons why it is proving so hard to define fair reductions. The first is that our attachment to the status quo leads us to give an excessive value to what we already possess. We come to believe that this originates in our own skill, talent, and hard work and is therefore a fair reward.

The second reason is that while people are sensitive to losses, they are even more
sensitive to the fair distribution of losses. In experiments, people may tolerate an unfair distribution of gains in the interest of a quick settlement, but they will doggedly insist that any loss is unfair, even if, by delaying an agreement, they end up paying far more.

This problem constantly recurs around the management of shared environmental resources where everyone wants the gain of exploitation but no one wants to accept the loss of constraint. In his highly influential and highly disputed paper published in
Science
in 1968, the ecologist Garrett Hardin argued that we are all forced by our evolutionary drives to maximize our personal benefit from a common resource even when we know that this will lead to its ultimate destruction. He named this phenomenon the “tragedy of the commons.”

Not surprisingly, climate change has been called the
ultimate
tragedy of the global commons, although, as usual, the people who use the phrase invariably focus on the tailpipe-emissions-into-the-atmosphere commons rather than exploitation of the common reserves of fossil fuels.

Such is its fame that people tend to forget that Hardin’s paper is not a reasoned argument grounded in evidence but an ideological polemic grounded in prejudice. Its primary aim was to confront “liberal taboos” in order to argue that the provisions of a welfare state encourage “overbreeding” by the poor. None of this concern about overpopulation prevented Hardin from pursuing his own hard-wired self-interest and having four children of his own.

Hardin’s deterministic model of human nature melds perfectly with the interests of authoritarianism and economic elites. Thus, when speaking of the atmospheric commons, Hardin says, “The air and waters surrounding us cannot readily be fenced, and so the tragedy of the commons as a cesspool must be prevented by different means, by coercive laws or taxing devices that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutants than to discharge them untreated.”

If climate change is a tragedy of the commons, it follows that appeals to responsibility and conscience are a waste of time and that, in Hardin’s words, only “mutual coercion mutually agreed on” will work to curtail our insatiable personal interests.

But there are many other ways to see it. The political scientist Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize in Economics for her research into the innumerable ways that people collectively manage resources. In a direct challenge to Hardin, she argued that people will sustain and even improve shared resources providing there is free communication, a shared vision, a high level of trust, and a mobilization of participating communities from the bottom up.

And if this is, as Stephen Gardiner puts it, an issue of collective moral pollution in which we benefit ourselves at the expense of future generations, then we need to build that bottom up vision by agreeing to a set of principles based on our shared values. The problem is that we do everything we can to avoid thinking about climate change in any form, including, as we shall see, its implications for our own children.

35

What Did You Do in the Great Climate War, Daddy?

Why We Don’t Really Care What Our Children Think

In 1915 Arthur Gunn, a
London printer, was debating whether to join the army. He said to his wife, “If I don’t join the forces, whatever will I say to Paul if he turns round to me and says: ‘What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?’” Gunn suddenly realized he had a marvelous slogan for a recruiting poster and passed a sketch onto a propaganda artist he had worked with, Savile Lumley. Lumley did a fine job, choosing to make the interrogator a little girl. Sitting on her father’s lap, a history book on her knee, she asks him this probing question as he stares wistfully into the middle distance.

The moral dilemma that inspired this iconic poster is one of the recurring ethical themes in climate change communication. Caring for the welfare of our children is one of our strongest evolutionary drives and one of the few concerns that consistently overcomes self-interest. On the face of it, giving those children a voice in our decisions, especially imagining how they might confront us in the future, should be a powerful spur to action.

The veteran environmentalist Jørgen Randers, one of the authors of the famous 1972
Limits to Growth
report, tells us that our “first priority should be to prepare the foundations for an unassailable answer to the question, ‘What did you do, (grand)father, when greenhouse gas emissions were allowed to grow out of control in the early 2000s?’”

Al Gore invites audiences to consider which question they want to hear from future generations: “What were you thinking? Didn’t you see the North Pole melting before your eyes?” or “How did you find the moral courage to solve the crisis?”

This narrative applies to businesspeople too. John Varley, the former chief executive of the international Barclays Bank group, says, “More than anything, I want my children to be able to look me in the eye and to say with conviction ‘You played your part.’” Hopefully his children might also spend a few minutes on the Internet and then ask him why he approved nearly six billion dollars in loans to companies mining or generating power from coal.

It not surprising that President Obama, as a committed father, speaks often of the welfare of children and being able to reply proudly to them that “this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

In a farewell letter to his former employees, Obama’s outgoing energy secretary, Steven Chu, wrote, “We don’t want our children to ask, ‘What were our parents thinking? Didn’t they care about us?’” After all, he continued, “we do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” As with so many of the folk quotations that gravitate to the climate issue, this eternal wisdom, usually ascribed to the Amish or Native American Chief Seattle, is actually nothing of the kind. It originates in a speech given in 1974 by the Australian Minister for the Environment, Moss Cass, but don’t expect any bumper sticker to give him the credit.

These intergenerational challenges pull together several parallel cognitive themes. They seek to create proximity by showing how future events follow from present choices and imagining the specific moment when they might be brought to account. They avoid the problems of diffused responsibility and bystander effect by creating a direct connection between ourselves and those who will be affected. They build on our hardwired sense of care for our children. And they bring in metaphors from outside climate change, including wartime mobilization or romanticized “tribal” lore.

They seem to be pressing all the right buttons. But do they actually work?

The attitudinal research suggests that people who have children are no more concerned about climate change than anyone else—indeed possibly less so. A survey conducted in the United States, Canada, and Britain found that people with children were consistently less likely to believe that climate change was a serious threat, less likely to talk about it, and significantly less likely to have any opinion on how to deal with it. In the Canadian survey, people with children were 60 percent more likely to say that climate change was not really happening than people without children.

Another study in Britain concluded that having children has little or no influence and that the main determinant of people’s attitudes is, as we would expect, their values and politics. If this disposes them to worry about climate change, then they are likely to loudly express a concern about their children’s future, but this should not make us assume that this is a narrative that works across all boundaries.

And there are good reasons to suspect that having a child will mobilize the full tool kit of biases and avoidance strategies. Having children is usually an active choice in which we quite deliberately choose to highlight the reasons for having the child and suppress our knowledge about the world we might be bringing them into. Presuming that we wish the best for our children (and Sigmund Freud, who always liked to be controversial, claimed that elders subconsciously resented the young), this inclines us to an optimism bias concerning climate change and certainly concerning the prospects for our own children.