November 22, 2010--The Limits of Virtue

For more than two years Harvey B. and I have been having a debate about global warming. He's pretty well versed on the subject and so am I. He's skeptical about the science; I am much less so. The debate has thus been lively.

We do at least agree that global warming is happening but not about its causes. I see clear evidence that humans are contributing significantly to it; Harvey sees some human responsibility but so little as to not get too worked up about what we and governments should do to in attempts to slow it.

To support his view he cites criticism of some of the science (for example, the UN Global Warming report and the compromised data from some British studies) but mainly he relies on the evidence from the geological past. How millennia before the emergence of humans, over eons, the Earth has cooled and warmed. There have been numerous ice ages and as many when the Arctic was a tropical rain forest.

He has his earth science right but he is wrong about what is currently happening--

The preponderance of scientific evidence is that this time around the warming is largely fueled (pun intended) by us. Largely because swelling populations in the developed and rapidly-developing worlds have been insatiably generating energy from carbon-rich fossil fuel that in turn produces carbon dioxide which then saturates the atmosphere, thereby trapping greenhouse gases which contribute to raising the temperature of the Earth.

You don't have to use Al Gore or an Inconvenient Truth as your bible in suppprt of this view. Just last week, for example, the New York Times published a sober summary of the growing, non-ideological evidence that human-caused warming is accelerating. (Article linked below.)

Harvey has been trying to convince me to calm down and I have been attempting to get him to agree to the following--

Because the science is not definitively proven, rather than waiting for it to be (which will never happen--this is the nature of science) since the stakes are so high, if the scientists I follow are correct, shouldn't we, for the sake of the human race assume they are right and do everything sensible we can to slow down the warming?

He is halfway there. Just the other day he wrote:

Yes, it would be prudent to do something if there is something viable to do. Most of the measures I’ve heard about will do virtually nothing to ameliorate the problem or be so insignificant (in light of the scope of the problem) as to be useless. I’m holding out for a “real” answer. I’m sure it’s out there and I’m sure it will be found. At that point you’ll see me get real excited about pushing for action.

Earlier in our debate Harvey and I couldn't agree to even this. I've been trying to figure out why.

Since those who vigorously oppose the government telling us how to use and conserve energy agree that there is some human contribution to global warming and since those like me who want enlightened government to set some standards--things such as requiring car manufacturers to increase the average miles-per-gallon of the vehicles they build--and since we agree that there are in fact geological forces at work over which we have no control, why is the debate in the political arena and in the hyper-media so hot and uncompromising?

I am coming to conclude that this is because folks on both sides of the debate have been thinking ideologically.

Those on the right see the government cooking environmental data so they can further limit personal freedom and thereby chip away at capitalism and the free market; while those on the left want the government to apply more regulation to an economy that they see protecting privilege and producing inequality.

Since so much of the argument is belief-based, we are stalled, in practical terms, about what to agree to do and will remain so until ideology is extracted from the debate.

Liberals, who have been behind the movement to have us do more to limit human contributions to global warming have based a large part of their case on what they perceive to be virtuous--in effect saying that it is a responsible, good, and noble thing to take care of the one Earth we have. Conservatives who tend to oppose organized efforts to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels also see their position to be virtuous--the free market, they claim, is derived from natural, even divine law and it thus goes against nature (and God) to in any way interfere with it.

When both sides are dug in about these core beliefs there is no hope of compromise or progress. One doesn't compromise about beliefs.

The political left, which cares most about these issues, has made the grievous error of not decoupling the practical from the moral.

Rather than focussing so much on doing the right thing, we should have been asking a much more universally appealing question:

How can we free ourselves from dependence on foreign oil?

Focusing on this would have captured almost everyone's attention and transcended the ideological debate about global warming and our role in contributing to it. By in this way de-intensifying the argument we would have been able to focus on what to do rather than what to believe.

If we could agree that energy independence is a necessary economic and national security goal (as well as a patriotic one), the things we might quickly conclude need to be done to accomplish this (the development of major new forms of renewable energy, conservation, mass transit) would also serve a secondary purpose: they would contribute in a major way to reducing the human role in global warming while at the same time growing our economy.

We would see these "good" things happen as an additional consequence of moving toward energy independence and could thereby bypass the ruinous ideological and moral arguments altogether. These are getting us nowhere fast.

Actually, they are fast getting us to the point of irrelevance as the Chinese, among others, ever practical, leave us in the dust as they move to dominate the field of renewable energy.