A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Asking the right questions

“Eco-economist” Herman Daly tries to inject some clarity into the debate on climate change. Even if some of the details are up in the air, he says, the trajectory is clear and we need to ask if this is the direction we want to be going in.

It seems to me that a lot of the climate change “skepticism” (which I put in scarequotes because much of it is an industry-funded attempt to muddy the waters, not a good faith pursuit of the truth; see the chapter on climate change skepticism/denial in George Monbiot’s Heat for some damning details) is about pouncing on uncertainty at the level of detail, whereas the big picture remains pretty clear. Take for instance the way that skeptics jumped on some recent minor revision by NASA of some temperature rankings for the US (see this post for some clarification, via Confessing Evangelical).

As Daly says, if the big picture is clear, then by asking the right questions, like “can we systematically continue to emit increasing amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere without eventually provoking unacceptable climate changes?” or “what is it that is causing us to systematically emit ever more CO2 into the atmosphere?” or “does growth in GDP at the current margin and scale in the U.S. really make us richer? Might it not be increasing environmental and social costs faster than it increases production benefits, thereby making us poorer?” can yield a fairly definitive answer to the question of what direction we should be going in.

As he puts it:

Setting policy in accord with first principles allows us to act now without getting mired in endless delays caused by the uncertainties of complex empirical measurements and predictions. Of course, the uncertainties do not disappear. We will experience them as surprising consequences, both agreeable and disagreeable, necessitating mid-course correction to the policies enacted on the basis of first principles. But at least we will have begun moving in the right direction.

I discussed Daly and theologian John Cobb’s book For the Common Good a bit here and here.

In a similar vein, D.W. Congdon is asking some questions for churches about consumerism, which is surely relevant to this topic.

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3 responses to “Asking the right questions”

  1. D. W. Congdon

    Thanks for the link, and for this helpful post. Indeed, the issue of consumerism is very relevant to the topic of environmental change. I have plenty of ultra-conservative relatives and friends who continually use the argument: if we really try to address this climate change issue, then it will completely wreck our economy. The assumption is that protecting our economy is the highest possible good (second only to spreading American “freedom” to every other country on the planet). But I think Al Gore hits the issue nicely on the head when he compares personal health-and-wealth to planetary health-and-wealth. Obviously, the planet is more important. American Christians also need to get over their idolatry of capitalism and realize that some things are worth risking economic collapse.

    (Of course, as the automobile industry shows quite nicely, being environmentally friendly can also be big business.)

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  2. Camassia

    I’ve had discussions kind of like this with people about population growth. There are a fair number of folks who say that the dangers of overpopulation are overblown and we need to keep multiplying to maintain a favorable young/old balance. That may be true, but either way the planet will reach carrying capacity someday, so we need to be able to at least conceive of an economy that has a lot of old people.

    Having said that, I think there’s more to the economic questions behind global warming than just consumerism. I tend to think that, given time, people can adjust to practically anything, but sudden shocks can be dangerous. For instance, McKibbon says we have to cut fossil fuel consumption by 70 percent in the next ten years. The Middle East is already a powder keg, what’ll happen if it loses most of its oil money? Again, sooner or later it will have to, but it does seem to argue for thinking over the consequences instead of hitting the panic button (a sentiment that Daly seems to disapprove of).

    Of course, the same applies to global warming itself: no one knows how fast it will happen. Although that may seem like a “detail” question to Daly, it will make all the difference in how humanity reacts to it.

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  3. Lee

    That’s a fair point, though I suppose one could argue that the degree to which we’re currently doing anything about it is so paltry that it requires people to be shaken out of their stupor a bit. Though whether that’s a sound strategy in the long run is debatable.

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