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Global warming and magical thinking
Jun. 1st, 2009 12:18 pmA while back I came across the notion of "vicarious goal satisfaction", also known as the "remedy effect". This is the idea that you can cancel out the effects of a bad choice so long as you follow it up with something that promises redemption. As in, it's "OK" to eat a giant steak so long as you follow it up with a low-fat cookie. The most compelling demonstration of this was a study showing that the mere presence of a salad on a fast-food menu inspired people to eat more french fries.
This, of course, is magical thinking - that the effects of a low fat cookie will, through sympathetic magic, cancel out the effects of the steak. It also relies on the notion of sin, rather than simple cause and effect - the idea that eating the steak is essentially "bad" rather than merely fattening. Sin can be redeemed, but cholesterol cannot; the confusion between virtue and chemistry is at the root of this effect.
I was exposed to lots and lots of environmentalist thinking when I was younger, so I suffer from this effect myself. I think nothing of getting on the motorcycle and riding 30 miles into town and back for a bite of lunch, but I feel terrible guilt over using paper towels. (That, at a rate of about 1 roll every 2 weeks.) Of course, the environmental impact of those 30 miles could buy a whole case of paper towels, but something about using the towels casually still rubs me the wrong way. Call it brainwashing.
Conserving paper towels is my capitulation to vicarious satisfaction. I figure that by recycling the paper towels I use to dry my hands for cleaning up spills on the floor, I'm somehow mitigating the enormous cost to the environment of everything else in my life. Knowing that this is wrong on an intellectual level makes no difference - the emotional programming isn't worth the effort to overcome.
Americans use a LOT of energy - as I said before, our bodies need only 100 watts of power from food, but on average we use a hundred times that amount of energy to sustain our lifestyles. This is a LOT of energy with a BIG environmental impact and it is VERY HARD to cut it down to something sustainable. The impact of adapting a truly sustainable lifestyle, on a national level, would make the disruption of the current "economic crisis" look like a walk in the park - it would be much more difficult to adapt to than even the worst-case financial scenarios. Living an eco-friendly life is, by and large, a privilege of the wealthy, who pursue it for mostly emotional reasons. That some people are individually successful at this is, in my opinion, irrelevant to the larger problem - I don't see them as saints, but as dupes.
I am not a global-warming skeptic and my opinions on the subject are generally in accord with the IPCC reports. (Though, it bears mentioning that this position is often considered "skeptical" in comparison to journalistic hysteria on the subject.) However, just as with individual conservation, I do think that current efforts to cut down on CO2 emissions are a complete waste of time.
In fact, I have come to the exact opposite conclusion - that the only sensible course of action is to extract as much benefit from fossil fuels as we possibly can. This does not mean "wasting" them, but it does mean taking the opportunity to use petroleum while it's still available. Oil isn't going to last forever, and conservation on our part (whether on an individual or national level) means nothing more than giving those fossil fuels away to other parties.
An idealistic perspective imagines a world where, somehow, every country agrees to curtail use. The trouble is, the more countries that agree, the stronger the incentives are for the remaining countries to opt out. There has never been a successful international treaty of this type, and there probably never will be. The Kyoto protocol has been conspicuously unsuccessful, and I think it would be even less so if the United States had taken part. Countries don't cooperate on economically difficult tasks out of the goodness of their hearts, and neither do people; "morality" has always been founded in self-interest, and moral principles don't last when the parties involved individually benefit from ignoring them.
I could be proven wrong on this, and maybe there will be some exceptional and unprecedented new mechanism that will convince all the major powers to dial back on their fossil fuel use. The most rational and plausible mechanism is not conservation, but some sort of international tax on raw petroleum - say, a hundred dollars a barrel - with the money disbursed in a way that encourages every country to participate. And maybe instead of driving cars, we'll all be riding around on flying unicorns that fart rainbows.
In the meanwhile, the current cap-and-trade legislation is the low-fat cookie of our age. Maybe it's affordable, but it's almost certainly not effective. I am 99% certain that destructive levels of global warming are going to happen regardless of US actions or international treaties. The only question remaining is how we can adapt.
This, of course, is magical thinking - that the effects of a low fat cookie will, through sympathetic magic, cancel out the effects of the steak. It also relies on the notion of sin, rather than simple cause and effect - the idea that eating the steak is essentially "bad" rather than merely fattening. Sin can be redeemed, but cholesterol cannot; the confusion between virtue and chemistry is at the root of this effect.
I was exposed to lots and lots of environmentalist thinking when I was younger, so I suffer from this effect myself. I think nothing of getting on the motorcycle and riding 30 miles into town and back for a bite of lunch, but I feel terrible guilt over using paper towels. (That, at a rate of about 1 roll every 2 weeks.) Of course, the environmental impact of those 30 miles could buy a whole case of paper towels, but something about using the towels casually still rubs me the wrong way. Call it brainwashing.
Conserving paper towels is my capitulation to vicarious satisfaction. I figure that by recycling the paper towels I use to dry my hands for cleaning up spills on the floor, I'm somehow mitigating the enormous cost to the environment of everything else in my life. Knowing that this is wrong on an intellectual level makes no difference - the emotional programming isn't worth the effort to overcome.
Americans use a LOT of energy - as I said before, our bodies need only 100 watts of power from food, but on average we use a hundred times that amount of energy to sustain our lifestyles. This is a LOT of energy with a BIG environmental impact and it is VERY HARD to cut it down to something sustainable. The impact of adapting a truly sustainable lifestyle, on a national level, would make the disruption of the current "economic crisis" look like a walk in the park - it would be much more difficult to adapt to than even the worst-case financial scenarios. Living an eco-friendly life is, by and large, a privilege of the wealthy, who pursue it for mostly emotional reasons. That some people are individually successful at this is, in my opinion, irrelevant to the larger problem - I don't see them as saints, but as dupes.
I am not a global-warming skeptic and my opinions on the subject are generally in accord with the IPCC reports. (Though, it bears mentioning that this position is often considered "skeptical" in comparison to journalistic hysteria on the subject.) However, just as with individual conservation, I do think that current efforts to cut down on CO2 emissions are a complete waste of time.
In fact, I have come to the exact opposite conclusion - that the only sensible course of action is to extract as much benefit from fossil fuels as we possibly can. This does not mean "wasting" them, but it does mean taking the opportunity to use petroleum while it's still available. Oil isn't going to last forever, and conservation on our part (whether on an individual or national level) means nothing more than giving those fossil fuels away to other parties.
An idealistic perspective imagines a world where, somehow, every country agrees to curtail use. The trouble is, the more countries that agree, the stronger the incentives are for the remaining countries to opt out. There has never been a successful international treaty of this type, and there probably never will be. The Kyoto protocol has been conspicuously unsuccessful, and I think it would be even less so if the United States had taken part. Countries don't cooperate on economically difficult tasks out of the goodness of their hearts, and neither do people; "morality" has always been founded in self-interest, and moral principles don't last when the parties involved individually benefit from ignoring them.
I could be proven wrong on this, and maybe there will be some exceptional and unprecedented new mechanism that will convince all the major powers to dial back on their fossil fuel use. The most rational and plausible mechanism is not conservation, but some sort of international tax on raw petroleum - say, a hundred dollars a barrel - with the money disbursed in a way that encourages every country to participate. And maybe instead of driving cars, we'll all be riding around on flying unicorns that fart rainbows.
In the meanwhile, the current cap-and-trade legislation is the low-fat cookie of our age. Maybe it's affordable, but it's almost certainly not effective. I am 99% certain that destructive levels of global warming are going to happen regardless of US actions or international treaties. The only question remaining is how we can adapt.
