Chapter Review: The Environment

Energy efficiency increases

The Environment is chapter 10 of Steven Pinker’s 2018 book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress. Pinker argues that although there are major barriers to dealing with global warming, there are also sound reasons for conditional optimism that it is still possible to significantly soften its impacts. His arguments point out that to a large extent, the environmental problem is significantly solvable. Implementing solutions will require social and political will, some reasonably expectable technological progress, and reliance on existing technologies. He comments, that “The key idea is that environmental problems, like other problems, are solvable, given the right knowledge. Despite a half-century of panic, humanity is not on an irreversible path to ecological suicide. The fear of resource shortages is misconceived.”

Pinker and others envision a new approach to environmentalism, called by various names such as Ecomodernism or Ecopragmatism. The first idea is that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics will necessarily lead to some pollution. We cannot escape entropy, and from that point of view, humans have never lived in harmony with the environment. We deforested and made species go extinct as we hunted them for food. A second insight of Ecopragmatism is that industrialization has been good for humanity and costs of pollution must be weighed against benefits such as escape from extreme poverty and public education. A third concept is that the human well-being vs environment tradeoff has been and continues to be significantly affected by technology. As technology develops, benefits such as calories, home heating, electricity, and gas mileage all continue to generate less pollution, including less CO2 emission into the atmosphere.

Pinker points to historical data showing that when a country develops, it prioritizes growth over the environment. Over time, that changes as affluence supports concern for both modernity and the environment: “when they can afford both electricity and clean air, they'll spring for the clean air.” Societies with sufficient affluence tend to be ones that pressure governments and businesses into protecting the environment. Countries such as China and India are now both concerned about their own environmental problems, due to pressure from their people and from the downsides that pollution is inflicting on their economies and their people.

Pinker refers to ecopessimists as advocating unworkable solutions such as giving up on modern things and going back to a simpler life. People simply will not do that and advocating it psychologically damages the idea that something can be done to deal with climate change.

Deforestation decreases

The resource scarcity fallacy: Since the 1970s, dire predictions of resource scarcity and ensing social collapse have all proven false. Pinker comments: “Indeed, most metals and minerals are cheaper today than they were in 1960. . . . . Humanity does not suck resources from the Earth like a straw in a milkshake . . . . . Instead, as the most easily extracted supply of a resource becomes scarcer, its price rises, encouraging people to conserve it, get it at the less accessible deposits, for find cheaper and more plentiful substitutes. . . . . In reality, societies have always abandoned a resource for a better one long before the old one was exhausted.”

Pinker asserts that existing data on oil spills shows another common fallacy, namely that environmental protection is not compatible with economic growth: “. . . . seaborne oil transport has become vastly safer. . . . . even as less oil was spilled, more oil was shipped.”

Oil spill data

Other fallacies are prevalent, e.g., organic farming, “which needs more land to produce a kilogram of food, is neither green nor sustainable.” Pinker acknowledges and then rebuts a tendency of environmentalists to respond to such arguments “with a combination of anger and illogic. . . . . But for many reasons, it’s time to retire the morality play in which modern humans are a vile race of despoilers and plunderers who will hasten the apocalypse unless they undo the Industrial Revolution.”

Climate change skepticism: Deniers and skeptics of global warming are in full retreat, at least among experts, but not among vested interests and political ideologues.

“Anthropogenic climate change is the most vigorously challenged scientific hypothesis in history. By now, all the major challenges . . . . . have been refuted, and even many skeptics have been convinced. A recent survey found that exactly four out of 69,406 authors of peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature rejected the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming, and that ‘the peer-reviewed literature contains no convincing evidence against the hypothesis.’ Nonetheless, a movement within the American political right, heavily underwritten by fossil fuel interests, has prosecuted a fanatical and mendacious campaign to deny that greenhouse gases are warming the planet. In doing so they have advanced the conspiracy theory that the scientific community is fatally infected with political correctness and ideologically committed to a government takeover of the economy. . . . . I can state that this is nonsense: physical scientists have no such agenda, and the evidence speaks for itself.” (emphasis added)

To be clear, denying warming and accusing the scientists of bad intentions or conspiracy is a fanatical and mendacious campaign of pure lies and nonsense by people who know better and self-delusion by people who don't.

Dematerialization: Progress in technology is causing dematerialization of all kinds of formerly material consumer goods. The digital revolution replaces material things with bits. For example, smart cell phones replace land lines, answering machines, phone books, cameras, street maps and other formerly physical things. Social media leads many young people to show and describe their experiences and preferences, e.g., music, travel and brand of beer, instead of showing pictures of cars and clothes. Dematerialization is changing criteria of social status. These trends reduce adverse impacts on the environment.

Psychological barriers: A number of psychological barriers must be acknowledged and dealt with. Research strongly suggests that people are more likely to accept the reality of global warming if the problem is presented properly: “people are likelier to accept the fact of global warming when they are told that the problem is solvable by innovations in policy and technology than when they are given dire warnings about how awful it will be.”

Other barriers include (1) a cognitive bias that leads people to ignore thinking in terms of the proper scale of the problem, and (2) a misplaced sense of morality that really is not particularly moral. Most people are poor at seeing global warming in terms of the scale of what needs to be done. The scale we are dealing with is tens of billions of tons of CO2 per year. When people propose sacrifices might feel morally good to propose, and maybe even live up to, but are trivial in terms of dealing with the problem, e.g., don't fly on airplanes or buy jewelry or pottery because those things are energy intensive. Aviation accounts for 1.5% of CO2 emissions, while jewelry and pottery are much smaller.

The moral problem runs deep. People advocating for environmental protection tend to dehumanize political opposition, “politicians are pigs”, which fosters a punitively aggressive mindset, “make the polluters pay.” Pinker makes the moral issue quite clear: “by conflating profligacy with evil and asceticism with virtue, the moral sense can sanctify pointless displays of sacrifice. . . . . But however virtuous these displays may feel, they are a distraction from the gargantuan challenge facing us. The problem is that carbon emissions are a classic public goods game, also known as a Tragedy of the Commons.”

Pinker notes that to deal with the Tragedy of the Commons, essentially all economists advocate a carbon tax or some analogous scheme. In economic terms, letting pollution go for free externalizes the cost. Imposing a cost incentivises less reliance on carbon energy sources. Unfortunately, a carbon tax is vehemently opposed by conservative political ideologues and the fossil fuel industry. The tax is the basis for nutty, unfounded allegations of deep state conspiracy theories and quack attacks on the expert science community. In a sense, this is another moral issue. Global warming deniers generally see efforts to impose a carbon tax as immoral. People on the other side tend to see not acting, e.g., by imposing a carbon tax, as immoral.

Nuclear power: Pinker argues that another necessary tool has to be an increase in the use of nuclear power. No other existing technology can come close to providing the amount of power needed to deal with the billions of tons of CO2 we generate each year. He notes that reactor design in the US has not been standardized, which drives cost up: “The French have two kinds of reactors and hundreds of kinds of cheese, whereas in the US the figures are reversed.” The US needs to standardize reactor design, or adopt an existing design, and it needs to do so urgently.

The prospect of nuclear power raises unwarranted psychological barriers such as fear of radiation poisoning, images of easily imagined catastrophe, distrust of technology and misplaced fears articulated the many progressive supporters of the traditional Green movement in the 1970s. Pinker argues fears of nuclear power are unwarranted:

“It's often said that with climate change, those who know the most are the most frightened, but with nuclear power those who know the least are the most frightened. . . . . engineers have learned from accidents and near-misses and have progressively squeezed more safety out of nuclear reactors, reducing the risks of accidents and contamination far below those of fossil fuels.”

All in all, the psychological and political barriers to dealing with global warming are high. But given the incredibly high stakes, not trying amounts to playing Russian Roulette (or Climate Casino, as one expert calls the do-nothing attitude) with modern civilization and billions of lives, and maybe, on a very bad day, the existence if the human species itself. Trying to deal with the problem carries some risk, but not trying carries far more risk.

B&B orig: 1/31/19