Stephen
Kershnar
Morality and Sustainability
Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer
May
14, 2018
Global warming (or climate change)
is the post 1950’s increase in the Earth’s surface temperature. On some projections
about the 21st Century, the surface temperature is expected to rise somewhere
between 0.5 to 8.6 Fahrenheit. Consider, for example, a 2013 study by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The effects of warming will depend
on the region, but might include changing levels of snow and rain, expansion of
deserts in the subtropics, more extreme weather (for example, heat waves,
droughts, floods, and heavy snowfall), retreat of glaciers and sea ice, rising
sea levels, greater ocean acidity, and species extinction. These things might affect
human beings by lessening food production and raising sea levels near populated
areas.
In response to this, the California
Energy Commission recently decided to mandate solar panels on new homes. This requirement
is pricey. The Wall Street Journal
reports that an average rooftop solar panel system costs roughly $19,000. It notes
that at a 5.5% interest rate over 30 years, this will cost a homeowner an
additional $107 per month, although 40-75% might be gotten back by energy
savings. It gets worse. The cleaning costs of these panels are $300 to $500 per
year and the repair costs average $650. The cost to the particular homeowner
might get dumped onto taxpayers, but then homeowners still pay for the mandate
through taxes. Given California’s problem with affordable housing, the
commission is likely smoking too many doobies.
There are a variety of other
policies that might reduce global warming. Examples include coerced or
subsidized recycling, reducing fossil-fuel use (see nuclear, solar, and wind
power), changing transportation patterns (for example, by concentrating people
in cities and discouraging flying), changing behavior (for example,
vegetarianism and fewer children), and cutting down fewer trees (for example,
smaller houses). Assuming that some of the benefits of these policies would
take decades, and perhaps a century, the issue arises as to whether they are
morally required and even whether they benefit the people they are trying to
help.
One concern about these changes if
they are done for people a century or more into the future is whether they
merit our charity. Economist Steven Landsburg argues that people in the future
will be much richer than we are today. For example, according to the United
States Regional Economic Analysis Project, the average American earned roughly $50,000
in 2017. On average, people’s income increased by 2.17% from 2058 from 2017. If
this pattern continues over the next century, future Americans will make, on
average, $431,000 (in today’s dollars). It seems that poor people suffering
today are a better choice for our charity than very wealthy people in the
future. By analogy, it seems that charity is better spent on people in the South
Bronx than people living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (average income
$311,000).
It is not even clear that the
pro-environmental policies benefit future people. While reducing global warming
might lessen environment-related harm, it comes at the cost of one type of
benefit, more economic growth (including technological change). It is unclear
if the harm that is avoided is greater than the benefit that is lost. By
analogy, consider a dying man who is deciding how to benefit a grandchild he
hopes his daughter will create in a decade or two. It is a real issue as to
whether he should do so by paying for his daughter’s education and thereby improving
the grandson’s childhood resources or by paying for a fifty-year bond that will
eventually make his future grandchild very rich. Similarly, it is a real issue
as to whether we can more effectively benefit people decades from now by investing
in increased productivity or reducing future environmental harm.
Landsburg and others further argue
that it is unclear whether we have a duty to benefit people well into the
future. Most of us think that we have a greater duty to benefit people close to
us than people distant from us. This is why most people would be willing to sacrifice
a lot for family and friends, but not for strangers halfway across the world. For
example, many people would take in their family or close friends were the need
to arise, but are unwilling to take in Sudanese families who are in danger of starving
or being killed. Similarly, most people think it is okay to spend money on alcohol,
cable, luxury cars, and vacations even though they could have done without and
instead donated to money to combat preventable death and suffering in the third
world. People who will live a century from now are no closer to us than strangers
in distant parts of the third world. If we do not have a duty to sacrifice for
the latter, at least not a strong duty, then we don’t have such a duty to the
former.
In addition, many of the future
people do not yet exist and so do not now own property that will be damaged by
future climate change. As a result, it is hard to see how failing to lessen
climate change violates their moral rights. If Richie Rich owns a mansion on
the Hamptons and memorializes a perfect summer by blowing it up, he doesn’t
wrong anyone. It might be wrong to damage or destroy current people’s property,
but it is unclear that current climate change will do so in the near future. Nor
is it clear that the cost of global-warming damaged property (for example, in
the Maldives) is anywhere near as large as the immense benefit that increased
economic growth brings about. Consider how many people benefit for every 1%
increase in economic growth in the developed world.
Green policies are probably not morally
required. It’s not even clear that they benefit the people they aim to help. The
moral case for mandated solar panels, subsidized recycling and green energy, and
so on remains unconvincing.
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