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Fairness, Personal Action and Al Gore’s House
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
Not long ago I was out at a dinner of climate activists, at the beginning of a conference I was at, and as we were climbing into the car of one of the program leaders, there was talk about whose car was messier. This is a competition I always win – I mentioned to them that not only do I have little kids in my car, messing it up, but I drive goats around in my Taurus.
Several people asked me why I drive goats in a car, (which even to me seems like a reasonable question). The answer is that I am a farmer with goats, but I don’t have a pick up truck, so when they go to be bred or to the vet, they travel in the front seat, sometimes with their heads hanging out the window.
Why don’t I have a pick-up? Don’t all farmers have to have a truck? I admitted a truck would be a nice thing. As it is, a few times a year, we barter for use of a truck with a friend of mine in trade for our pasture for her sheep. It is a bit of hassle to have to put down newspaper for the goats in the car, and to be reliant on my friend’s truck when we want to take poultry to the butcher or get hay. But we are trying to live in a comparatively low resource life, and I know that if we owned a truck, we’d use it a lot more than we do. By not owning one, we make sure that when we use a low-mileage vehicle, it is really necessary.
The other speaker, who was a scientist from the CDC, and an expert on the medical implications of global warming was kind of mystified and skeptical that the inconvenience of this would be worth it. Like most climate scientists I know, he didn’t seem to believe that personal actions matter that much – and there’s something to be said for his case. In the great scheme of things, whether I have a truck or not isn’t very important. I could drive my goats around with the a/c running and the windows down in a Hummer, an it wouldn’t be a drop in the bucket in world climate emissions. And yet, I think it does matter – not just for me, but in general.
The very first time I was asked to do a public presentation on peak oil and climate change, one of the people in the audience, an older man, stood up and said to me, “Look, you may be right, this sounds right. But a lot of people sound right, and I just want to know why I should believe you. I don’t know whose papers to read or how to read them for the science – I never took a lot of science in school, and that was 50 years ago. What I want to know is if it is true, why don’t the people who say it is true act that way? I’ve been hanging my laundry out on the line for 40 years and more, and my wife just got us a dryer. Now you are saying I shouldn’t use it. And I won’t if you can show me a climate scientist out there with his underwear out on the line.”
…And yet, it isn’t just a red herring. The perception of fairness and justice is a really big deal for people, and to underestimate its importance, I think, misses a central point. This guy was saying that he’d consider giving up some of his luxuries – but only if he felt that the people who were demanding he do so were also giving them up.
There’s considerable psychological research that suggests that fairness matters an awful lot to us. In one paper published in Nature a study used a “Prisoner’s Dilemma” type game in which one recipient receive painful shocks, to show whether our empathy for people’s pain is affected by how we perceive the fairness of their actions. All participants found less empathetic response when the person getting the shocks was acting unfairly. In men, it was found that not only were they not feeling empathy, but they received pleasure thinking that someone was getting revenge.
Other research suggests that people will even act against their own interests in order to avoid perceived unfairness – and in fact, we can see this in many debates on social welfare policies. Many of the people who oppose these programs are among those who would benefit the most from them – the American health care debate is a good example. But the sense that others would benefit unfairly or more than they is so troubling to them that they often oppose the program, despite the fact that it would help them…
(16 Dec 2009)
Do Panels Dispense Advice or Rationales?
Emily Badger, Miller-McCune
Back during the Thanksgiving recess, while most of us were otherwise occupied with Black Friday plans, holiday menus and party crashers, President Obama quietly signed into existence Executive Order No. 13521.
The order creates a new Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, replacing the Bush-era council Obama disbanded over the summer. The administration simultaneously announced the top two scholars on the commission – University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann and Emory University President James Wagner — with the remaining 11 members yet to be determined.
In the few weeks since, interest groups have begun wrangling over the remaining makeup of the group and the kind of work it will do, thrusting a once-apolitical scientific advisory body deeper into the realm of culture wars.
The previous commission, appointed by Bush, was criticized for leaning in the same ideological direction as its creator and for producing more philosophical discussion than practical policy advice. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker skewered its culminating 2008 report — the 577-page “Human Dignity and Bioethics” — for having more Christian-themed essays than actual bioethics expertise.
“How did the United States, the world’s scientific powerhouse,” Pinker wrote in the The New Republic, “reach a point at which it grapples with the ethical challenges of twenty-first-century biomedicine using Bible stories, Catholic doctrine, and woolly rabbinical allegory?…
(10 Dec 2009)
Unschooling & Unworking: Confessions of a stay-at-home family (Part 2)
Myra Eddy, These New Old Traditions
The most important aspect of schooling is control. Without permission, you may not stand, speak, urinate, quench your thirst. You may not disagree, and a lot of times, you may not ask questions. As Grace Llewellyn writes,
“School controls the way you spend your time (what is life made of if not time?), how you behave, what you read, and to a large extent what you think.… There are lots of good reasons to quit school, but to my idealistic American mind, the pursuit of freedom encompasses most of them and outshines the others. If you look at the history of ‘freedom,’ you notice that the most frightening thing about people who are not free is that they learn to take their bondage for granted, and to believe that this bondage is ‘normal’ and natural. They may not like it, but few question it or imagine anything different.”
And what does school prepare you for? Work!
To me, most work I’ve done has been incredibly boring at the least, and equally soul-sucking at times. I’ve been working half of my life, in various so-called skilled and unskilled jobs. I was employed full-time for many years, for no apparent reason that I can now discern. Although I was making what I considered to be a lot of money, I accumulated a lot of debt. I accumulated a lot of stuff. I spent all my time working and consuming. And all that time, I was trying to figure out what was missing from my life. It turns out my whole life was missing. I was stuck in this very rigid routine that was incredibly unsatisfying. A few random happenings, most importantly my daughter’s arrival, have led to what we have now: a stay-at-home family, a beautiful, rich life (just not rich in money).
A few months before I quit my job to be unemployed for two years and two months, I read a book by Michael Fogler called Unjobbing: The Adult Liberation Handbook. It’s a fairly straight-forward book, asking people to think about the sad fact that “in a large sense, life = job.” Although it seems like work-consume-die is our millennial mantra, he reminds us that for 99 percent of the time that humans have been on Earth, “people have lived communally, in tribes and villages. The kind of life we take for granted and is normal today—big cities where adults and children leave their single-family homesteads all day for work (or schooling) in large institutional settings—is only a very recent phenomenon. This has been the case for less than one percent of the time humans have inhabited Earth.”…
(10 Dec 2009)
COP15: Climate ‘scepticism’ and questions about sex
Richard Black, BBC news
Why are virtually all climate “sceptics” men?
The question first came to mind on the plane to Copenhagen last week while scanning The Guardian’s feature on movers and shakers in the “sceptical” field.
So we go down their list… Bjorn Lomborg, Viscount Monckton, former TV presenter David Bellamy, British National Party leader Nick Griffin, Freakonomics authors Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Lord Lawson, social anthropologist Benny Peiser, geologist Ian Plimer, US Senator James Inhofe, Czech President Vaclav Klaus… all men.
In the centre of Copenhagen, a group called the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) has been holding an event giving the “sceptical” version of the climate science story. The speakers list? Nils-Axel Morner, Cliff Ollier, Stuart Wheeler, and so on down the agenda… all proud possessors of a Y-chromosome.
The recently-launched London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation numbers a single woman across its Board of Trustees and Academic Advisory Council.
I could go on… but I hope the point is demonstrated. In fact, across the entire sceptical landscape, as far as I can see, the female contingent numbers one UK columnist, a couple of Australian bloggers, UK academic Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen and US counterpart Sallie Baliunas… and that’s about it, apart from former US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin who – as the Washington Post reveals – hasn’t always displayed climate scepticism in the past.
It’s a marked contrast to the world of mainstream climate science, which boasts a number of eminent female practitioners including IPCC lead authors Susan Solomon and Cynthia Rosenzweig; and to the world of UN climate talks, where many delegations include, and are led by, women, including the UK’s negotiating team.
…But a report from the US think-tank American Progress probed a little deeper and came up with a more nuanced view.
It split citizens into six categories depending on how they felt about man-made climate change, from “alarmed” through to “dismissive”.
The genders were roughly equally represented in the middle groupings, but at the margins the divide was absolutely stark: “Almost two-thirds of the Dismissive are men (63%), the largest gender split among the six segments,” the report concluded.
What else did the survey reveal about the “dismissive” group?
“More likely than average to be high income, well-educated, white men… much more likely to be very conservative Republicans… strongly endorse individualistic values, opposing any form of government intervention, anti-egalitarian, and almost universally prefer economic growth over environmental protection… have a specialized media diet, with a higher than average preference for media sources that reflect their own political point of view.”
(15 Dec 2009)
Can Obama Stop America’s Gas-Guzzling Ways?
Klaus Brinkbäumer, Spiegel online
Never before has a US government been as serious in its warnings against the dangers of climate change as the Obama administration. But Americans are divided: Half of them regard climate protection policies as socialist, and half want to save the world. Can Obama make America go green?
There are parts of the United States where there is no real evidence of social discord, of the loathing and aggressiveness with which different groups view one another, and where no one seems to question the prevailing view.
In Las Vegas, Nevada, they build artificial waterfalls and big roads for big cars because opulence and wastefulness are part of the city’s raison d’etre. Las Vegas residents have no moral qualms about their lifestyle and the excesses they see around them. Oil and water have always come from somewhere, they reason, so why should that stop? It makes perfect sense that, in Washington, Nevada’s senators and lobbyists would champion the causes important to their voters: growth, employment and progress — all without taxes or regulation. From their perspective, there is no good reason why rivers in the desert should ever run dry.
Berkeley, California, is a similar kind of place, a city where everyone has more or the less the same convictions — the only difference being that Berkeley’s residents have very different ideas than the people in Las Vegas.
They believe that it’s their duty to save the world. They ride bikes, even though they’re Americans. They separate plastic from paper in their recycling bins. In fact, Berkeley’s hippies were the first Americans to sort and recycle their garbage. Even though they are Americans, the people of Berkeley insulate their windows, install solar panels on their roofs and think about ways to harness wind power in San Francisco Bay. And because they’re Americans, they, like Amy Kiser, think about how to take their message to the rest of the country and the world…
(15 Dec 2009)
