16 2020: A Proposal
We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are
“enlightened” all maintain that those coolies ought to be set
free; but our standard of living, and hence our “enlightenment”
demands that the robbery shall continue.
—George Orwell
By a large margin 1998 was the warmest year ever recorded. The previous
year was the second warmest (IPCC 2001). A growing volume
of scientific evidence indicates that, given present trends, the combustion
of fossil fuels, deforestation, and poor land-use practices will
cause a major, and perhaps self-reinforcing, shift in global climate
(Houghton 1997). With climatic change will come severe weather
extremes, superstorms, droughts, killer heat waves, rising sea levels,
spreading disease, accelerating rates of species loss, and collateral political,
economic, and social effects that we cannot imagine. We are
conducting, as Roger Revelle (quoted in Somerville 1996, 35) once
noted, a one-time experiment on the earth that cannot be reversed
and should not be run.
The debate about climatic change has, to date, been mostly about
scientific facts and economics, which is to say a quarrel about unknowns
and numbers. On one side are those, greatly appreciated by
some in the fossil fuel industry, who argue that we do not yet know
enough to act and that acting prematurely would be prohibitively expensive
(Gelbspan 1998). On the other side are those who argue that
we do know enough to act and that further procrastination will make
subsequent action both more difficult and less efficacious. In the
United States, which happens to be the largest emitter of greenhouse
gases, the issue is not likely to be discussed in any constructive manner.
And the U.S. Congress, caught in a miasma of ideology and partisanship,
is in deep denial, unable to act on the Kyoto agreement that
called for a 7 percent reduction of 1990 carbon dioxide levels by
2012. Even that level of reduction, however, would not be enough to
stabilize climate.
To see our situation more clearly we need a perspective that transcends
the minutiae of science, economics, and current politics. Because
the effects, whatever they may be, will fall most heavily on future
generations, understanding their likely perspective on our
present decisions would be useful to us now. How are future generations
likely to regard various positions in the debate about climatic
change? Will they applaud the precision of our economic calculations
that discounted their prospects to the vanishing point? Will they
think us prudent for delaying action until the last-minute scientific
doubts were quenched? Will they admire our heroic devotion to inefficient
cars and sport utility vehicles, urban sprawl, and consumption?
Hardly. They are more likely, I think, to judge us much as we now
judge the parties in the debate on slavery prior to the Civil War.
Stripped to its essentials, defenders of the idea that humans can
hold other humans in bondage developed four lines of argument.
First, citing Greek and Roman civilization, some justified slavery by
arguing that the advance of human culture and freedom had always
depended on slavery. “It was an inevitable law of society,” according to
John C. Calhoun, “that one portion of the community depended
upon the labor of another portion over which it must unavoidably exercise
control” (W. L. Miller 1998, 132). And “Freedom,” the editor of
the Richmond Inquirer once declared, “is not possible without slavery”
(Oakes 1998, 141). This line of thought, discordant when appraised
against other self-evident doctrines that “all men are created equal,” is
a tribute to the capacity of the human mind to simultaneously accommodate
antithetical principles. Nonetheless, it was used by some
of the most ardent defenders of “freedom” up to the Civil War.
A second line of argument was that slaves were really better off
living here in servitude than they would have been in Africa. Slaves,
according to Calhoun “had never existed in so comfortable, so respectable,
or so civilized a condition as that which it now enjoyed in
the Southern States” (W. L. Miller 1998, 132). The “happy slave” argument
fared badly with the brute facts of slavery that became vivid
for the American public only when dramatized by Harriet Beecher
Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852.
A third argument for slavery was cast in cost-benefit terms. The
South, it was said, could not afford to free its slaves without causing
widespread economic and financial ruin. This argument put none too
fine a point on the issue; slavery was simply a matter of economic survival
for the ruling race.
A fourth argument, developed most forcefully by Calhoun, held
that slavery, whatever its liabilities, was up to the states, and the Federal
government had no right to interfere with it because the Constitution
was a compact between independent political units. Beneath
all such arguments, of course, lay bedrock contempt for human equality,
dignity, and freedom. Most of us, in a more enlightened age, find
such views repugnant.
While the parallels are not exact between arguments for slavery
and those used to justify inaction in the face of prospective climatic
change, they are, perhaps, sufficiently close to be instructive. First,
those saying that we do not know enough yet to limit our emission of
greenhouse gases argue that human civilization, by which they mean
mostly economic growth for the already wealthy, depends on the consumption
of fossil fuels. We, in other words, must take substantial
risks with our children’s future for a purportedly higher cause: the
material progress of civilization now dependent on the combustion of
fossil fuels. Doing so, it is argued, will add to the stock of human
wealth that will enable subsequent generations to better cope with
the messes that we will leave behind.
Second, proponents of procrastination now frequently admit the
possibility of climatic change, but argue that it will lead to a better
world. Carbon enrichment of the atmosphere will speed plant
growth, enabling agriculture to flourish, increasing yields, lowering
food prices, and so forth. Further, while some parts of the world may
suffer, a warmer world will, on balance, be a nicer and more productive
place for succeeding generations.
Third, some, arguing from a cost-benefit perspective, assert that
energy conservation and solar energy are simply too expensive now.
We must wait for technological breakthroughs to reduce the cost of
energy efficiency and a solar-powered world. Meanwhile we continue
to expand our dependence on fossil fuels, thereby making any subsequent
transition still more difficult.
Finally, arguments for procrastination are grounded in a modernday
version of states’ rights and extreme libertarianism which makes
squandering fossil fuels a matter of individual rights, devil take the
hindmost.
Of course, we do not intend to enslave subsequent generations,
but we will leave them in bondage to degraded climatic and ecological
conditions that we have created. Further, they will know that we
failed to act on their behalf with alacrity even after it became clear
that our failure to use energy efficiently and develop alternative
sources of energy would severely damage their prospects. In fact, I am
inclined to think that our dereliction will be judged a more egregious
moral lapse than that which we now attribute to slave owners. For
reasons that one day will be regarded as no more substantial than
those supporting slavery, we knowingly bequeathed the risks of global
destabilization to all subsequent generations everywhere. If not
checked soon, that legacy will include severe droughts, heat waves,
famine, changing disease patterns, rising sea levels, and political and
economic instability. It will also mean degraded political, economic,
and social institutions burdened by bitter conflicts over declining supplies
of fossil fuels, water, and food. It is not far-fetched to think that
human institutions, including democratic governments, will break
under such conditions.
Other similarities exist. Both the use of humans as slaves and the
use of fossil fuels allow those in control to command more work than
would otherwise be possible.We no longer use slaves but we do have,
on average, the fossil fuel equivalent of 75 slaves at our service (Mc-
Neill 2000, 16). Both practices inflate wealth of some by robbing others.
Both systems work only so long as something is underpriced: the
devalued lives and labor of a slave or fossil fuels priced below their replacement
costs. Both require that some costs be ignored: those to
human beings stripped of choice, dignity, and freedom or the cost
of environmental externalities, which cast a long shadow on the
prospects of our descendants. In the case of slavery, the effects were
egregious, brutal, and immediate. But massive use of fossil fuels simply
defers the costs, different but no less burdensome, onto our descendants,
who will suffer the consequences with no prospect of
manumission. Slavery warped the politics and cultural evolution
of the South. But our dependence on fossil fuels has substantially
warped and corrupted our politics and culture as well. Slaves could be
manumitted; victims of global warming have no such prospect. We
leave behind steadily worsening conditions that cannot be altered in
any time span meaningful to humans.
Both slavery and fossil fuel–powered industrial societies require a
mass denial of responsibility. Slave owners were caught in a moral
quandary. Their predicament, in James Oakes’s words,was “the product
of a deeply rooted psychological ambivalence that impels the individual
to behave in ways that violate fundamental norms even as
they fulfill basic desires” (1998, 120). Regarding slavery, George
Washington confessed that “I shall frankly declare to you that I do not
like even to think, much less talk, of it” (ibid., 120). As one Louisiana
slave owner put it, “A gloomy cloud is hanging over our whole land”
TABLE 16.1. A Comparison of Slavery and Procrastination on
Efforts to Limit Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Issue Argument for slavery Argument for procrastination
Progress Historically necessary for Energy consumption
human improvement necessary for economic
growth
Improvement Slaves better off here A carbon-enriched world
will be better for agriculture
Cost-benefit The southern economy Costs of energy efficiency
depends on slavery are too great to bear; let’s
wait for better technology
Rights The federal government’s The rights of presentrights
stop at states’ generation carbon emitters
borders trump those of all others
(ibid., 110). Many wished for some way out of a profoundly troubling
reality. Instead of finding a decent way out, however, the South created
a culture of denial around the institutions of bondage. Southerners
were enslaved by their own system until it came crashing down
around them in the Civil War.
We, too, find ourselves in a quandary. From poll data we know
that most Americans believe that global warming is real and that its
consequences could be tragic and irreversible. But the response of
Congress and the business community has been to deny that the
problem exists and continue with business as usual. Proposals for
higher gasoline taxes, increasing fuel efficiency, or limits on use of automobiles,
for example, are regarded as politically impossible as the
abolition of slavery was in the 1830s. Unless we take appropriate
steps soon, our system, too, will end badly.
We now know that heated arguments made for the enslavement
of human beings were both morally wrong and self-defeating. The
more alert knew this early on. Benjamin Franklin noted that slaves
“pejorate the families that use them; the white children become
proud, disgusted with labor, and being educated in idleness, are rendered
unfit to get a living by industry” (Finley 1980, 100). Thomas
Jefferson knew all too well that slavery degraded slaves and slave
owners alike, while providing no sustainable basis for prosperity in an
emerging capitalist economy. On one hand, it is possible that the extravagant
use of fossil fuels has become a substitute for intelligence,
exertion, design skill, and foresight. On the other hand, we have every
reason to believe that vastly improved energy efficiency and an expeditious
transition to a solar-powered society would be to our advantage,
morally and economically. Energy efficiency could lower our energy
bill in the United States alone by as much as $200 billion per
year (Hawken et al. 1999). It would reduce environmental impacts
associated with mining, processing, transportation, and combustion
of fossil fuels and promote better technology. Elimination of subsidies
for fossil fuels, nuclear power, and automobiles would save tens of billions
of dollars each year (Myers 1998). In other words, the “no regrets”
steps necessary to avert the possibility of severe climatic
change, taken for sound ethical reasons, are the same steps we ought
to take for reasons of economic self-interest. History rarely offers such
a clear convergence of ethics and self-interest.
If we are to take this opportunity, however, we must be clear
that the issue of climatic change is not, first and foremost, a matter of
economics, technology, or science, but rather a matter of principle
that is best seen from the vantage point of our descendants. The same
historical period that gave us slavery also gave us the principles necessary
to abolish it. What Thomas Jefferson called “remote tyranny”
was not merely tyranny remote in space, but in time as well—what
has been termed “intergenerational remote tyranny.” In a letter to
James Madison written in 1789 (Jefferson 1975, 444–451), Jefferson
argued that no generation had the right to impose debt on its descendants,
for were it to do so the future would be ruled by the dead,
not the living.
A similar principle applies in this instance. Drawing from Jefferson,
Aldo Leopold, and others, such a principle might be stated thus:
No person, institution, or nation has the right to participate in
activities that contribute to large-scale, irreversible changes of
the earth’s biogeochemical cycles or undermine the integrity,
stability, and beauty of the earth’s ecologies, the consequences
of which would fall on succeeding generations as a
form of irrevocable remote tyranny.
Such a principle will likely fall on uncomprehending ears in Congress
and in most corporate boardrooms. Who, then, will act on it?
Who ought to act? Who can lead? What institutions represent the interests
of our children and succeeding generations on whom the cost
of present inaction will fall? At the top of my list are those that educate
and thereby equip the young for useful and decent lives. Education
is done in many ways, the most powerful of which is by example.
The example the present generation needs most from those who propose
to prepare them for responsible adulthood is a clear signal that
their teachers and mentors are responsible and will not, for any reason,
encumber their future with risk or debt—ecological or economic.
And they need to know that our commitment is more than
just talk. This principle can be stated in these words:
The institutions that purport to induct the young into responsible
adulthood ought themselves to operate responsibly,
which is to say that they should not act in ways that might
plausibly undermine the world their students will inherit.
Accordingly, I propose that every school, college, and university stand
up and be counted on the issue of climatic change by beginning now
to develop plans to reduce and eventually eliminate or offset the
emission of heat-trapping gases by the year 2020.
Opposition to such a proposal will, predictably, follow along
three lines. The first line of objection will arise from those who argue
that we do not yet know enough to act. In other words, until the
threat of climatic change is clear beyond any possible doubt (and also
less easily reversed), we cannot act. Presumably, these same people do
not wait until they smell smoke in the house at 2 A.M. to purchase fire
insurance. A “no regrets” strategy relative to the far-from-remote possibility
of climatic change is, by the same logic, a way to insure our descendants
against the possibility of disaster otherwise caused by our
carelessness.
A second line of objection will come from those who will argue
that educational institutions on their own cannot afford to act. To be
certain, there will be initial expenses, but there are also quick savings
from reducing energy use. In fact, done smartly, implementation of
energy efficiency and solar technology can save money. Moreover, it is
now possible to use energy service companies that will finance the
work and pay themselves from the stream of savings, making the transition
budget neutral. The real problem here has less to do with costs
than with moral energy and the failure to imagine possibilities in
places where imagination and creativity are reportedly much valued.
A third kind of objection will come from those who agree with
the overall goal of stabilizing climate, but will argue that our business
is education, not social change. This position is premised on the
quaint belief that what occurs in educational institutions must be uncontaminated
by contact with the affairs of the world and that we
have no business objecting to how that world does its business. It is
further assumed that education occurs only in classrooms and must
be remote from anything having practical consequences.Were the effort
to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, however, done as a 20-year
effort in which students worked with faculty, staff, administration,
energy engineers, and technical experts, the educational and institutional
benefits would be substantial. How might the abolition of fos-
sil fuels occur? In outline, the steps are straightforward, requiring
(1) a thorough audit of current institutional energy use; (2) preparation
of a detailed engineering plans to upgrade energy efficiency and
eliminate waste; (3) development of plans to harness renewable energy
sources sufficient to meet campus energy needs by 2020; and
(4) competent implementation. These steps ought to engage students,
faculty, administration, staff, and representatives of the surrounding
community. They ought to be taken publicly as a way to educate
a broad constituency about the consequences of our present
course and the possibilities and opportunities for change.
Some colleges are beginning to act on climate change. Fifty-six
college presidents in New Jersey agreed to meet or exceed the Kyoto
Protocol.Tufts University has launched a “Cool Planet, Clean Air” initiative
with an alliance of New England colleges and universities.
Oberlin College, working with the Rocky Mountain Institute, has
completed a study of what would be required for the institution to
become “climatically neutral” by the year 2020. The longer-term goal
of such efforts is to begin, from the grass roots, the long-delayed transition
to energy efficiency and solar power. Perhaps our leaders will
follow one day when they are wise enough to distinguish the public
interest from narrow, short-run private interests. Someday, too, all of
us will come to understand that true prosperity neither permits nor
requires bondage of any human being, in any form, for any reason,
now or ever.