Between
An Inconvenient Truth, Gov. Schweitzer's
recent diary on energy strategy, DarkSyde's
recent diary on peak oil, and a conversation I had with a Jet Propulsion Labs engineer on a plane trip recently, I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, and have come to the conclusion that the whole philosophical underpinning of the environmental movement is entirely unsuited to support the changes actually needed in our society. Modern environmentalism has all the structural integrity of Boston's Big Dig.
That's why we have to pit Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana vs. Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant of Prussia. Two men enter. One man leaves. In the balance: the fate of our environment and our nation's energy security.
Make the jump to see how it all goes down...
I took a philosophy class in high school, which is where I first learned of Immanuel Kant's concept of a "categorical imperative," (or as I have also heard it called, a "moral imperative"). The categorical imperative, to somewhat oversimplify things, states that for any potential action, you should consider the result if everybody took the same action when faced with the same decision. If the result would be positive, then you can (or, perhaps, are morally compelled to) take the action in question. If the result would be negative, then you are not allowed to take the action. (Wikipedia has a more formal discussion
here.)
This, in a nutshell, seems to me the basic philosophical foundation on which modern environmentalism is laid. Each environmental decision we make every day is transformed into a moral decision. And it works fine for decisions like whether or not to, when practical, recycle my cans and bottles, or whether or not to dump used oil down the drain or in a creek. These are low-cost decisions or decisions with obvious and immediate downsides. Sometimes laziness or dumbassery will win out, but generally people tend to make the "right" decisions in this arena.
But this basis for decision making is completely inadequate for the problems of global warming and energy security. That is because these involve big decisions where the right choice usually costs a great deal more in dollars or prestige (in the short or medium run) than the bad choice. Futhermore, the connection between your bad choice and the bad results is not immediately obvious. It's not like (to borrow from Patton Oswalt) the moment you buy a Hummer someone knocks you on the back of the head with a roll of quarters and when you wake up you're in Iraq with a gun in your hand being told you have to get the gasoline your damn self.
No, these kinds of decisions, if we apply Kant's imperative, usually mean making some kind of self sacrifice. And if you carry the reasoning through, things can get quite maddening. For instance, my spouse and I moved to the downtown of our small southern city recently, and I have gotten a bike. These are conscious decisions we made, partially from environmental motives. I try to get around downtown for my errands and commuting by foot or by bike whenever practical -- because it's better for the environment, it's better for America's energy independence, it's better for my waistline -- it's the "right" thing to do.
But yesterday it was crazy clown fuckall hot. I mean Ren Hoëk space madness hot. And I had to make a quick trip to my office a very few blocks away. I took the car -- with the a/c on (and felt only a little bad about it). Folks, this should not be a moral decision. And honestly it's ridiculous that it is.
So this is where we are with Kant's moral imperative. It is very much a YOYO (you're on your own) environmentalism, and it's simply not suited to the task. It leads ultimately to a couple of problems. First of all, making "green" choices becomes a luxury available primarily only to the financially comfortable. And I think we can all agree that fewer and fewer Americans (not to mention people around the world) are comfortable these days.
The other main problem that follows from Kantian environmentalism is that it leaves environmentalists open to criticism on a few fronts. To the old Reagan-era criticism that if it were up to us, everyone would freeze to death in the dark; and to charges of moral self-righteousness. Because if every environmental decision is a moral one, and most big environmental decisions are self-sacrificing (or expensive and conspicuous), you create a mindset where self-sacrifice is righteous -- perhaps even self-righteous -- and even a goal in itself. At that point, we've lost sight of the entire reason for this movement in the first place. It's supposed to be about sustainability, not about being holier than thou.
Enter environmental challenger Gov. Brian Schweitzer from the great state of Montana. He's gonna kick some Prussian Enlightment philosopher ass!
Gov. Schweitzer pulls the rug entirely out from under Kantian environmentalism. One of his most controversial ideas (around here at least) is the advancement of technologies to turn coal into liquid and gaseous fuels, allowing us to sequester the excess carbon back underground during the production process. Now, many people around here are skeptical of fossil fuels in general, and coal (the dirtiest fossil fuel of them all) in particular. And I understand there is a legitimate debate to be had on the pros and cons. But Schweitzer's argument is based on the simple fact that there are a shitload of desperately poor people on the other side of the world who have a lot of coal and not much else, and they want a better life. Do you really think we, living in comparative luxury, spewing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere at incomprehensible rates, are going to be able to win a Kantian moral environmental argument with India or China? Can we really make a moral argument that these nations should not follow the path of least resistance out of poverty?
Now, Schweitzer makes it clear that he does not see this "carbon sequestration and coal gasification" as the answer to all of our problems, but rather sees it as
a piece of a larger national plan that 1) takes us through the next several decades to the hydrogen economy, 2) includes a heavy dose of biofuels and other renewables, 3) breaks oil dependence in the short term, and 4) provides a boost for technology that will help us combat global warming.
Now it might not be clear at first glance what's just happened here, but the good Governor has outlined for us an entirely new, much more solid foundation onto which we can move our entire environmental movement.
Here's the difference in a nutshell: we must develop technologies that make make the environmental choice the cheap and convenient choice, and vice versa -- for individuals, for companies, for countries. To do this will no longer require billions of individual sacrifices, but rather require government investment in technologies that will make all of these decisions no-brainers because the "moral" choices will also be the cheap and convenient ones (or at the very least, the cheap and convenient choices will have their moral downside greatly reduced).
With this new basis for environmentalism, we won't have to win a moral argument with China or India to keep them from spewing all the carbon they've got underground into the sky. If we develop this carbon sequestration and coal gasification technology and refine it to be no more expensive than existing coal technologies, then it will simply become the straightforward choice for new power plants. Now is coal the best possible choice? Of course not, but everything seems to have its downside these days. (Just look at China's much-criticized foray into hydro power with the Three Gorges Dam!) But let's face it, in the short to medium term, they're going to use their coal.
As we develop the "basket of solutions" that will bridge us to the next generation of energy technology -- hydrogen or otherwise -- I will no longer have to make a moral decision of whether or not to take my car downtown when it's hotter than the frickin' sun, because I won't necessarily be burning dinosaur bones that have kept their carbon locked up underground for the last several million years. Furthermore, your average meat head will start making green environmental decisions in his everyday life -- not neccessarily because he's been converted to green thinking (though more power to him if he has!) but rather because the environmental decision will become simply the common sense decision.
Technology, not moral philosophy, is what got us into this mess, and ultimately technology, not moral philosophy, is what will have to rescue us.
Of course, the best time to have embarked on this paradigm shift would have been immediately following the first Gulf War. It was a wake-up call to our dependence on an unstable and dangerous region for our ever-more finite energy resources, and it was the beginning of a sustained period of fiscal health which would have made the necessary investments relatively easy and painless to make. The longer we wait to develop the next generation of energy technology, the more it will cost, the less time we'll have to iron out the wrinkles, and the greater the danger that we won't get it done in time to forstall a great deal of pain.
One final anecdote: in An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore spoke about how we have successfully begun to reverse the damage we've done to the ozone layer. And what stopped the problem from getting worse? Government mandated switching spray cans from CFCs to HCFCs. In other words, the problem was not solved by individuals making the personal decision to deny themselves that can of hairspray, but by governments spurring companies to develop the technology to make a can of hairspray at the same price that didn't hurt the ozone layer. Let's use that as our model, but on a much larger scale.
(The ozone/CFC story points to another lesson we need to learn about publicizing our environmental successes, but that's a subject for another diary.)