Category Archives: Climate change

Extra votes for the young

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By all indications, the choices we are making about climate change and energy now have the effect of selling out the interests of future generations, in exchange for greater wealth during the next few years. This connects to the central conflict of interest created by climate change: the disjoint between the interests of those who burn fossil fuels and those who suffer from the pollution that behaviour creates. All indications from the political system suggest that people will continue to undermine the interests of their own children and grandchildren, where doing so is personally financially beneficial to them.

Earlier, I brought up a radical proposal to align the interests of the elite with those of future generations. Unfortunately, no such proposal has any chance of success, because elites are highly influential and members of future generations are nothing but powerless victims.

Perhaps one way reduce the strength of the intergenerational conflict of interest is to adjust the voting system so that those who will experience more of the consequences of climate change have more of an ability to vote. Specifically, votes could be weighted so that those of younger people count for a bit more while those of older people count for less.

Each person could start with one guaranteed vote. Younger people could then be credited with additional partial votes, to represent their greater personal interest in the choices being made today. If we assume that people in Canada live to be about 80, that means someone who is 50 today is likely to live until about 2042. Somebody who is 20 today, by contrast, is likely to live until 2072. The amount of climate change experienced by the 20-year-old is likely to be substantially greater. They will also live longer with the consequences of all the other related choices we made: from designing electricity and transport infrastructure to managing conflict internationally.

One way to implement this idea would be to give everyone 1 vote, plus an additional 1/100th of a vote for every year they are likely to live (based on the simplification that everyone will live to be about 80). Someone who is 20 would therefore get their 1 vote, plus 0.6 additional votes to represent how long they will be on the planet. Someone who is 70 would only get 1 vote plus 0.1 additional votes.

Usually, the older someone gets, the worse the alignment is between their interests and the interests of society as a whole. (This is obvious in areas like health care, where those who are dying have every interest in unlimited public funding being devoted to keeping them alive.) Actually, this is a more general problem. An employee who knows he will be quitting in two weeks has little or no interest in the long-term health of the company. A tourist who is leaving a country in a couple of days has little interest in its long term health. Those who have little time left on the planet have every personal reason to support the pillage of the natural world, if it means their remaining time will be more prosperous and comfortable.

The young, by contrast, will be forced to live with the choices we make, right or wrong. If we do too little about climate change, they will suffer from all of the effects of that choice. Similarly, if we actually end up doing too much about climate change – scrapping too much fossil fuel infrastructure and building too much renewable energy capacity – it is the young people of today who will live poorer lives because of it.

The idea of weighing votes by age, even if it is philosophically and ethically defensible, is probably politically impossible. Older people are richer and more involved in the political process. They seriously outgun young people who are struggling to develop personal financial security and who are largely uninterested in voting. It may also be faulty to assume that young people will vote with their own long-term interests in mind. They may prove just as narrowly self-interested as older people have been. Instead of seeing policies developed that will encourage the emergence of a decent world for everyone in 2050 or 2100, they may just support policies that make the world of 2012 a little bit better for them personally.

Keystone XL rejected

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The Obama administration has officially rejected the proposed Keystone XL pipeline! That is the pipeline that prompted me to travel to Washington D.C. this summer to volunteer at the protests.

The rejection of the pipeline is good news for many reasons.

By rejecting pipelines, the jurisdictions around Alberta can slow the development of the oil sands and reduce the total quantity of fossil fuels that will be burned. These pipelines are also a major investment in an inappropriate technology. Canada needs to be working on developing a decarbonized economy, not encouraging unlimited growth in the unsustainable business of extracting fuels from the oil sands.

President Obama will probably lose a few votes over this decision, particularly from people who think oil is still the future of energy and who do not care about climate change. At the same time, I am sure he will gain some votes too for finally doing the right thing on this. The choice offered to us by the oil sands is to either profit today in a way that harms future generations or to leave the oil in the ground and invest in safer sources of energy.

Oil sands buyers and sellers

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In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice Portia describes how the quality of mercy is twice blessed: “[i]t blesseth him that gives and him that takes”.

The oil sands are like the moral opposite of mercy – it is unethical to produce them, and unethical to consume them. It is unethical for the oil companies to dig up and sell such fuels, given what we know about climate change, and it is unethical for the buyers to purchase the fuels, largely for the same reason. Both buyers and sellers are complicit in a pattern of action that sells out future generations, in exchange for profits and cheaper fuels today. They are all knowingly imposing harm upon people all over the world, either in exchange for profits or in exchange for the benefit of using cheap fossil fuels.

In time, the oil sands industry may come to be seen as much like the asbestos industry: companies that push what they know to be a dangerous and harmful product, just because it is in their self interest to do so. Even worse, the companies do everything in their power to keep their industry unregulated. They fund phoney ‘grassroots’ groups that argue that the oil sands are wonderful, they run misleading advertising campaigns, they make campaign contributions to politicians, they make misleading claims about jobs, etc.

Strategies for stopping Gateway #1: The Hecate Strait

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As Gerald Butts explained in The Globe and Mail, one of the biggest environmental risks associated with the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline is the stream of supertankers that would carry oil from Kitimat out to the Pacific: “At Kitimat, toxic diluted bitumen would be loaded onto supersized tankers. Each year, more than 200 would travel through narrow fjords and into some of the world’s most treacherous seas”.

These tankers would flow through the treacherous Hecate Strait – a dangerous maritime environment located far away from equipment that would be required in the event of a major spill. It’s also an area of considerable natural beauty and ecological importance.

It seems like a convincing case to be made that building the Northern Gateway pipeline creates an unacceptable marine oil spill risk – and that is just one of a great many arguments against the project.

Monbiot on libertarianism and ecology

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British journalist George Monbiot has written a good explanation of why the political philosophy of libertarianism is undermined by the reality of the ecological interdependence of all people:

The owners of coal-burning power stations in the UK have not obtained the consent of everyone who owns a lake or a forest in Sweden to deposit acid rain there. So their emissions, in the libertarian worldview, should be regarded as a form of trespass on the property of Swedish landowners. Nor have they received the consent of the people of this country to allow mercury and other heavy metals to enter our bloodstreams, which means that they are intruding upon our property in the form of our bodies.

Nor have they – or airports, oil companies or car manufacturers – obtained the consent of all those it will affect to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, altering global temperatures and – through rising sea levels, droughts, storms and other impacts – damaging the property of many people.

I have written about this before: The death of libertarianism.

See also: Why conservatives should love carbon taxes

Two tasks for 2012

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The politics of climate change are pretty dismal right now. Canada is doing as little as it possibly can to combat the problem. The Obama administration in the United States is tied up doing other things, and regional initiatives like the Western Climate Initiative seem to be falling apart.

Given these challenging circumstances, it seems like a twofold strategy is justified for the year ahead.

First, it makes sense to work on rebuilding a political coalition calling for climate action. This is a complex undertaking that will involve everything from working to improve the electoral odds of parties and candidates who support climate action to raising the visibility of promising policy mechanisms like fee-and-dividend schemes.

Second, it makes sense to keep working to block projects that are triply-stupid, like the Keystone XL pipeline. When we build infrastructure that keeps us locked into a fossil fuel based economy, we are being wasteful in three connected ways. We are building infrastructure that will need to be scrapped when the world finally gets serious about stopping dangerous anthropogenic climate change. We are increasing the level of damage that climate change will do, both in terms of money and in terms of human suffering. Finally, we are forcing ourselves to build more appropriate energy infrastructure more quickly later.

By blocking inappropriate projects, we can avoid that triple waste. We can also show the world that there are at least some people in countries like Canada who are interested in protecting human lives more than in reaping oil profits.

It will probably be another difficult year, full of disappointments, but that is why it is necessary to keep applying ourselves to the problem with energy, creativity, and integrity.

Climate the issue of the century?

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Strong words from The Economist’s Democracy in America blog:

A HUNDRED years from now, looking back, the only question that will appear important about the historical moment in which we now live is the question of whether or not we did anything to arrest climate change. Everything else—the financial crisis, the life or death of the euro, authoritarianism or democracy in China and Russia, the Great Stagnation or the innovation renaissance, democratisation and/or political Islam in the Arab world, Newt or Mitt or another four years of Barack—all this will fade into insignificance beside the question of whether we managed to do anything about human industrial civilisation changing the climate of Planet Earth. It’s extremely hard to focus on this, because environmentalism goes in and out of political fashion depending on the economy, war, and so forth. But from the perspective of our great-grandchildren, the only thing that’s going to seem important is whether we burned all the fossil fuel on the planet and sent global temperatures up by at least 4 degrees Celsius in the next century, or whether we took collective action, shifted our energy sources, and held the global temperature rise to 2 degrees or less.

Joseph Romm has made a similar point before.

The blog post goes on to say:

Maybe a hundred years down the line, nobody will look back at climate change as the most important issue of the early 21st century, because the damage will have been done, and the idea that it might have been prevented will seem absurd. Maybe the idea that Mali and Burkina Faso were once inhabited countries rather than empty deserts will seem queer, and the immiseration of huge numbers of stateless refugees thronging against the borders of the rich northern countries will be taken for granted. The absence of the polar ice cap and the submersion of Venice will have been normalised; nobody will think of these as live issues, no one will spend their time reproaching their forefathers, there’ll be no moral dimension at all. We will have wrecked the planet, but our great-grandchildren won’t care much, because they’ll have been born into a planet already wrecked.

The question of how climate change will be viewed in retrospect is a tricky one. There are things about it that will be unknowable. If we do end up mitigating strongly, we will never know for sure if things would have been OK without all that action. Similarly, if we ignore the problem and things become terrible, we will never know for sure whether we could have succeeded in stopping it.