It's Not Easy Being Green

This post's title comes from a 2011 essay of the same name by Joseph Heath, professor in the Department of Philosophy and the School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto. That essay is worth reading, so I've reprinted some of it with comments here.

The introduction explains why it is not easy being green. I like the way it relates the climate change mitigation problem to everyday life. I've reprinted it without comment.

A couple of years ago, while contemplating the dandelions running riot alongside the road in front of my house, I decided it was time to get a weed whacker. I went down to my local Canadian Tire to see what was available. Being an environmentally sensitive guy, I picked out a nice 18-volt battery-powered one.

I returned home, plugged it in overnight and set out the next morning to wreak havoc on the obstreperous dandelions. The results, however, fell somewhat short of expectations. My childhood memory of weed whackers was that they were slightly alarming contraptions, always on the verge of running out of control, posing a danger not just to plants but to bystanders and exposed shins as well.

My new trimmer, however, did not exactly whack the weeds. Really, it just knocked them around a bit. Half of them got bent over, rather than being severed at the base. I often had to come at them from several different angles in order to get them clipped. This took a long time, so that after 20 minutes when the batteries ran out, the job was only half done.

Oh well, I thought, I will finish up tomorrow.

The introduction continues.

The fate of my weed whacker was sealed a couple weeks later when my wife decided that I was not doing a good enough job and that she would have to take on the dandelions herself. She saddled up with the usual safety gear, grabbed the trimmer and headed off for the road.

Five minutes later she came back, threw my poor battery-powered trimmer on the ground and said—her exact words—“This is bullshit.”

She then hopped in the car and drove away. Half an hour later she reappeared, back from Canadian Tire, this time with an old-fashioned gas-powered weed whacker. “Can you get this going for me?” she asked sweetly.

Naturally it had a two-stroke engine. So I got out the gas can from the garage, sat down with a funnel and measuring cup, and poured in the right amount of oil. (NB: Any time you find yourself mixing oil into gasoline with the intention of burning it, just admit that you are a bad person. Save everyone else the trouble.)

The new weed whacker, I had to admit, was a small miracle of miniaturization. It had a tiny little engine, with a gas tank that held no more than a cup of fuel. Pull the cord, though, and the thing took off like a bat out of hell. And did it ever whack weeds! It annihilated them, eviscerated them, terminated them with extreme prejudice. It splattered their vegetative fluids across the road, leaving nothing but exposed roots and chlorophyll stains.

This was the weed whacker of my childhood memories.

And now, the problems begin.

The difference, however, was that when I was a child, no one knew much about the environmental consequences of weed whackers, or two-stroke engines, or fossil fuels more generally.

Now we do.

And yet this knowledge does not automatically give us an incentive to stop using them.

The fact remains that, kilo for kilo, nothing delivers power like a good old-fashioned gasoline engine. It is only when you explore the alternatives that you realize what an incredible concentration of energy there is in fossil fuel.

Precisely. Speaking as an environmental economist here, Heath defines the collective action problem with respect to global warming in terms of hidden costs and direct benefits.

Thus we find ourselves in something of a dilemma. On the one hand, we know that it is bad for the environment to be burning fossil fuel.  On the other hand, we have all sorts of things that we would like to get done. We still derive benefits, as individuals, from the use of fossil fuels.

The costs, on the other hand, are primarily borne by others. Not only does my weed whacker make only a tiny contribution to the overall problem of global warming, but even the effects that it does create are felt very far away, by persons unknown to me.

These costs, in other words, take the form of what economists call “negative externalities,” effects on third parties whom I need not compensate for their losses, and so whose interests I am not forced to factor into my calculations. The result is what some environmentalists have called “the mother of all collective action problems” — each of us contributes, in our own way, to the problem of climate change, yet none of us has an incentive to stop what we are doing, and each one of us can plausibly point to someone else’s behavior as the cause of the problem.

Global warming is therefore a textbook example of a tragedy of the commons.

This makes it, first and foremost, a motivational problem, not an ideological one.

Right.

In other words, it needs to be fixed, not by changing people’s minds, but by changing their incentives.

And yet people still find this devilishly hard to grasp. There is an almost irresistible tendency to think that the reason we have not yet fixed the problem of global warming is that we are not thinking about it in the right way.

It is important to pause at this juncture to emphasize that this analysis, as far it goes, is entirely correct. Heath recognizes that human beings in the general case operate within what I called in the second Flatland essay the "human economic frame of reference" (an unfortunate term, but it was the best I could up with at the time). Please review the relevant parts of that essay while understanding that assigning economic costs and benefits to the environment makes the environment visible to humans.

Long story short, human minds are not changed by reasonable arguments; humans require the right incentives to respond to problems like global warming. Straightforwardly, those incentives must put human self-interest front and center. This should not be "devilishly hard to grasp" as Hearth puts it, but it is.

Heath then proceeds to skewer environmentalist David Suzuki and journalist William Marsden for not grasping the obvious (book reviews). Let's start with Suzuki.

Perhaps because of this passionate commitment to the cause, it is startling to discover that Suzuki is oblivious to the logic of collective action. What’s worse, he does not even know what a [negative] externality is, and seems unwilling to learn...

Right, humans generally are unwilling to learn. Actually, they are unable to learn 

It is worth pausing for a moment to reflect upon this. It means that Suzuki does not know the first thing about environmental economics. It means that in 38 years as a university professor, public intellectual and environmental activist, he did not once take the time to find out what social scientists have to say about the problem of global warming. It means that he has never even glanced at the Wikipedia page on environmental economics.

Because of this, Suzuki winds up committing the core fallacy of environmental activism.

He thinks that if people only understood the consequences that their actions were having on the environment, they would each be motivated to change their behavior. And so, to the extent that we are not changing our behavior, it must be because we do not understand, or that we have not been telling ourselves the right “story.”

Yet this is manifestly not the case. My wife understands the science of global warming perfectly well. But she also does not like dandelions growing by the side of the road.

And when push comes to shove, the desire to kill dandelions wins over environmental peccadilloes.

It is not particularly mysterious. It is called free riding; people do it all the time.

Of course. Free riding is as natural and mindless as breathing in the climate change context.

Thus when Suzuki writes “we say we are intelligent, but what intelligent creature, knowing that water is a sacred, life-giving element, would use water as a toxic dump?” he seems genuinely not to know.

The answer is easy: we are intelligent creatures who care just slightly more about ourselves than we do about other people.

For example, like most residents of Toronto I do not use the water on my land as a toxic dump; I use Lake Ontario for that purpose. Saying that “we are water, and whatever we do to water, we do to ourselves” sounds very nice, but all the “we” talk actually encourages a very serious confusion.

What I do to water, I primarily do to other people, not to myself, which is why I care about it just ever-so-slightly less.

It is hard to see how the term "intelligent" is being used here, but I'll skip that thorny issue.

In reality, what we "do to water" we primarily do to the various animals who live in the water. (Ultimately, our fate is tied up with the fate of those animals, i.e., the entire biosphere.) But humans are generally oblivious to this fact. The all-encompassing "human economic frame of reference" is inherently selfish and therefore anthropocentric.

In economic (strictly human) terms, dumping waste into Lake Ontario is a benefit for us and costly to somebody else who we don't know (those who have to deal with the waste). The fundamentally self-interested shortsightedness of the human condition is thus summed up by Heath's point.

Let's turn to William Marsden's Fools Rule. Heath is scathing again.

The investigative journalist shows up in another way, in his somewhat hardbitten view of humanity. Marsden clearly believes that people are knaves. He is a “glass-half-empty” kind of guy...

Marsden, then, seems like the kind of guy who would understand free-rider problems. Indeed, when it comes to his analysis of the political maneuvering (charlatanism, cynicism, etc.) that led to the failure of the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009, he is in perfect stride. He starts out sounding as if he is going to present it as a North-South morality play, with the North as villain. “One of the sad realities in the struggle to meet the challenges of climate change is that the countries that pollute the most—the rich countries—hold all the cards,” he writes.

From this point of view, the desire to expand beyond Kyoto, in order to get China and India to accept emission controls, seems like a cynical plot. “Just as emerging nations see their chance for a better life, the West turns the tables and demands emission cutbacks that could stall their growth.”

But this theme quickly falls apart, first, because of the simple fact that China is now the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, with India rapidly advancing, and second, because both countries have been extremely bloody-minded in the pursuit of their national interests, at the expense of the common good.

(Marsden quotes the Indian environment minister declaring the meeting a “success”: “I went to Copenhagen not to save the world. I went to Copenhagen to protect India’s national interests. And my mandate was to protect India’s right to foster economic growth.”)

A couple of pages on, Marsden admits what is becoming increasingly obvious: “there are no good guys in this story.” Indeed, by the end of the book, he is talking even tougher on India and China than he is on the West...

Right. There are no good guys in this story, generally speaking. (Rare people like Daniel Pauly are the only "good guys" in this story.) This is always important to remember. On the other hand, there are no bad guys either. (It's always a matter of degrees of confusion, not some absolute quality goodness/badness.) There are only humans doing what they do.

Let's jump to a key point and finish up.

What is surprising about Marsden’s analysis, however, is that even though he recognizes a free rider when he sees one and knows what an externality is, he still misunderstands the logic of collective action.

In his presentation of the tragedy of the commons, he confuses two distinct issues:

first, our tendency to put our short-term interests ahead of our long-term interests

and

second, our tendency to put our own interests above those of other people.

It is the second tendency that generates the tragedy [of the commons], not the first.

But because he mixes these two things up, Marsden ends the book speculating about what the “trouble with our brains” might be, such that we are unable to solve the problem of global warming.

This is strange—since it is incredibly easy to identify what the trouble with our institutions is, such that we are unable to solve the problem. Why does there have to be a problem with our brains as well?

What becomes apparent is that Marsden is committing the same fallacy as Suzuki—assuming that if people only understood better what is happening, they would be motivated to do something...

Why must there be a problem with our brains? Don't get me started! (Too late...)

Long story short again, there is no problem with our brains for Heath because the human economic frame of reference can be understood to an extent and is working perfectly with respect to climate change (the second tendency above, negative externalities, free-riding, tragedy of the commons, etc.).

The actual problem with our brains is that very fact—the human economic frame of reference is working perfectly in a context in which it needs to be overridden. (See here and here to understand the problem.)

But humans can't escape their economic frame of reference. That crucial capacity is not part of their nature. In a nutshell, that's the problem with our brains.

Comments

[Jim]

Something obvious Heath is missing is why did they have to cut the dandelions in the first place, because if the concern was truly about being green, it'd have been best to just leave them alone. There would have been no resources used, and the dandelions are a pollen source for bees and supporting species for others. If one really wants to be green, just leave nature alone. It knows far more than we do about how to take care of itself.

Of course, that wasn't a consideration, because of our brains - social concerns led to the need to have a mono-culture front yard. Additionally, it was made possible by technology, and that is something few seem to acknowledge - that technology increases our disconnect from nature, and that increasing disconnect helps fuel increasingly bad choices in regards to the environment.

I read two recent articles that are related. The first is this:
http://www.dw.com/en/german-youth-ditch-enviro-interests-for-economic-woes/a-19005640

Youth care about the environment outwardly, but they care more about themselves in the end. It's a sort of, "I want to be green, but how do I make money while doing it?", instead of considering that the two ideas are opposed. How does one help the environment? Don't make money. Be poor.

That's totally whacko to just about everyone and runs directly counter to our nature, so it's a moot point, but still worth saying.

Youths, especially the educated ones, are also often strapped with debt. They are locked into the system from day one, even if they could somehow overcome their own biological and social urges.

The second article is this one:
http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/24/technology/upstart30-freight-farms/

Heath's article and many others talk about incentivizing "green" behavior - change the dialogue from the morality of being environmentally conscious to how can one be "green" while increasing their own wealth and status. That's a fool's errand to me because the two are essentially opposites, and Heath seems completely blind to that, but the CNN article could be taken as a test case.

Here's a guy who got a low interest, no money down $300K loan from the Department of Agriculture, has embraced technology in a big way, and is looking to supply leafy greens his community. The article touts that he makes $15K a month doing it, but later explains with all his expenses he's "about breaking even". The article says nothing about whether or not his output is greater than his inputs in environmental costs.