Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Why don’t you and some friends start a movement on the Internet to get people to sign a pledge that they will make real sacrifices to fight global warming. Because that’s the problem. Nobody wants to make any sacrifices. People should pledge to never fly in airplanes except in dire emergencies, because airplanes burn so much fuel. People should pledge to eat no meat on at least three days per week, because meat production adds so much carbon to the atmosphere. People should pledge to buy no jewelry, ever, because refining gold and silver is so energy-intensive. We should abolish artistic pottery, because it burns so much carbon. The potters in university art departments are just going to have to accept the fact that we can’t go on like this.

Forgive the bean-counting, but even if everyone gave up their jewelry, it would not make a scratch in the world’s emission of greenhouse gases, which are dominated by heavy industry (29 percent), buildings (18 percent), transport (15 percent), land-use change (15 percent), and the energy needed to supply energy (13 percent). (Livestock is responsible for 5.5 percent, mostly methane rather than CO2, and aviation for 1.5 percent.)⁵⁶ Of course my correspondent suggested forgoing jewelry and pottery not because of the effect but because of the sacrifice, and it’s no surprise that she singled out jewelry, the quintessential luxury. I bring up her ingenuous suggestion to illustrate two psychological impediments we face in dealing with climate change.

The first is cognitive. People have trouble thinking in scale: they don’t differentiate among actions that would reduce CO2 emissions by thousands of tons, millions of tons, and billions of tons.⁵⁷ Nor do they distinguish among level, rate, acceleration, and higher-order derivatives—between actions that would affect the rate of increase in CO2 emissions, affect the rate of CO2 emissions, affect the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, and affect global temperatures (which will rise even if the level of CO2 remains constant). Only the last of these matters, but if one doesn’t think in scale and in orders of change, one can be satisfied with policies that accomplish nothing.

The other impediment is moralistic. As I mentioned in chapter 2, the human moral sense is not particularly moral; it encourages dehumanization (“politicians are pigs”) and punitive aggression (“make the polluters pay”). Also, by conflating profligacy with evil and asceticism with virtue, the moral sense can sanctify pointless displays of sacrifice.⁵⁸ In many cultures people flaunt their righteousness with vows of fasting, chastity, self-abnegation, bonfires of the vanities, and animal (or sometimes human) sacrifice. Even in modern societies—according to studies I’ve done with the psychologists Jason Nemirow, Max Krasnow, and Rhea Howard—people esteem others according to how much time or money they forfeit in their altruistic acts rather than by how much good they accomplish.⁵⁹

Much of the public chatter about mitigating climate change involves voluntary sacrifices like recycling, reducing food miles, unplugging chargers, and so on. (I myself have posed for posters in several of these campaigns led by Harvard students.)⁶⁰ But however virtuous these displays may feel, they are a distraction from the gargantuan challenge facing us. The problem is that carbon emissions are a classic public goods game, also known as a Tragedy of the Commons. People benefit from everyone else’s sacrifices and suffer from their own, so everyone has an incentive to be a free rider and let everyone else make the sacrifice, and everyone suffers. A standard remedy for public goods dilemmas is a coercive authority that can punish free riders. But any government with the totalitarian power to abolish artistic pottery is unlikely to restrict that power to maximizing the common good. One can, alternatively, daydream that moral suasion is potent enough to induce everyone to make the necessary sacrifices. But while humans do have public sentiments, it’s unwise to let the fate of the planet hinge on the hope that billions of people will simultaneously volunteer to act against their interests. Most important, the sacrifice needed to bring carbon emissions down by half and then to zero is far greater than forgoing jewelry: it would require forgoing electricity, heating, cement, steel, paper, travel, and affordable food and clothing.