{"id":2316,"date":"2015-06-07T13:42:54","date_gmt":"2015-06-07T17:42:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2316"},"modified":"2016-12-10T04:40:06","modified_gmt":"2016-12-10T09:40:06","slug":"97-environmentalist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/?p=2316","title":{"rendered":"97% environmentalist"},"content":{"rendered":"

I decided to add\u00a0my name to\u00a0a petition<\/a>\u00a0by, as of this writing, 81 MIT faculty, calling on\u00a0MIT to divest its endowment from fossil fuel companies. \u00a0(My co-signatories include Noam Chomsky, so I guess there’s something<\/em>\u00a0we agree about!) \u00a0There’s also a\u00a0wider petition<\/a> signed by nearly 3500 MIT students, faculty, and staff, mirroring similar petitions all over\u00a0the world.<\/p>\n

When the organizers asked me\u00a0for a brief statement about why I signed, I sent them the following:<\/p>\n

Signing this petition wasn’t an obvious choice for me, since I’m sensitive to the charge that divestment petitions are just meaningless sanctimony, a way for activists to feel morally pure without either\u00a0making serious sacrifices or engaging the real\u00a0complexities of an issue.\u00a0 In the end, though, that kind of meta-level judgment can’t absolve us of the need to consider each petition on its\u00a0merits: if we think of a previous\u00a0crisis for civilization (say, in\u00a0the late 1930s), then\u00a0it seems\u00a0obvious that even\u00a0symbolic divestment gestures were\u00a0better than nothing.\u00a0 What made up my mind\u00a0was reading the arguments pro and con, and seeing that the organizers of this petition had a clear-eyed understanding of what they were trying to accomplish and why: they know that\u00a0divestment can’t directly drive down oil companies’ stock prices, but it can powerfully signal\u00a0to the world a scientific consensus\u00a0that, if global catastrophe is to be averted, most of the known fossil<\/span>-fuel\u00a0reserves need to be left in the ground, and that current valuations of oil, gas, and coal companies fail to reflect that reality.<\/p>\n

For some recent prognoses of the climate situation, see (for example)\u00a0this<\/a>\u00a0or this<\/a>\u00a0from Vox<\/em>. \u00a0My own sense\u00a0is that the\u00a0threat\u00a0has been systematically\u00a0under<\/em>stated even by environmentalists, because of the human impulse\u00a0to shoehorn all news\u00a0into a\u00a0hopeful\u00a0narrative (“but\u00a0there’s still time! \u00a0if we just buy locally-grown produce, everything can\u00a0be OK!”). \u00a0Logically, there’s an obvious tension between the statements:<\/p>\n

(a) there was already an urgent need to act decades ago, and<\/p>\n

(b) having\u00a0failed to act then, we can still\u00a0feasibly avert a\u00a0disaster now.<\/p>\n

And indeed, (b) appears\u00a0false to me. \u00a0We’re probably\u00a0well into the era\u00a0where, regardless of what we do or don’t do, some\u00a0of us\u00a0will<\/em>\u00a0live to\u00a0see\u00a0a climate dramatically\u00a0different from the one in which\u00a0human civilization developed for the past 10,000 years,\u00a0at least as different as the last Ice Ages were.<\/p>\n

And yet that\u00a0fact\u00a0still doesn’t relieve us of moral responsibility. \u00a0We can\u00a0buy more time to prepare, hoping for technological advances in the interim;\u00a0we can try to bend the curve of CO2<\/sub> concentration away from the worst futures\u00a0and toward the merely terrible ones. \u00a0Alas,\u00a0even those steps\u00a0will\u00a0require\u00a0political will that’s unprecedented outside of major wars. \u00a0For the capitalist free market (which I’m a big\u00a0fan of) to work its magic, actual costs first need to get\u00a0reflected in prices—which probably means\u00a0massively taxing fossil fuels,\u00a0to the point where it’s generally\u00a0cheaper to leave them in the ground and switch to alternatives. \u00a0(Lest anyone call me a doctrinaire treehugger, I also support way<\/em>\u00a0less regulation of the nuclear industry, to drive down the cost of building the hundreds of new nuclear plants that we’ll probably need.)<\/p>\n

These realities have a counterintuitive practical implication that I wish both sides understood better.\u00a0 Namely,\u00a0if you share my desperation and terror about this\u00a0crisis, the urgent desire to do something, then\u00a0limiting your personal carbon footprint should be very far from your main concern<\/em>. \u00a0Like, it’s great if you can bike to work, and you should keep it up\u00a0(fresh air and\u00a0exercise and all). \u00a0But I’d say\u00a0the anti-environmentalists are\u00a0right<\/em> that such voluntary steps are luxuries of the privileged, and\u00a0will accordingly never add up to a hill of beans. \u00a0Let me\u00a0go\u00a0further: even to conceptualize<\/em> this\u00a0problem\u00a0in terms of personal virtue\u00a0and blame\u00a0seems to me like\u00a0a\u00a0tragic mistake, one on\u00a0which the environmentalists\u00a0and their\u00a0opponents\u00a0colluded. \u00a0Given the choice, I’d much rather that the readers of this blog\u00a0flew to all the faraway conferences they\u00a0wanted, drove gas-guzzling minivans, ate steaks every night, and had ten kids, but then\u00a0also<\/em>\u00a0took some steps that made serious political action to leave most remaining fossil fuels in the ground\u00a0even \u03b5\u00a0more likely, \u03b5 closer to the middle of our\u00a0Overton window<\/a>. \u00a0I signed the MIT divestment petition because it seemed to me like such a step, admittedly with an emphasis on the\u00a0\u03b5.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I decided to add\u00a0my name to\u00a0a petition\u00a0by, as of this writing, 81 MIT faculty, calling on\u00a0MIT to divest its endowment from fossil fuel companies. \u00a0(My co-signatories include Noam Chomsky, so I guess there’s something\u00a0we agree about!) \u00a0There’s also a\u00a0wider petition signed by nearly 3500 MIT students, faculty, and staff, mirroring similar petitions all over\u00a0the world. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-fate-of-humanity"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2316"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2324,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2316\/revisions\/2324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottaaronson.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}