A moral puzzle on individual climate action

Worth mentioning that the ETS currently runs an enormous surplus of credits and it’s an open question whether it will ever be adjusted to actually reduce total emissions at all.

This starts on the assumption that the ‘market’ can solve the problem of CO2 emissions altering the climate. The ‘market’ in this case the individual making a cost benefit calculation. The entire worlds economic/industrial society, including all markets, are based on burning carbon. The ‘market’ cannot fix a problem created by ‘markets’. The belief they can is the purest of neoliberalism. The cure in this instance is to have neither a train or a plane.

There is no ‘market’ solution to global warming. It’s like a cat chasing its tail. An additional and sweet irony is writers and thinkers get paid for discussing and promoting the ‘market’ as a cure.

The whole Venice/train/plane might be a bit of a distraction? If buying ETS rights effective and a moral good, then it hardly matters whether you go to Venice or stay at home, or go twice, or take the train or the plane. Those are rounding errors in the story.

I think the question becomes more – if buying some amount of ETS is good, then how should someone decide where to put the limit? 100 euro/ year, a 1000, 10,000? It would be weird to base that number on the cost of 1 train trip.

Perhaps a suggestion (again, assuming that someone believes that the ETS will be reasonably effective): estimate for yourself what you think the carbon price should be today, subtract teh actual price, multiply that by your estimated emissions (including indirect emissions), and spend that amount on ETS (or give it to Urgenda if you think that is more effective per euro). Push the system towards your desired point. Once you do that, you can “optimize” each travel or other emission-generating activity. If your price is 200 euro/tonne, then the trip to venice costs 40 euro plus 30 euro for the ETS fund.

For example, closing coal plants in the Netherlands was estimated by the PBS at 70 euro/tonne. Other measures in that price range also have substantial support. GroenLinks gets a million votes, other parties have substantial numbers of pro-climate action voters as well. Just as a wild guess, there might be 2 million people in the country who would support a 100 euro/tonne (or more) price target instead of the current 25 of the ETS.

At 15 tonne/voter (including some kids in the balance), that’s about 1000 euro per person “virtual ETS”, or 2 billion in total, or 80 million ETS rights/ year at current prices. On a European total of 2000 million – not insignificant. Spread the scheme to some other countries as well, and it might well become the price-determinant for the ETS system.

This is more of a technical question but can someone explain how that 160 euro contributes to the removal of 8 tons of CO2? Like, what’s the actual mechanism that makes that happen?

Abstractly, clearly the answer is the one the puzzle was devised to justify: An isolated individual considering only the green virtue of a single transaction takes the flight.

If you stop abstracting other issues, the question of why the plane ticket doesn’t already incorporate the cost of the carbon dioxide emissions becomes rather compelling. The puzzle is only a puzzle in a society where only the individual is expected to be moral. And that includes only voluntary choices, at that. A plane ticket where the purchase of offsets is required for the ticket is evidently out of the question.

If you get a little less abstract and allow for human variation and human error as this choice is repeated again and again, then intentions will fail. This is guaranteed. Posing the flight as a moral choice is then true individually, but not collectively.

I do think that even if you insist on reducing green morals to individual consumer choices, then you still should not abstract from life to consider only a single transaction. In that case, you should opt for the train, as it is collectively the less carbon costly arrangement.

But even then, if you exercise your ingenuity, composing moral puzzles where speed is urgent will still provide the desired outcome, a morally correct choice of the flight.

And lastly, this little thought experiment seems to me very much like most philosophical thought experiments, assuming away all the details that actually should guide our choices. In this case, the notion that the market in carbon emissions permits is actually a feasible choice. This seems to me to be an economist’s utopia. The notion that putting the money saved on the ticket into the coffers of an environmentalist group seems even less likely to effectively reduce net emissions. It would be good for showing the purity of the vegetable soul, I suppose.

Cian says: “I feel this kind of ignores the obvious question. Why is flight cheaper than the train and what as a society can we do to fix this?”

Main reason is maintenance on tracks – typically about a third of railway operating cost, while airports are a minor cost for air travel. That’s not even including capital cost of building the track, since this is often not passed on to the paying passenger. Staffing is another reason. Planes are fast, so they need much less staff per passenger-kilometer even though they have more staff per kilometer. I looked up some numbers – Easyjet does 10 times more passenger-kilomter per employee than the Dutch railway operator. JR East (with the shinkansens) comes closer, but still a third or so of Easyjet. A similar but milder effect comes into play for equipment cost – planes might be expensive to buy and run, but they do put on a lot of passenger-kilometers in a year.

Flexibility is a factor in the background – planes can change routes to match changing demand, railway networks are less flexible. It’s unavoidable that a railway network has underutilized track and equipment – and their cost gets born by the heavier-used parts of the network.

As others have implied, color me skeptical that 160E would buy 8 tons of CO2 emission reduction. If that’s the case the airline should charge the whole plane-load of people 200E and buy 800 tons of reduction or do that across their whole schedule and reduce 8 million tons every day….

I’d take the train. Flying sucks on so many levels, the pollution is just one of them. If everyone did that eventually the pollution load would be reduced without the need for the credits since most of the airlines (especially the ones in Europe) don’t need much more than a nudge and a cut-off of state subsidies to go under.

The mid-term scale as a base for deciding how to act sounds fine, but 1000 years is a lot longer than I would choose. In 1000 years social and technological change will have taken humanity to a point where I expect whatever people do today will be averaged out. My intuition will be something between 200 and 400 years — more than 100 (which is “people who make decisions then will have been talking with people alive today”) in any event; 300 years would leave room for steep decline, world-wide state of war and destruction, plus social and technological recovery, if it comes to that path.

Points that I would take into account are (some already mentioned above):

* What travel offerings are I incentivizing (incrementally) by choosing one option over the other? Flight – I create demand for cut-price airline tickets. Train – I create demand for trains. Also, there ARE cheaper options than EUR 200 for a ticket Amsterdam-Venice, but you have to jump through hoops to get to discounts and last-minute discounters. If more people do this, the offer will become more user-friendly and accessible, the way it is now for airline tickets.

* Do those EU ETS credits actually do what they promise they do? Are there scientific studies that tot up their carbon-effect with the same amount of certainty as I can quantify the T of CO2-equiv added by a plane or train? I have not dug into this question, but right now am just not at the same level of trust. They may be a scam. They may be an overly optimistic program… I work with forests, and know that planting a tree somewhere isn’t nearly the same thing as preventing a tree’s worth of deforestation.

* Other than EU ETS, are there more efficient ways of offsetting my travel carbon, if I were to chose the cheaper (and in some cases still more convenient) option. I could for example donate EUR 160 to a political action group that aims to make flying more expensive, or that does work that reduces emissions more directly.

The best real life solution should be to buy the cheapest plane ticket and go one with ones life, try to do good for the world in some other setting that mostly wont involve consume choices. Otherwise we got to start with why should the numbers be right, any of them? Shouldnt we count plane emissions at a higher factor because they have stronger global warming effect due to the higher altitude of emission. And if we dont do that, how do we count the electricity for the traines? At the prices of marignal extra electricity or as network average? Id say the first which should involve 0 renewables. And why do we count only global warming externalities, both choice create a hell lot of noise for example. Also, how do we count us as marginal passengers? Would the trains or planes go half empty without us anyway, or do we encourage more half empty train/plane activity by paying a high price…?

And yes, we dont know how politicians will react to particular high or low emission rights prices, they might just create more or remove some which they have done in the past.

“As others have implied, color me skeptical that 160E would buy 8 tons of CO2 emission reduction. ”
Perhaps not exactly 8, but a lot lot more than that 0.1 tonne difference between rail and air.

It doesn’t sound like much, but 20euro/tonne is not that unreasonable for the range where industry starts reducing CO2. If they are fairly sure that the price will stay there, or go up further.

For example, it adds about 1ct to a kwh of gas-fired electricity – and industrial users only pay a few ct/kwh. If electricity is a large chunk of your expenses, than such an increase will push people to finally upgrade aging equipment, or to make machinery variable instead of running full power all the time, etc. For the really CO2-intense industries, 20 euro/tonne is enough to justify significant changes to their core processes. Again, if they are fairly sure that the 20 euro is not going away.

So it does add up, roughly. The EU made changes to the ETS system recently, to hoover up excess rights over the next few years. And prices quickly rose from almost zero to about 25 euro/ton – the price range where the low-hanging reduction fruit becomes worth the bother.

@soru 11

“It’s a moral dilemma, if the trolley problem is. It could be restated as ‘Do you stop to avoid running over the one worker in front of you, or do you use the extra earnings from getting to your job on time to buy malaria blankets for 200 African children?”

I have my doubts about the trolley problem too, however I’ll try to unpack my doubt more:

In the trolley problem, we have a situation where we are supposed to calculate the value of different human lifes, so for example you can get to a point where you have the question “do 5 children count more or less than 5 middle aged guys”. This poses a lot of moral doubts because we generally think that it is immoral to calculate the value of a human life.

In the emissions problem, however, there is no difference in the kind of emissions that we are calculating, so it is obvious that, once we know that we want to minimize emissions, the best route is the one that minimizes emissions, there is no moral doubt on how we calculate the moral value of an emission against the other, because all emissions are the same, whereas in the trolley problem there is a moral distaste in calculating lifes numerically.

There is another way in which both the trolley problem and the emissions problem can cause a moral dilemma, and I suspect that this is the real root of the moral doubt:

– if we think about ethics in consequentialist terms, then the obvious way to solve the problem is to calculate the consequence of each choice and see what choice leads to the least bad situation;

– but many people do not think of morals in consequentialist terms, rather in a sort of proceduralist way where ends don’t justify means and some action are inherently unhetical.
In the trolley problem, the problem is that if I choose the best action (trample the worker and save the kids) I actively choose to do an action that is supposed to be intrinsecally evil: I’m choosing to take a human life; whereas if I let the kids die I’m not taking an action that causes their death so in a procedural view of morals letting the kids die is less bad than actively killing the worker.
Also, most people istinctively see ethics as a matter of emotions, so the consequentilaist view sounds cold and calculating, and you wouldn’t really trust a consequentialists that has no problem trampling a worker for the greater good.

I personally am a consequentialist and I think that the procedural view of morals is just a simplification because, in reality, we cannot really calculate all the consequences of our actions, so we naturally have to discount the calculations of the future greater good and give more weight to the immediate evil of the means, but in the purely abstract situation of the tought experiment where there is no doubt about the consequence of my actions, I think that if I let the kids die I’m equally as guilty as if i killed them actively, so I think it’s a stupid tought experiment (because all the counterintuitive part is hidden in the assumption that I can perfectly calculate the consequences of my actions, something that in reality I can never do).

The emissions problem also could be seen both from a consequentialist and a proceduralist angle.
In my opinion in the abstract world of the tought experiment where all consequences are known only the consequentialist approach makes sense, however, if we want to apply the proceduralist approach, we have something like this:

– causing emissions is immoral in principle, so going by plane instead than by train is in principle a more immoral ation (note, no5t a less efficient, but an immoral one).

– buying emissions rights doesn’t count as a moral action, because the ones who don’t emit CO2 are those businesses that can’t buy an extra permit, so the moral action counts for them, excluded that it doesn’t count because it’s forced.

Therefore in terms of procedural immorality the situation where I pollute as much as I want but prevent others to pollute is very immoral.

But this assumes that we see pollution as something like an immorality in itself, instead than something that is going to have bad consequences, it’s a view where the one who doesn’t pollute does so in order to feel at ease with his/her coscience instead than for the objective of reducing world pollution.
So in the emissions example the procedural approach sounds extremely weird to me, even more so than in the trolley problem.

The main problem with the dilemma appears to be Peter Dorman’s third point, i.e. the idea that buying emission rights is any use. Surely these rights have not been set to an amount so that when I go out and buy 8 tons some factory will go, “okay, we will produce less shoes now than we can sell, for we cannot use more coal-derived electricity”?

I find it really hard to believe that flights are fairly priced. Yes, train tracks cost a lot of maintenance. But are airport infrastructure and security and the maintenance going into the airplanes themselves not considerably more expensive? Also don’t see how trains would need more staff per person and distance – the average small, short-distance train in Germany seems to have two staff on it, or one if there is nobody checking the tickets, and a rather long, high speed train maybe five or so tops? Maybe I am totally mistaken about all this, but is there a possibility that air travel (including security and fuel) is highly subsidised compared to other forms of travel?

Am I missing something, because the answer seems obvious to me?

The only remedy to climate change is (immense) structural change in how we run our societies. Individuals scrimping and saving on small portions tonnes of carbon does approximately nothing. All that means is that the fossil-fuel carbon is there for someone else to use, and so long as the externalities aren’t somehow internalized, they are economically incentivized (over and above where it ‘should’ be if they were bearing
the full cost of their action) to use it now rather than later or not at all.

This will continue until either society collapses to the point where air travel becomes a difficult undertaking, or we use up all the easily-available carbon and therefore reach the maximum level of global warming (at which point either we’ve found another source of energy or society undergoes an immense collapse) — or, counter to the hypothesis, we reign in our carbon emissions somehow.

Saving even significant amounts of carbon on an individual level (because there’s a lot of us doing it) just mean cheap flights (and expansion of fossil-fuel powered industry and military exercises subsidized by global disaster) for longer for everyone who is not doing it.

If you could get so many people avoiding flights to the point where the airline industry itself has to significantly retrench, then perhaps that might slow emissions, but it’s still not a complete solution and is already unrealistically optimistic — there just aren’t enough people willing to take the personal hit to do this (even if there are in principle, which I doubt, there’s a big coordination problem) plus past experience is that we solve these sorts of problems by regulation, not by individual economic choices.

So you should do whatever is most likely to bring about the necessary structural changes. Incentivizing and investing in rail travel is something, I suppose, but political action is the only thing that’s actually going to work, so fund that.

If, per steven t johnson, this isn’t going to work, then we’re screwed and you may as well save yourself the time (do you have a different opinion, steven?). And maybe the money, if you’re convinced by that, but I don’t want to endorse that strategy because we are certainly doomed if everyone thinks we’re doomed and does nothing. Anyway, in terms of regret minimization doing something and knowing you tried is surely better than bitterly crowing that you did nothing and therefore didn’t waste your time / weren’t conned.

The very small amount of signalling achieved by taking the train is not worth talking about, I can’t see how structural change could ever be effective by a few subtle signals here and there (“I repeatedly hinted that I wanted effective climate change action through a whole lot of small economic choices and appearing marginally more environmentally clean to the small number of people who know me personally! How did you fail to notice this, global market society?”)

Plus if we’re going to talk about signalling, then why can’t this also be signalled? “I took the cheapest possible flight and donated the difference: go and do likewise!” is a great thing to be signalling.

(If the point is to not look like a hypocrite, I don’t see the point – if donating the difference really is the best strategy, then there’s nothing hypocritical about this at all, in fact one could argue the train-takers are the ones doing something unhelpful, by promoting personal purity over effective action.)

This is all very armchair, so maybe I have missed something subtle or even something obvious, but so far no-one’s saying anything to change my mind about any of this…

It would be nice if our governments were to ensure that market prices fully internalise the cost of carbon emissions. Then we don’t need to worry about these moral problems and turn our attention to other moral issues.

+1s for Anarcissie (does Marc really have to be there?) and Peter Dorman’s point 3 (ETSes are bullsh*t).

Don’t they have internet in Venice?

Ask the event organisers to supply you a mobile telepresence device. If they say “what’s that?,” tell them to find out and only book venues that have them.

Or use Facetime or Zoom, if mobility isn’t needed.

If none of these is feasible, the moral thing to do is withdraw, and spend the time saved volunteering for a climate action group that you deem worthwhile.

@
I’m not interested in having my individual consumption turned into a moral issue on climate change, because almost every issue involves an insanely complex set of structural factors that need to be addressed by society as a whole and not by my individual choices”.

Yes! –
that’s why I am interested to have any individuals consumption turned into a moral issue – as another piece of the puzzle – WE try to solve.

And WE need philosophers who come out with such ”puzzles” as much as we need Swedish schoolgirls who say they don’t fly anymore ”for climate reasons, because they don’t want to say one thing and do another thing”.

I want to practise as I preach,” she said and with her ”puzzling protest” has ”galvanized protests by schoolchildren around the world, after delivering a fiery speech NOT only in Da von.
”Unlike many of the movers and shakers gathered in the Swiss ski resort, Thunberg has not zipped into town for a few quick meetings at luxury hotels.
With the train trip from Stockholm, which took 32 hours, Thunberg was making a statement in opposition to many of the Davos elite, who flew in by private jet”.

So – such ”statements” -(or ”puzzles”) help a lot.

Right?

The fact that there has to be any debate around so simple an issue, after all these decades of global warming, surely shows that the issue itself is meaningless.

I disagree with faustusnotes on many, many things, but he is absolutely correct in saying that individual choice is meaningless and any technology facilitating such individual choice, such as offsets, is simply a distraction aimed at preventing effective action against global warming.

People should not waste time on such false moral dilemmas; it is immoral to do so.

Good topic, and I think one that will rise in importance. Carbon-intensive industries will face pressures to move from high CO2 emission locations (Europe, Aussie, Canada), and setting rules so they just don’t relocate to locations with low CO2 emissions is a moral challenge. A robust carbon pricing market can only go so far, and markets are quick to reorganize in the face of change.

Liz Cripps has suggested that in addition to political contributions, another efficient way to ‘offset’ your emissions might be to donate to research on green technology (‘On Climate Matters: Offsetting, Population and Justice’, *Midwest Studies in Philosophy*, 40 (1) [2016]: 114-28). Driving down the price of alternative energy as is one of the most important things we can do. Finding alternatives to meat is another. Supporting research on either one is likely to do more good than taking the train.

This debate has similarities to that between utopian socialists and Marxists in the 19th century, with the former focusing on personal action (model factories, etc.) and the latter on structural change. There’s no doubt as to which group was more effective, though the utopians might not have cared for the results.

Several have commented on the alternative of “not going” or dialing in remotely and that’s certainly a viable choice to the extent there is some discretion involved in the trip (I’m not sure the OP actually says what its for). Technology has facilitated a great deal efficiency in that regard, but its hardly carbonless either as it typically relies upon some mix of electricity, plastic and rare-earth metals in order to work properly. Amazingly too, despite the available tech, airports are more crowded than ever.

That said, there can be some moral dilemma in trips that might be viewed as non-discretionary such as (perhaps) attending a siblings wedding or perhaps a graduation or other singular event. Indeed most people wouldn’t think more than a few seconds about the carbon footprints they are leaving as they booked the first available flight with the hopes of spending some final minutes with a dying loved one.

Faustnote’s point about not making one’s singular choices into a moral dilemma are well taken, but it doesn’t stop one from wondering if any individual choice is the best or most Pareto efficient choice they can be making under their own set of individual circumstances.

“Who can help with this moral riddle…What is better for the climate and what is the moral right thing to do?”

Cancel the trip, take all of the money you were going to spend on it, and give it to the poor.

@
”Cancel the trip, take all of the money you were going to spend on it, and give it to the poor”

But ”the poor” got much more money (than just 200 bucks) – after a relative of mine went to the Biennale in Venice and saw Alejandro Aravena’s ”Art”.

Afterwards he donated over 6.000 Bucks for a housing project for the Poor.

Offsets are only valuable in the context of a very short term, market-driven start of the necessary process that leads to the end of fossil fuel flight. So any kind of thousand year or even hundred year analysis that includes flight is mistaken right from the very start. The climate emergency doesn’t allow us the luxury of saying “in the long term we’re all dead”, because right now we’re on track for less than a billion people alive in 2100. By then anyone reading this in 2019 is going to be dead, sure, but so are any young people we might know, or any children or grandchildren we might have.

In that context: if you must travel, take the train. Better by far to use whatever skills and advantages you might have to avoid the travel altogether. Especially if you’re a university professor or somesuch, you need to be part of the intellectual elite showing ordinary mortals how teleconferencing, video calls and so on obviate the need for shuffling meat puppets about the place. If you can’t do it, how can anyone without your advantages do it?

@ clew #43

OK, I wasn’t discussing the ETS, but rather a situation where there’s no effective management on carbon emissions at all, as I was under the impression the ETS wasn’t effective. John Quiggin #45 says this has changed, and I’m glad to hear it. I will read his links (and yours) and educate myself.

Doesn’t this makes the whole discussion rather moot (once the plane trips are covered by the ETS)? I think this is the point John is making. Assuming the ETS is effective, the EU budgets its carbon emissions and nothing a potential traveler like Davidson does will alter what the emissions are.

Why does he ‘have to be’ in Venice?

@
”Being paid not to do something that can’t be allowed to happen is a cheat or a scam”.

There are numerous stories of Americans moving to Europe in a time where most European Countries already had started to recycle -(with different and differently marked trash cans) -while they knew from their homeland only one trash bin – and what did (some of them) – love to say:

You need to pay me for putting the Banana peels in a different trash bin than the glass bottle – and now they do it almost all for free…
without getting paid for murdering somebody?

I think the correct answer is to fly because you A) are giving less of your time and money to a corporate entity and B) it’s easier for you.

A) is pretty self-explanatory if you assume that corporate entities and government agencies are far more responsible for climate change than individuals and are, therefore, inherently less trustworthy stewards of your resources than you yourself would be. Whether you use your “change” from the plane ticket to buy offsets or not, there’s no reason to think the railroad would have spent it any more ethically.

B) is a little more abstract and debatable, but I think decisions that will decrease an individual’s quality of life (say, by arriving late and exhausted after a grueling train ride) tend to be a tough sell from a utilitarian standpoint. In a situation like this, it’s almost impossible to measure how much you taking the train train benefits other people, nature, or society at large, but it’s obviously going to cost you something (even if ticket prices being equal, it’s still extra travel time). Since the individual in this thought experiment is assumed to be committed to fighting climate change, we should be wary of decisions that negatively impact their lives as they may also reduce their motivation and effectiveness as climate activists in the future.

I think buying the carbon credits is largely tangential to this moral calculus and raises as many issues as it addresses (Are the millions of people who fly without buying credits being immoral? Even the ones who can’t afford the train?). What matters is that we have two scenarios where the individual is contributing to the problem of emissions while financially rewarding the source of those emissions. In the plane scenario, the problem is made much worse, but the problematic behavior is only slightly rewarded. In the train scenario the problem is less severe, but the reward for causing that problem (as well as the cost to the individual) is much higher, as is the cost to the consumer.

Of course, this all gets complicated if you start looking at per-passenger government subsidies and consider giving money to railway and transit to be a way of evening the scales. I don’t know if one individual’s travel plans would have any effect on what is essentially a public policy issues, however. As I see it, if trains and planes are both too dirty to keep around in their current state, then the comparatively large reward (and tacit approval) that comes with taking the train may actually be more harmful than the much smaller transfer of resources that accompanies begrudgingly taking the plane.

This isn’t a hard calculus to make if you assume that individual self-interest is a valid moral dimension. In the real world, almost everyone (except climate activists and train aficionados) would buy the plane ticket and I don’t have a problem with that.

This interests me because we had just such a dilemma in my family recently.

My daughter is far to the left of me (and I’m left of center) and her history class was travelling to Auschwitz over Easter (from the Rhein-Main Gebiet). All the class was flying but she didn’t want to fly within Europe (let alone to a neighbouring country). So she took the train and in the end when we hunted up all the discount fares it was actually cheaper (although it involved her staying with friends in Berlin on the way). Somehow, (since the rest of the class travelled by plane) I don’t think consequentialism dominated, it was more a personal ethics issue – of being part of the solution and not part of the problem.

I am a bit agnostic on this issue, ultimately I don’t think you can avoid political solutions. But there is value in people demonstrating that we don’t have to do things the way we have being doing them up to now.

But perhaps, I have to come back to what is the missing theme here. Time. I don’t think we will achieve a solution without re-examining our relationship to time. Going ever faster is the problem. We can’t use up resources accumulated in millions of years in decades and think it will be OK, when it’s gone we’ll find something else. We have to slow down.

The answer is simple. Don’t go to Venice. Develop an interest in insects instead. You will you have a veritable Serengeti of wildlife drama just a short walk away from where you live. First class entertainment and education with a carbon-positive footprint.

@alex, Wikipedia has a page under “carbon dioxide removal”

The core chemical trick, is that you do not have to return the carbon to a hydrocarbon. It can be another carbon-containing solid, or you can literally pump gaseous CO2 in underground reservoirs. Former (non-fracked) natural gas reservoirs are gas-tight, almost by definition

Maybe a city that’s literally sinking into the sea under the pressure of mass tourism isn’t the best place for an ethics conference…
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/23/venice-tempers-boil-over-tourist-high-season

Also while I am sympathetic to Moz of Yarallumla’s cynicism about offsets, there’s no reason they couldn’t (theoretically) be effective and improve human welfare. Offsets that contribute to a fund to get farmers in high-income countries to retire early and rewild their land would be short- and long-term carbon negative; a fund that installed rooftop solar and storage in the houses of low-income black people in the American south, along rainwater tanks and remediation of their septic systems, would be long-term carbon negative and have huge health benefits; a fund to insulate low-income homes on the US East Coast so that they have lower heating bills and lower carbon emissions, particularly in areas that don’t get super hot in summer, would be a massive benefit to those people. You’d see even larger welfare benefits (but much smaller carbon offsets) if you did the same solar/storage installations in LMICs. It’s possible to design offset programs that don’t just pay people to not do something they weren’t going to do; but again this requires collective action and political reform, not individual choices!

I have read a few articles now (can’t recall where) which point out that carbon capture needs to be treated as a risk as well as (or instead of) just a carbon sink. Trees can burn (and in a warming world, increasingly so) and underground storage could release sudden huge amounts of carbon if things go wrong. Someone above said that ex- gas fields are “by definition” carbon tight – but if so how are they ex-gas fields? There is obviously some risk here. Obviously it’s good to store carbon now since we need to get it out of the atmosphere but we need to bear in mind this risk.

There are some storage techniques that are cheap and carbon negative in the short and long term. A moratorium on fishing is the absolute best example of this: not only do we get the entire polluting fishing fleet to stop, which reduces emissions, but we also allow the ocean to restore its fauna, which will lead to carbon sequestration and the restoration of a highly damaged part of the carbon cycle. The moratorium on whaling had big effects in this regard – whales are an entire ecosystem by themselves and support a large amount of carbon sequestration. Killing off the farmed salmon industry would lead to reduced harvesting of feeder fish, which are a huge carbon sink. The great thing about ocean carbon is it sinks several thousand metres down when it dies, and is not released into the atmosphere.

You can do your bit to kill the fishing industry by not eating fish, but a political decision to put a ban on fishing would be much more effective. You can also contribute financially to the Sea Shepherds, who do excellent work helping west African governments protect their fishing zones from predatory international fleets, protecting fish stocks and giving priority to low-carbon low-intensity local fishing fleets, with obvious benefits to local human rights and welfare. It’s my personal view (not backed up by numbers) that ending fishing would have a huge impact on many aspects of the coming environmental catastrophe.

John Quiggin enforced redistribution is not only more effective than voluntary redistribution, it more importantly does not involve evolutionary perversity, i.e. it doesn’t select for selfishness. I think this is more important. I thought economists caref about incentives? =)

Barry @71. The gas was released (from he gas field), because someone drilled holes into the formation. No old wells are capped, but the long term fate of those caps, which I think are cement pumped into the drill hole, may not be well known. If we plan to sequester the stuff for millenia, then those issues matter.

Coal beds are also great for holding on to stuff like CO2 and methane, but we’ve probably mined the ones that are easy to get to.

Of course we could inject liquid CO2 into ocean trenches. The circulation time for the bottom waters is something like a thousand years, and if our CO2 was well mixed into the ocean (and not concentrated in near surface waters) the oceans can actually hold many times more than the atmosphere. But, I don’t think that is going to happen.

Four points in response to @faustusnotes

1. For any of our actions there is uncertainty about whether they will bring about their intended goals. For some reason, people get hyper-sceptical about things like charity donations or environmental choices but not so much about their regular consumer decisions which regularly fail to bring them happiness.

2. The claim that individual action is pointless and the solution is at the state/systemic level is exactly replicated at the state/international level: “anything we do will be an ineffective pointless sacrifice unless the whole world acts. The whole world is not acting, so we can do as we like.” This gets us to stalemate, and ultimately to ecocide.

3. Action at the state level typically takes the form of taxes, subsidies and prohibitions. Faced with these, lots of people push back: “why should I pay more for petrol when those bastards over there are the real problem” (cf Gilets Jaunes).

4. Effective action on climate change would require sacrifices in standards of living or at least big lifestyle changes. People advocating effective action at state/systemic level gain or lose credibility in the propaganda war to the extent to which they show now that they’re willing to make those changes. Otherwise, it is “the hypocritical elites trying to impose stuff on us”.

@ Chris Bertram

…. yet despite all this, one nation has succeeded in significantly reducing emissions whilst simultaneously achieving economic growth above its nearest neighbours. That nation being, of course, The United Kingdom.

As for actual numbers and actual plans, the best guide to a viable prosperous green future remains, as always, Michael Liebriech

Nice try, @Dipper, but the picture changes considerably once we take into account the emissions embodied in imports to the UK.

@faustusnotes

Chris Bertram, your response is depressingly nihilistic, offers no solutions and treats people’s political positions as unchangeable natural laws.

* I’m not nihilistic.
* I didn’t offer solutions, I merely pushed back against the idea that personal changes have no part to play in them.
* I didn’t say anything that warrants the conclusion about “unchangeable natural laws”.

The one thing I do accept is that I haven’t done enough to put principle into practice.

@Dipper “the UK’s achievements”. ROTFL. It is largely a side-effect of deindustrialization rather than the consequence of policies adopted to reduce emissions. And with deindustrialization comes the importation of those goods that are now manufactured elsewhere (with their CO2 emissions).

Why does faustusnotes think Glenn Greenwald is a leftist? Snowden isn’t and surely he picked Greenwald because he was simpatico. Didn’t anybody watch Oliver Stone’s movie?

“1. For any of our actions there is uncertainty about whether they will bring about their intended goals. For some reason, people get hyper-sceptical about things like charity donations or environmental choices but not so much about their regular consumer decisions which regularly fail to bring them happiness.”

People are more objective about something they haven’t invested their personal hopes in, not “hyper-sceptical.” They long term effects of pervasive consumerism paid for by interested parties seems to me to explain fairly well why so many are less realistic about their consumption bringing them happiness. Material deprivation doesn’t bring happiness either, something this ignores. The only point I can get here is people are stupid?

“2. The claim that individual action is pointless and the solution is at the state/systemic level is exactly replicated at the state/international level: ‘anything we do will be an ineffective pointless sacrifice unless the whole world acts. The whole world is not acting, so we can do as we like.’ This gets us to stalemate, and ultimately to ecocide.”

There is no “state/international level.” There are states operating as sovereign powers.
State action is more effective than individual action, contrary to the implication here. The notion that the free rider problem will be solved by individuals is absurd. There is an implication that individual nations can’t solve the free rider problem either. The real solution is to create a genuine international level, but the notion that anybody at Crooked Timber would endorse a limited world government strikes me as tact. The only point here is that it’s the people’s fault?

“3. Action at the state level typically takes the form of taxes, subsidies and prohibitions. Faced with these, lots of people push back: ‘why should I pay more for petrol when those bastards over there are the real problem’ (cf Gilets Jaunes).”

Action at the world level would include planning a new world transport system, would include planning for new cities as sea levels rise, include planning for mass reforestation, include planning for closing down ecologically insane things like Los Angeles, and so forth in a multitude of ways I personally can’t imagine. It is unimaginable that anyone here at CT would favor any action of this kind, ever. The only point here is people are greedy?

“4. Effective action on climate change would require sacrifices in standards of living or at least big lifestyle changes. People advocating effective action at state/systemic level gain or lose credibility in the propaganda war to the extent to which they show now that they’re willing to make those changes. Otherwise, it is ‘the hypocritical elites trying to impose stuff on us’.”

The idea that the transport system or city planning or testing of geoengineering projects or, or, or, or on and on are “lifestyle” choices strikes me as incredible. John Quiggin’s new book has done well in modernizing the principle that the consumer is king! The insistence that restricting consumption will work if the rulers (who here is in that group?!) if, noblesse oblige, they set the tone also strikes me as incredible. And the notion that veganism is the only moral choice, even for children, regardless of variation in their bodies and minds, regardless of whether the (unknown!) nutritional requirements of a healthy vegan diet (if there is one?) can be met for the whole of humanity strikes me as not just incredible, but callous. The only real point here is that there are too damn many people?

But contra faustusnotes, none of this seems “nihilistic” to me. It just seems like standard contempt for humanity.

@
”My actions are meaningless while supposed leftists like Glenn Greenwald are going on fox news to defend fascism and environmental delay”.

That’s… weird?

My actions suddenly became so much more meaningful ”when supposed leftists like Glenn Greenwald where going on fox news to defend fascism and environmental delay”.

hix @84.
That Tesla S will probably last a million miles, and it doesn’t directly use oil -although tires are made of rubber, and the road it drives on is made of asphalt. Still its advancing the EV revolution, and rewarding the corporate entities that are leading it, rather than the dinosaurs whose goal is to milk the ICE cash cow for as long as possible.

Closer to home my EV has absorbed almost 40MWhours off the California grid this weekend. During sunny cool weekends when hydro is running flatout because of spring runoff, California has so much solar plus hydro that there is a threat of curtailment that having a fleet of hungry EVs is a real plus for renewables.

@What is this?
”There is no “state/international level. There are states operating as sovereign powers”.

But, but, but isn’t there this ”complaints of Brexiters” -(and silly US Trumpists) – that we’re all are ruled by EU bureaucrats -(or the UN? – or ”a world government)

And so – perhaps… yes?
”State action is more effective than individual action” – which is (concerning fighting climate change) a ”good thing” –
Right?
And about ”the notion that the free rider problem will be solved by individuals is absurd”.
In the short time of my life all kind of ”free rider problems” had been solved by ”individuals” getting together -(even on ”international” or ”state levels”) and solved ”free rider problems” all the time?

So – what is… ”this”?

– and it is truly… strange? –
as we could recall – that Ingrid Robeyns once posted about the example of a (”very individualistic”) Swedish teenager – who turned ”individualistic action” into very meaningful ”internationalist action” and… still?

Whassup – dudes?

Nice try, @Dipper, but the picture changes considerably once we take into account the emissions embodied in imports to the UK.

As I remarked on the Pinker thread, I’m skeptical of framings that put the focus on consumers instead of producers. “It’s not Georgia Power’s fault that they emit so much carbon dioxide — they’re just supplying the inexpensive energy desired by consumers.” I don’t buy it. And I don’t buy it any more when we’re talking about Chinese businesses than when we’re talking about businesses in the UK or US.

There would ideally be coordinated international action to cut emissions year over year. Barring that, nations willing to lead on climate action should impose strong domestic requirements and impose high tariffs on imports that don’t demonstrate similar alignment with climate goals via a transparent and auditable supply chain.

Maybe that’s all you mean: not relieving foreign manufacturers of responsibility for emissions embodied in UK imports. Just highlighting that domestic emissions measures are easily gamed if badly behaved industries can relocate to places with weak environmental standards while retaining access to the same distribution channels.