Climate Change: Are We Focused on What Matters?
I’m woefully under-educated on the science of climate change, but I’ve read enough to suspect we might be engaged in the wrong debates.
Today, we argue about whether or not the planet is warming, and — if it is warming — how much of that trend is caused by (and thus can be controlled by) human action or counteraction.
These arguments, like all arguments, are made by terribly imperfect people. What’s more, in the case of climate change, those terribly imperfect people have great passion for their respective points of view. Inevitably, that combination — great passion plus terrible imperfection — leads to petty, distracting, spin-off spats about impolitical emails and the like.
Enough already. We need to re-direct the terms of these debates to different and perhaps more pragmatic ground.
For instance: We know there are universal (beyond-global) factors at play here; e.g., the sun, our planet’s orbit, etc. We have zero control over those universal factors and they might just contribute more significantly to climate change than any actions we do or don’t take. Accordingly, shouldn’t we spend at least as much, if not more, time debating ways to survive climate change than we do ways to prevent it? (Why does the debate about how to prevent the melting of polar ice caps take precedent over the debate about how to keep Manhattan functioning despite rising sea levels?)
Another example: We know our current addiction to oil shifts significant money and power away from us and into the hands of what Thomas Friedman labels “petro-dictators.” And domestic drilling might not change this power-and-money shift by any meaningful measure. Accordingly, shouldn’t we spend as much, if not more, time debating ways to develop alternative fuel technologies for the sake of national security and prosperity than for the sake of climate change?
Finally, while we’re at — i.e., developing alternative fuels for the sake of national security and prosperity — wouldn’t it be a nice gift to our children and grandchildren (climate change or not) to emphasize cleaner, sustainable alternatives?
Call me naive. I am. Regardless, I think these and related questions have merit and deserve greater attention than they currently receive.
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74 Responses to “Climate Change: Are We Focused on What Matters?”
I just thought I would point out that there is not a hugely meaningful difference between enduring hazards you don't know about and enduring hazards you “signed up for with eyes open,” IF there aren't any significantly better alternative choices.
I see all the difference in the world between a job you were duped into taking and one you picked yourself. One could reasonably be described as exploitation, the other is simply an exercise of free choice.
In the scenario we've been discussing, the alternative choice to working in the factory is continuing to work on the family farm. Is the factory a “significantly better” choice? It's a matter of opinion. DQ says no, but many of the people offered factory jobs say yes.
But factories close all by themselves, with no lobbying — actually, with lobbying *not* to close — all the time, to move their businesses overseas or to states where workers can be paid less. Is that despicable?
They don't close by themselves, the people who own them decide to close them, usually because they're facing losses if they don't. Although it's unfortunate that the people at the old factory will lose their jobs, the people at the new one will gain jobs, and in your example they sound needier than the first group. Plus a more cost-efficient factory will mean a great many people will pay less for the goods it produces. I wouldn't call it despicable at all, I'd call it a net good.
DQ's arguing for something quite different. He wants to close *someone else's* factory in which he doesn't have a stake beyond his armchair-industrialist disapproval. He's not taking jobs from the rich and giving them to the poor, he's taking jobs from the poor. And he's trying to frame that as an act of charity. Despicable indeed.
Why do people have to rise from poverty a step at a time? Why the “have to”?
Because their winning lottery tickets keep getting lost in the mail. If it were the case that you could force the sweat shop factory to close, and a nice white-collar industrial park would take its place and employ all those same people in easier, better paying jobs, I'd say go for it. But is anyone actually offering such jobs?
And historically, incrementalism is the way development seems to work. Most developing countries have made huge progress in the past 50 years, and they've done it through small steps.
I see all the difference in the world between a job you were duped into taking and one you picked yourself.
What does “picked yourself” mean if there are no other meaningful choices?
One could reasonably be described as exploitation, the other is simply an exercise of free choice.
What does “free choice” mean if there are no other meaningful choices?
… the people who own them decide to close them, usually because they're facing losses if they don't.
“Losses” defined as deficits, or “losses” defined as a decrease in profits from obscene to huge?
Although it's unfortunate that the people at the old factory will lose their jobs, the people at the new one will gain jobs, and in your example they sound needier than the first group.
Well, of course they're needier. That's how the company gets away with paying them less money. Well, that, and no unions.
And if the people who gain the jobs are in places like Malaysia or Indonesia or Guatemala or Azerbaijan, they are even *more* needy than even the needier American people who gain jobs when the factory moves from Michigan to Mississippi.
You call that generosity. I call it exploitation.
If it were the case that you could force the sweat shop factory to close, and a nice white-collar industrial park would take its place and employ all those same people in easier, better paying jobs, I'd say go for it. But is anyone actually offering such jobs?
You *can* force the sweat shop factory to close. It's called enforcing the law. Which laws exist, btw, because people who believe as I do fought and struggled against people who believe as you do to get those laws passed.
You can even employ blue-collar workers in white-collar jobs located in nice white-collar industrial jobs if you train them to do the white-collar jobs. Naturally, that takes time, but on-the-job training is a recognized and acknowledged phenomenon in our world. So are community colleges and nice places like that, and if white-collar industrial park purveyors wished to encourage those nice places to do their nice work, they could, and voila! they would have lots of nice white-collar workers who used to work in factories that don't exist anymore.
Of course, not every laid-off factory worker wants to or is cut out to work in a white-collar job, and for those workers we have something called the minimum wage, which when it's pegged to the actual cost of living now rather than the cost of living when “Father Knows Best” was on the air, it actually does serve as a portal to financial stability.
And historically, incrementalism is the way development seems to work.
Not really. The civil rights movement went for roughly 15 years, from 1954 to 1968, and achieved humongous and ground-breaking legislative progress in that very short period of time, which followed about 250 years of legal slavery and a century of de facto re-enslavement after that, with no progress at all apart from a 10-year historical period called Reconstruction.
Incrementalism is really a euphemistic way of talking about how progressive change has always happened in this country — which boils down to individuals and groups of people busting their butts for years and years and years and years with some, but usually very little, real change until some mysterious “zeitgeist moment in time” is reached, at which point the blood, sweat, and tears of countless nameless people doing work unknown to most for long, long periods of time finally bears fruit.
“Incrementalism is really a euphemistic way of talking about how progressive change has always happened in this country”
“Stepwise” or “piecemeal” work just as well. These and “incrementalist” are accurate. They are not “euphemistic” or vague or imprecise or incorrect.
“very little, real change until some mysterious 'zeitgeist moment in time' is reached.”
Isn't the truth that much if not most of the time, progress is not only incremental but each step tangible?
Don't you think your description is both fatalist and revealing a passive rather than active view of life?
like KK said.
Don't you think your description is both fatalist and revealing a passive rather than active view of life?
No, lol. It's the opposite. Social and political change does not happen unless people make it happen. Americans both black and white had been actively calling for change, working for change, and all too often bleeding and dying to achieve, first legal freedom, and then equal rights, for black Americans for literally centuries.This was not passivity; it was activism. My point is that these activists were working for full equality under the law; they were not working for “incremental” little baby steps. It was the *other* side — the people who did not want to see *any* change or who were so terrified of and intimidated by white supremacy that they were afraid of “riling up” white authorities with too rapid change — who were always urging the activists to slow down, take it one step at a time, don't push things, let's go for incremental progress. Martin Luther King, Jr., took on the incrementalists with his pen in “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” He rejected incrementalism utterly, because what on earth kind of meaning does “incremental change” have when the change has been waiting for 350 years?
Long story short, meaningful change takes time, but it doesn't come at all if the people who seek it don't pose a threat (figuratively speaking) to the powers that be. Incrementalism does not pose a threat to any power authority and never has. That's why they promote it.
individuals and groups of people busting their butts for years and years and years and years with some, but usually very little, real change
Kathy, I'm talking about economic and social development of poorer countries, and it doesn't follow the Martin Luther King pattern at all. It's gradual and steady. No one brings the process to life better than Hans Rosling.
Both of which are cheaper than an F16, an F22, an F35 or any of our drones that we are using to kill defenseless people through out the world.
I wouldn't lobby to close the factory, I would lobby for strong labor laws in order of importance:
4 or more weeks of paid vacation.
1) The right to work in a safe environment.
2) No Child Labor.
3) No Prison Labor.
4) 8 hour work day with time off for lunch and appropriate breaks.
5) 5 day work weeks.
6) A minimum wage that lets you support yourself and your family.
7) The right to have an independent Union.
What huge progress?
If you made a list of industrialized countries prior to WWII and made the same list today, you would find the same countries on both list, with the exception of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia. The vast majority of the population of China & India live in abject poverty, Indonesia isn't any better, South America after having followed the Washington Consensus for the last thirty years is no better of than it was in the 70's, Africa is a disaster. The only parts of the world were substantial improvements are happening is Eastern Europe were Western European Corporations are shifting their manufacturing and Coastal China were US & Japanese Corporations are shifting their manufacturing.
I wouldn't lobby to close the factory, I would lobby for strong labor laws
The effects are the same. Making it more expensive to run factories means fewer factories.
Again, I don't recognize your moral authority to impose that list of your values on people in other countries. How safe is safe enough? What should the minimum working age be? Those are their decisions to make, not yours.
Well, I sure that we could shangai teenagers of the street, throw them in a factory, whip them into submission, chain them to their work stations, force them to work, feed them 1200 calories of gruel a day, and shove their bodies into an incinerator the minute they fell below an appropriate standard of productivity or died whichever happened first.
It would do wonders for manufacturing, productivity and profits…
And I don't recognize yours either.
And if it was up to people like you, I have no doubt the above scenario would be standard operating procedure.
The only parts of the world were substantial improvements are happening is Eastern Europe
Wow, when you're wrong, you're wrong big. Why don't you put your mindset up against this data set?
And if it was up to people like you, I have no doubt the above scenario would be standard operating procedure.
What an idiotic comment. I'm arguing that these people should be able to set their own labor laws, and that they're not as incompetent to do so as you apparently like to think. Your attitude is elitist and demeaning.
What you are arguing is that there should not be any labor laws, unions, nor environmental standards and that Corporations/The wealthy should be able to do whatever they damn well please.
When the people decide to pass laws to protect workers and elect leaders that will enforce them, people like you can be relied upon to back the coup that will bring back “liberty”…
FU
Profit Uber Alles.
What you are arguing is that there should not be any labor laws, unions, nor environmental standards
What I said was “those are their decisions to make, not yours.” You somehow read that as “throw their bodies into an incinerator.” Either you're not capable of having an adult conversation on the topic, or you're not interested in doing so. Not much I can do about either, so I'm done.
DLS: Like midnight basketball, or a rain forest park in Iowa?
D-Q: Both of which are cheaper than an F16, an F22, an F35 or any of the drones that we are using to kill defenseless people through out the world.
[sniff] Those poor terrorists. The USA kills them, Israel kills them (Yassin — like father, like son! HA)
Sure, let's do better than crazy Barney Franks wants to, and not only rob and gut the military, but end it completely. We're the evil colonalist-imperialist hierarchy-patriarchy alpha nation that's responsible for all the strife in the world, anyway, the most evil thing ever to evolve. If we eliminate our military, the rest of the oppressed world won't feel threatened and upset by us any longer, and they all will rush to be our friends, and we'll all sing around the campfire and live happily ever after.
Better still, let's get rid of all government, as that will prove to be cheaper still, and in fact, cheapest.
Starting with federal entitlements, and progressing from there elsewhere in the federal government …
cut, cut, cut…
(“Don't you think your description is both fatalist and revealing a passive rather than active view of life?”)
“No, lol. It's the opposite. Social and political change does not happen unless people make it happen.”
You had said that often little or nothing happens, and then a magic moment happens. That viewpoint is dissociated with people making it happen, people doing things. It is fatalistic or hints at it (it's out of your hands), and more importantly, is definitely passive (you're waiting for something you can't control to happen — this is hardly the same as “making it mappen.”) More in a moment (later in this posting).
“Americans both black and white had been actively calling for change, working for change, and all too often bleeding and dying to achieve, first legal freedom, and then equal rights, for black Americans for literally centuries.This was not passivity; it was activism. My point is that these activists were working for full equality under the law; they were not working for 'incremental' little baby steps. It was the *other* side — the people who did not want to see *any* change or who were so terrified of and intimidated by white supremacy that they were afraid of “riling up” white authorities with too rapid change — who were always urging the activists to slow down, take it one step at a time, don't push things, let's go for incremental progress. Martin Luther King, Jr., took on the incrementalists with his pen in 'Letter From a Birmingham Jail.' He rejected incrementalism utterly, because what on earth kind of meaning does 'incremental change' have when the change has been waiting for 350 years?”
Change was happening before that — it was just “incomplete” or insufficient, that's all (and as being resisted, especially in the South, in the case of civil rights). Certainly with this case, the full goal or complete goal was what was being sought (“Eyes on the Prize,” not on a partial prize); in cases like this, you probably view the objective as complete or absent, without “partial credit,” and viewing it as an objective no differently than you'd say there are no degrees of perfection, uniqueness, or — being pregnant, say.
I would point out that many goals are reached by steps, rather than all at once, and while sometimes you can be ambitious and even demanding, at least with defining your (eventual or ultimate) goals, at other times it's unrealistic, trying for too much, too soon, or seeking what isn't immediately reachable. (After all, gestation when you're pregnant isn't instantaneous, but requires nine months.)
“Long story short, meaningful change takes time, but it doesn't come at all if the people who seek it don't pose a threat (figuratively speaking) to the powers that be. Incrementalism does not pose a threat to any power authority and never has. That's why they promote it.”
No. You're mistaking being offered scraps or sops by people in power with what Dr. J and others like me are writing about, true progress, which comes from effort and achievement (eventually making others yield before it), and perhaps you are mistakenly discrediting the smaller, incremental achievements that are concealed (in various ways) or obscured by preoccupation with what's ultimately sought (which isn't always realistically achieveable promptly).
I believe you'd have been on firmer ground if you had stuck with noting that not all efforts achieve the same gains, which actually is true not only about political change or progress but everything. In the business world, for example, many businesses fail, or pioneers (as in political movements) are too far ahead of their time (there is no “conspiracy” or magic spell inhibiting them) and make little or no progress. The best example you could have provided (which I believe best illustrates the reality of what you're trying to explain) is Thomas Jefferson: “One-tenth inspiration, nine-tenths perspiration,” and how many experiments did he make that failed before he got the incandescent light bulb to be successful and practical? And what actual progress did he make, learning from his failures, that are obscured by the history we all know, that (finally) he invented the light bulb? (Promptly, from scratch? No) Usually the achievements that are made are incremental, not all at once. Think of Europe and Japan, rebuilding from the ashes of World War II, and Japan in particular becoming competitive with the West. All at once, promptly? No. It was incremental, and many of the steps are lost to most of us, vague, or only documented in obscure places by specialists. But obviously it didn't happen overnight.
We didn't instantly occupy and “own” the Pacific islands when fighting the Japanese in World War II. It took time and steps to do it.
Note that federal takeover of health care cannot happen overnight. The public won't tolerate it (as a goal, and because it distrusts government as well as the current politicians, if you care to know why not). But it's possible to get that toehold, that beachhead, and we know which way such “progress” moves in the future, once the precedent has been set. Goals like these are unrealistic to achieve all at once, and it is a waste of time to be conceiving them primarily in this way.
“The theoretical need starts because what's 'decent' is not obvious. Workers want wages to be higher, customers want them to be lower, and managers are stuck in the middle. The ideal midpoint is one where everyone is sharing equal amounts of pain.”
This is related to what I've warned people about, to come in future decades, in paying for government, and exploding entitlement costs (and growing taxes). “Equal amounts of pain”: I have specifically decribed what will be sought, in fact, as “equilibrium.” (in practice, equalizing the pain and howling)
Ditto…
Finally something we can agree about…
No one brings the process to life better than Hans Rosling.
Dr J, can I have the last 19 minutes of my life back? I just wasted them, thanks to you.
I'm arguing that these people should be able to set their own labor laws,
Dr J, do you truly believe that 10-year-old children, or young women like these, are setting their own labor laws?
In the world of Dr_J and those who share his ideology there is no such thing as someone who takes a job because it's the only one available. There is no such thing as involuntary unemployment. There are enough jobs for everyone and not only that, but no one will face a starving family if they turn down a job that exposes them to dangerous conditions. Capitalism is perfection incarnate, with no flaws. Capitalists never do anything wrong and are the saints of his religion, the First Church of Free Market.
Of course his world doesn't exist in reality. He has to completely revise history in his mind to make it true. It's amusing and more than a little sad that in one post he says that labor laws would close a factory and eliminate jobs and then in another he gets indignant when it's pointed out that he believes we shouldn't have labor laws.
Sorry, Dr. J, that it took me two days to get back to this. I see that you've been having a fun conversation with Don Q. Anyway, what most struck me about your reply is that your skepticism or agnosticism on climate change makes no reference to the climate or scientific modeling at all. I had assumed you had in mind a series of false scientific predictions, but instead your concerns revolve around political or economic differences. It seems to be that either 1) because “liberals” are concerned about the issue then it's suspect or 2) because part of the solution involves government coordination or limitation then it's suspect. Would you think we need to worry about climate change if either the scientists were all libertarian or if the solution was that private industry needs to come up with a technological solution? I understand this to some degree. At the same time, I can only hope that you consider climate change issues based not on what Al Gore or a Democrat or a funny hippy says and more on what is published in Geological Sciences, etc.
There are a lot of issues here, but a parallel I think of when reading your argument is crop rotation. The mechanism is pretty straightforward. Plants use various nutrients in the soil to grow. If the plants of a crop extract those nutrients and we then ship the plants elsewhere, those nutrients are not replenished fast enough for future crops. Eventually, the soil will be unable to grow a healthy crop of that kind due to lack of the proper nutrients. “Scientists” (meaning just people who studied this topic; no idea if it was a professional class of scientists, farmers, or who) figured this out and recommended that farmers rotate crops to stop that cycle of nutrient depletion. Now, we add nutrients back in through fertilization.
The point if we follow your argument, we should have been deeply skeptical of crop rotation. “After all, the earth has been growing plants successfully for a billion years. And suddenly now we need to control how plants grow and put certain people in power to regulate this? I'm deeply skeptical.” But of course this is an erroneous way to understand the situation. It's not that the earth can no longer grow plants. Instead, humans stepped in and changed the relationship between plant growth and the soil cycle. Because we were making that change on such a large scale, we then had to modify how we operate that in the future.
Similarly, no one I am aware of believes that the natural climate cycles can't keep a stable climate for the next few centuries if humans weren't affecting things. The problem is that we aren't allowing those cycles to work. Instead we are releasing millions of tons of greenhouse gases into the air every year for our power needs. Whenever nature does do things on such a vast scale in such a short amount of time (such as a major volcanic eruption), it does indeed affect the climate for a substantial timeframe (at least on a human scale).
Going back to crop rotation, of course the analogy falls apart in various ways. I believe that most farmers themselves adopted the innovation without a governmental regulation because there was a clear medium-term economic advantage to doing so. The ones who did not eventually ran their farms into the ground and had to move on. I am on record on TMV for posting that I'd like everything that can be handled without government intervention to be handled that way. (Though I now see it's not a very good post.)
There are two major problems with simply hoping that private actors will take care of the issue. First, there's no strong mechanism in the markets today to take into account the full costs of certain activities. Here in Hawaii, we use imported oil to bring in almost all our goods from other places. If the sea levels rise in a century to destroy our beaches, our economy will be devastated, because of the impact on tourism, and businesses will have a substantial loss. But no grocery store today worries about that when they can sell some good bananas from Ecuador and raise profits today. There is no cost to the long term destruction of beaches for that grocery store. If the markets did have some way of considering this, I think that would be far more important and successful than any governmental regulation.
Second, if a farmer of old decided to let his fields go kaput, well, the impact was largely on him. But with global climate change, we are all tied together. Hawaii could switch to all renewable energies tomorrow and the sea levels would still rise if no one else acts. Such comprehensive action could require governmental involvement.
“The point if we follow your argument, we should have been deeply skeptical of crop rotation.”
That's not the analogy. (Nor is the depletion of fisheries, for example.) The analogy based on what you are saying would be that we would have to severely constrain, or try to eliminate, the growing of crops,0 for what is being advocated as a “solution” to the “crisis” are measures that are destructive as well as highly unrealistic and beyond what sensible people understand is necessary. (Additional details would include the claim that we're going to deplete the soil within a season or two, when fertility would take many years more to decline, for example; but the most important element is the radicalism — along with the familiarity — of the “solution” that is being sought, even more than the hype about the “problem.”)