Tag Archives: fossil fuels

Self-Interest Properly Defined

Here’s a question: if you lie on an employment application in order to get a job, and you do in fact get the job as a result,  was your dishonest behavior in your self-interest?

Most of us would probably say that the lie did advance your short-term interest, although there is a strong likelihood that long-term, simply as a practical matter, your dishonesty would come back to bite you. Thoughtful respondents might go further, pointing out that even when we “get away” with unethical behaviors, such actions tend to make us less aware of the effects of such behaviors on ourselves and others, and ultimately cause us to be worse people than we might otherwise be.

Being a deeply flawed human is arguably not in our self-interest.

Assuming you agree with this analysis of where self-interest properly lies, what can we say about corporations and other financially-interested parties that intentionally and knowingly create public doubt about climate change?

A recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists didn’t ask that question, but it did explore the “organizational and financial roots of polarization.” (That’s academic-ese for the process of intentionally sowing doubt about settled science.)

Ideological polarization around environmental issues—especially climate change—have increased in the last 20 years. This polarization has led to public uncertainty, and in some cases, policy stalemate. Much attention has been given to understanding individual attitudes, but much less to the larger organizational and financial roots of polarization. This gap is due to prior difficulties in gathering and analyzing quantitative data about these complex and furtive processes. This paper uses comprehensive text and network data to show how corporate funding influences the production and actual thematic content of polarization efforts. It highlights the important influence of private funding in public knowledge and politics, and provides researchers a methodological model for future studies that blend large-scale textual discourse with social networks.

The entire article can be accessed at the link. Basically, it confirms that “uncertainty” is the desired outcome of expenditures made on behalf of fossil fuel interests. (I know you are shocked–shocked–to find that gambling is going on here.)

Many people excuse the efforts of gas and oil and coal interests to slow the development of renewable energy and green practices on the grounds that these companies and lobbyists are acting in their “self-interest.” I have heard people say that, although it is unfortunate, it is understandable that these companies  would try to protect their bottom lines.

It may be understandable (it’s also “understandable” that people steal things they want, or shoot people they dislike), but it is profoundly immoral. And as far as “self-interest” is concerned, delaying widespread recognition of an existential threat to the planet cannot possibly be in the “self-interest” of any of the planet’s inhabitants.

Many years ago, De Toqueville admired Americans for displaying “enlightened self-interest,” or “self-interest rightly understood.” As he explained it,

The Americans…are fond of explaining almost all the actions of their lives by the principle of interest rightly understood; they show with complacency how an enlightened regard for themselves constantly prompts them to assist each other, and inclines them willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property to the welfare of the state.

Just like that lie on the employment application, climate-change denial in service of a short-term bottom line will eventually destroy the reputations of the liars. But in this case, the likely damage to millions of their fellow humans–including their own progeny– makes loss of reputation a pretty inadequate price to pay.

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Well, THIS Certainly Ups the Stakes….

Over the last couple of weeks, there have been reports from interviews with Donald Trump that should give any sentient being pause: in one, it became embarrassingly clear that he had never heard of the GI Bill; in another, challenged on his ability to push through a constitutional amendment to stop women from giving birth to all those “anchor babies,” he responded–wrongly– that birthright citizenship wasn’t in the constitution. (“It just takes a statute.”)

The Donald’s most recent policy pronouncement, however, is far more terrifying. As a number of media outlets are reporting, Trump says that if he is elected he will pull out of the Paris climate agreement and approve the Keystone pipeline.

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said on Thursday that he would pull the United States out of the U.N. global climate accord and slash environmental regulations on the energy industry if elected…

“We’re going to cancel the Paris climate agreement,” Trump said at the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in Bismark, the capital of North Dakota, the second largest U.S. oil-producing state. It was Trump’s first speech detailing the energy policies he would advance from the White House.

Trump said he would invite TransCanada to reapply to build the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the United States, reversing a decision by the administration of President Barack Obama to block the project over environmental concerns.

“I want it built, but I want a piece of the profits,” Trump said. “That’s how we’re going to make our country rich again.”

Trump is on record (not that being on record means anything in his case, since he changes his positions more often than most people change their underwear–but still) as repeatedly saying that climate change is a hoax. Whether he believes that or not, the policies he is promising to pursue are all based upon the increased use of fossil fuel and the rollback of regulations on energy.

As Ed Brayton wryly observed over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, it may simply be another rather breathtaking exhibition of Trump’s hypocrisy:

Now remember, he said this literally two days after it was revealed that his company has applied to build a high sea wall at one of his golf courses in Scotland in order to protect the property from the rising seas resulting from global warming. So he knows damn well that global warming is real and has serious consequences. But he’s more than willing to screw over pretty much the entire world in order to get elected. Speaks volumes about the man, don’t you think?

At the end of the day, however, what Trump actually thinks (assuming, in the absence of evidence, that he actually does engage in that activity) is irrelevant. He is promising that on his watch, America will pursue policies having the foreseeable consequence of making the planet largely uninhabitable.

If his misogyny, racism, xenophobia, narcissism and profound ignorance about our government haven’t given Americans reason enough to insure that he never, ever gets near the Oval Office, this should do it…..
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Who Pays?

Americans talk a lot about growing inequality, but we often fail to recognize how frequently poorer folks shoulder the costs of change simply because existing systems work that way. “The way things are” often translates into an unthinking acceptance of burdens that should—and could–be reallocated.

A recent column in the LA Times by Mark Schapiro  makes that case with numerous and telling examples.

Congress may continue to resist a carbon tax, but Schapiro points out that the American  middle and working classes are already paying for the costs of climate change. Those costs may not look like the much-disdained carbon tax, but if we are honest, they amount to one. Every time the average American uses fossil fuels, he increases his tax burden.

Schapiro counts the costs of recovering from Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Katrina and a growing number of major droughts—the sorts of dramatic climate “incidents” that are likely to become much more frequent as climate change advances. And he details the economic consequences of changing weather patterns for all of us.

“Start with food: Farmers have always faced good years and bad years, but as bad years get more frequent, taxpayers pick up more and more of the tab. When the Government Accountability Office issued its biannual audit of the government’s highest financial risks last year, for the first time since the list was launched in 1990 climate change was identified as a major financial threat, specifically because of the government’s flood and crop insurance programs.”

Federally subsidized payouts for crop insurance have skyrocketed (from $4.3 billion in 2010 to $10.8 billion in 2011 and to $17.3 billion in 2012). Even more significantly, the USDA has estimated that the 2012 drought led to a 20% jump in meat prices. And the price of cereals has doubled since 2000, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, again due to climate change.

Acidification of the oceans and rising sea levels (from melting ice packs and glaciers) have given us declining yields—and soaring costs—of shellfish.

The list goes on. And that’s just at the grocery.

Scientists writing in the journal Health Affairs report that “over the first nine years of this century, six “climate-related” events (floods, hurricanes, infectious disease outbreaks) led to 760,000 encounters with the healthcare system amounting to as much as $14 billion in health costs.”

Even that substantial sum is dwarfed by the millions spent by the CDC and other research institutions to study the ways in which climate change is enabling an ever-expanding universe of bacteria and diseases affecting humans, plants and animals in new and troubling ways.

There is much more, but the bottom line is that the general public–that’s you and me– bears the costs of climate change through both higher prices and higher taxes; meanwhile,  the fossil fuel companies contributing to the problem continue to enjoy massive subsidies.

The farmer who needs fuel for his combine, the factory worker who fills his tank for his commute to work, the soccer mom doing car pool duty—these are the people who are paying the tax that isn’t labeled a tax.

The major corporate producers of these fossil fuels continue to make unprecedented, outsize profits, thanks in large part to public policies that underwrite and subsidize fossil fuel exploration. Those energy policies exacerbate inequality by placing the costs of climate change and energy exploration almost entirely upon the consumer.

There are obviously much more important reasons for addressing climate change than the unfair allocation of costs—reasons of life and death. But those of us who advocate for responsible environmental policies also need to insure that the costs of necessary remedial measures are equitably distributed.

We need to take care that the burdens do not always fall on the most vulnerable–and in this case, at least, the least culpable—Americans.

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